Moved...

I've consolidated my two blogs here:

www.hyphenatedrepublic.wordpress.com

Two Boys, One Sided Coverage from The New York Times

The latest installment in the New York Times’ attempts to posit a balance in the Israeli Palestinian conflict, plucks all the right strings. “2 Boys, 2 Sides, 2 Beds in an Israeli Hospital Ward,” sets the scene in an Israeli military hospital. We see Osher, an Israeli boy from the town of Sderot, a victim of a rocket attack from nearby Gaza. Yacoub, a young Palestinian victim of an “accidental” Israeli attack, lies in a hospital bed in the same hospital. The article is a perfect example of how the NYT, in its quest for symmetrical and dramatic human interest narratives, makes the same errors in telling the story time and again.

The article juxtaposes the stories of the two boys, delving into the bitter irony that even as both sides kill each other, their societies are intertwined. True enough, on one level. But the article suffers from the same defect in perception of the conflict that characterizes most of the NYT’s writings on the issue. Though there are two boys from opposing nations in the hospital, there is no such symmetry in the conflict they are victims of.

As the article states in the last few paragraphs, Palestinian’s like Yacoub, must wait days and weeks to access the better equipped hospitals of Israel. Just how did Gaza and the West Bank become so dependent on Israeli health services in the first place? Though this seems like a perfect opportunity to examine the crushing impact of Israel's occupation of Palestine on health and emergency services in Palestine, there is little background to be found in the NYT's coverage. The health care crisi in Gaza is not a symptom of Hamas' control of the Gaza Strip, as this piece, and many others, seeks to imply. In fact, long before Hamas ever dreamt of accessing political power in the territories, and the now be-knighted Fatah was still running the now bifurcated Palestine, Israel had been blockading medical and humanitarian supplies to Gaza.

The United Nations, UNICEF, Amnesty International, Defence for Children International, the Palestinian Red Crescent and many other organizations have been reporting on this situation since 2000, with little notice in this country’s paper of record. As these organizations have reported and observed in numerous reports and studies, the Palestinian territories as a whole have been cantonized by a warren of distinct physical barriers, military laws, and movement restrictions that have caused a host of problems for Palestinian society. These movement restrictions impede economic activity, and access to education and jobs. But just as importantly, Israel's movement restrictions--total blockade in Gaza, closures and checkpoints in the West Bank, and complete cut-off by Israel's security wall in Israeli colonial zones--have caused an unprecedented crisis of health care in the West Bank and Gaza since 2000. Most recent among these movement restrictions, Israel’s security wall has cut off many West Bank towns that lie adjacent to settlement areas and areas of settlement expansion. As the World Bank noted in a recent report,

“Gates [in the wall] are routinely closed, for example, on public holidays in Israel. As permits are usually valid only at certain gates, the ad hoc nature of the opening and closing hours of the gates can be particularly difficult as alternative passages do not exist. In general, gates are not open at night which causes complications for the normal conduct of life and business and can be life threatening in cases of medical emergency.”

As a case in point, just a few days after the “2 Boys” piece, a wizened article appeared in the Friday, February 15, 2008 NYT. “Ambulance Passage Refused ” with only 70 odd words to work with, was unable to give the context or any pertinent details as to why a Palestinian woman died after being refused access to a Palestinian ambulance in the West Bank village of Tulkarem. The woman’s family, apparently, “did not tell the local military coordination office for humanitarian cases of the ambulance’s arrival.” Tulkarem is completely surrounded by Israel's security wall; if a medical emergency occurs, Palestinians must rely on the good graces of Israeli authorities to ensure access to medical care within Palestine proper. Such deaths have becomea common place, but media invisible, aspect of Israel’s security fence. Over a third of West Bank Palestinian communities have lost their access to health care due to the wall’s construction. Additionally, Israel controls outright a large portion of Palestinian areas, and these are often subjected to random closures, which have also led to countless deaths and misery due to lack of access to medical treatment.

Of course, there is a huge disparity in the level of violence depicted in the "2 Boys" article. To give an accurate image of the effect on Palestinian and Israeli children from the violence that began in 2000—according to data from Defence for Children International—there would need to be 9 or 10 Palestinian children laying mortally wounded in the same Israeli hospital as young Osher. This is not to say that the deaths and injuries of Israelis should be trivialized. But reporting on them should not come at the expense of detailing the countless human rights abuses to which Israel subjects the Palestinian people.

The Post-Fairytale Fairytale

You can tell its going to be a rough election year when you start nodding at Sean Hannity's opinion about your party's front runner. Hannity, who may never have yet told the truth on television, asked an assembled "focus group" of Democratic Primary voters to name one thing that Barack Obama had accomplished in his career. Some made an effort; but it was true, no one knew anything about the Freshman senator. Granted, I wouldn't be surprised if Fox had computer generated the entire assemblage. But for the others interested in such non-Hannity issues as integrity and good governance--especially, those like myself who voted for Obama and want to find a good reason to support him--the question remains and it is a difficult one to answer.

Aside from a few key votes, little is said by Obama or his surrogates about his record. A quick look at legislation with the Obama trademark bears little fruit. Obama has sponsored an average number of bills, most of which never saw daylight and he co-sponsored the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, which limited lobby largese to congress. But his senate record is certainly nothing to write home about for any aspiring presidential candidate.

The question about what Obama hasn't done as a lawmaker is a far easier and appetizing one for his supporters.--he did not vote to authorize force in Iraq. Of course, he was a beneficiary of the luck or design of not being a US Senator at that time. Obama's voting record, however, in the post fairy-tale world--to appropriate Bill Clinton's maligned comment--where he is a real-life US Senator is conspicuous for its lack of principled activity.

Most recently, Obama failed to show up for the final vote on the heinous FISA Amendments Act of 2007, which provides retroactive immunity to telecom companies that broke the law and sold their customer's private data and communications to the White House. Obama was only one of three senators who did not vote (one of them, of course, a senator of more widely-advertised cowardice, Hillary Clinton). Obama seems to have purposefully taken advantage of the confusing number of votes surrounding the bill--there were separate votes on amendments introduced by Senator's Dodd, Feinstein and others. Obama voted for Dodd's amendment and Feinstein's, but left the building when it came time to vote for the final bill. In a subsequent oily move, Obama later issued a press release praising himself for supporting the doomed amendments to the bill, while neglecting to mention that he had more important things to do than vote against the final bill. Similarly, Obama did not vote in the original FISA vote--which tabled permanent passage until this February--last year. Obama can now claim to have voted for the amendments when he is in progressive auditoriums, while not having to take the centrist aprobrium for an official nay vote on the actual bill.

More importantly, Obama did not lead on this issue--he gave no speeches, no interviews, he did not once mention the upcoming FISA vote or make a plea to his supporters to deluge the phone lines of their representatives to rally against the bill. Certainly, if Obama's groundswell is what everyone seems to think it is, then the bill would have easily failed if Obama had given it the hairy eyeball. But Obama never used his populist bull pulpit to drive home to his supporters the incredible danger of allowing telecom companies to legally work as spies for the government--receiving money from customers to provide them service, while simultaneously selling their phone calls and emails to the white house. Thus, while the Obama brand is based on his outsider-Washington-cleanser status, his real record outside of his infamous non-act on Iraq is not much different than that of his powerful Democratic colleagues; those unpopular hacks who have failed to back the kind of legislation that Obama's supporters have championed throughout the last 7 dark years.

What is left, then, of Obama? Searching through the hollows of the larger than life construct, we find very little of substance, besides a scandal or two (shady dealings with indicted former colleague, Reznik, and elastic back-bending for nuclear polluters in his home state). This is not to say that Clinton is the better choice. And forget the laughably 'straight-talking' McCain, who only last year was caught using the US military to lock down an entire Iraqi market, so that he could stroll through to 'prove' that Iraq was getting safer. But it is also important to remember that Obama faces another year of scrutiny before voters take to the general polls. Much of today's luster may have dulled by then, as his expedient political pedigree emerges and there are no conveniently barnacled Hillaries to project his own cowardice upon.

Just so we know what we're getting into.

What We're Fighting For 3

Okay, not to let the New York Times off the hook so readily, here's a prime example of how not so subtle differences in the way the Times covers Israeli casualties vs. Palestinian ones, can color perceptions toward the conflict.

Yesterday, on page A11, the Times ran an article headlined, "Palestinian Rocket Injures Child in Israeli Kibbutz". Today, on page A12, the Times ran an article headlined, "Israeli Airstrike Kills a Top Militant in Gaza". Both headlines are accurate, but the emphasis of the second seems somewhat misplaced. In the first story we learn that Gazan rocket attacks in the last seven years have killed a total of 13 Israelis. Israeli bases much of its military activity in Gaza on retaliating for these attacks.

Indeed, we find in the second article, that the militant in question was well known for launching rocket attacks against Israel. We also find that seven Palestinian bystanders were wounded, including three children. This wasn't the first time Israel has injured or killed bystanders in the densely populated Strip when carrying out attacks against military targets. Amnesty International Reports that in June of 2007, in just two weeks of Israeli 'reprisals' for rocket attacks in June, twenty bystanders were killed, including six children--nearly twice as many Palestinian deaths in two weeks, than in 6 years of Palestinian rocket attacks against Israel.

In fact from a strictly statistical perspective, the Times' Palestinian headlines would do better concentrating on the deaths of bystanders, which nearly always out-number those of the intended targets. As Mustafa Bhargouti observed in the International Herald Tribune, over half of the 400 people killed since 2001 in Israeli targeted killings of Palestinian 'militants', were not militants at all, but bystanders. At least forty four if not many more, were children. Defence for Children International reports that nine hundred Palestinian children have been killed since 2001, many in this same way.

What We're Fighting For 2

After bashing the NYT yesterday, I thought it only fair to draw attention to two great stories in the paper about the Middle East today.

This one, which recounts the story of a 63 year old Algerian who carried out a suicide attack against a UN facility. A thoughtful piece of rare contextualization that follows the history of European violence and imperialism in the Arab World, and its links to modern extremism. While it is common to hear about France's problems with its North African population, one almost never hears anything about France's genocidal war against Algeria just a few decades ago.

Here, you'll find an interesting story that pokes a few holes in the Saddam as Islamic dictator trope that many Americans still seem to cling to. Yes, the man was responsible for the deaths of lots of people--just like our leaders--but he also oversaw a flourishing social openness not common in many Arab regimes. Under Saddam, women and, yes, even Gays, as this article notes, experienced a near-social revolution.

If articles like this were not so rare, we'd have much less support for stupid wars against the third world.

What We're Fighting For

Of the many points of interest on today's front page of the New York Times--a photo of Bill Clinton lasciviously juxtaposed at his wife's powerful, if blandly shoed feet; a magazine style expose about US Laotian pawns hiding out in the jungles of Southeast Asia; a hard hitting look at Facebook--nowhere could you find a story about Bilal Hussen. No, the story about the Iraqi AP photo-journalist held by US forces for nearly two years without charges, has had a limited view in our nation's paper of record. It languishes in the business section today and a quick search reveals only a short pair of articles when the Pentagon finally handed Hussein over to Iraqi authorities a few weeks ago for trial and an editorial and one article a year ago when the Pentagon stated that it had "convincing and irrefutable evidence that Bilal Hussein is a threat to stability and security in Iraq as a link to insurgent activity.”

The US never presented any of this "irrefutable" evidence and for the most part, the media forgot about the US's attempt to install democracy in Iraq by jailing journalists. But the fact remains that under US tutelage, the Iraqi government bans any journalism that "publically insults' members of the government; a similar if unspoken and unenforced ban seems to exist in our nation's paper of record, which has remained non plussed by our government's habeas corpus hat trick, and prefers documenting the many daily utterances of the various celebrity presidential candidates.

The Bilal story, were it salvaged from the media and advertising sub-section, would add some sorely needed context to the current debate about torture. How is it possible, for example, that the US is so often convinced about the "irrefutablility" of its evidence, yet so often wrong? Forgotten in the current dust up about the CIA's purged videotapes, is that Abu Zubayda, one of the tortured informants at the heart of the controversy, accused American citizen Jose Padilla of planning to set off a "dirty bomb" in the US. Padilla was held without trial for nearly five years on the basis of those allegations-- baseless to be sure, for the US prosecutors never even mentioned dirty bombs when they finally indicted Padilla on other charges. There has been virtually no reporting on the "dirty bomb"-Zubayda connection in the New York Times or other mainstream media.

The news that the US is promoting an exclusive and frightening form democracy at home, and importing it abroad, is obviously of not much value to the executive office-foot fetishist readership of the New York Times.

CNN: We're Number Two, so we Try Harder.

Looking through Google News today, I came across a list of headlines for the annual turkey pardon. Literally the dozens, if not hundreds, of headlines on the creepily ironic yearly Presidential Turkey pardoning story are exactly the same. "Bush Pardons Turkey" says ABC News. Bush Pardons the National Thanksgiving Turkey, quips USAToday. And Fox, "Two Turkeys Paronded, Going to DisneyWorld". And on, and on; all pretty standard stuff for a fairly mundane story. But not for CNN, the media conglomerate working double time to be your number one news provider. Here's their headline:

Press Corps Turns Out to See Lucky Turkeys Escape Death

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics. Oh, And Brit Hume

I caught this from Newshounds, a great little service available on YouTube that makes good on its promise to "watch fox, so you don't have to".

Toward the end of this clip (following an incredibly misleading story on how Bush is already drawing down forces, i.e. the surge forces) we find the distinguished propagandist Brit Hume pointing to a recent Congressional Research Service report that finds that there were as many military deaths in peaceful 1980 as war-torn 2005. The report states that in 1980 there were 2,392 deaths (characterized as accidental deaths by the Fox segment) a proportionately identical number to that of 2005. A subsequent segment stresses that the organization is non-partisan. Their finding, essentially, is that as many soldiers die in some peace times as in wars like Iraq. Cheer up America, Iraq isn't so bad after all.



Though a superficial reading of the statistics does seem to imply such a reality, a closer and more detailed view reveals a completely different story. In Hume's defense, such attributes are not his strong suit.

Looking at a breakdown of the data (here's the report) in question over the entire period from 1980 to 2005, we find some important basic information that is worth noting. As the military scaled down its forces during the Clinton Administration beginning in 1992, the number of active duty troops declined to about 60% of its 1980 level by 1999, the last year of Clinton's administration. It is also important to note that in 1980, the US military was demoralized by Vietnam and struggled with its first incarnation as a volunteer-only organization in modern history. While both the Reagan and Bush administrations neglected the personell structure of the military in favor of blind arms build up, the post-cold war Clinton Administration focused on more educated and better trained recruits.

Remarkably, this strategy brought down the number of deaths to 796, a significant improvement even when considering the fact that the military had been reduced to nearly half of its previous size. Nearly half of the deaths in 1980, in fact, were not due to accidents at all, according to the report--174 were homicides, 231 were suicides and a remarkable 419 were the result of illness. By 1999, the homicide number was reduced to 34, or 20% of its 1980 level. The number of deaths due to illness was a third of what it had once been. The military of the 80's was a broken mess that huffed and puffed its way through the invasion of Grenada; the military of the 90's was a sleak beast, ready for whatever Imperialist conquest its leaders cared to wager.

Enter GW Bush. According to the same report referenced by Brit Hume, these figures begin to go up again starting in 2000, though the size of the military remains the same. Even by the year 2001 the accident rate has increased; the rate of death from illness also increased that year and every subsequent year, coincidentally as Bush applied his privatization compulsion to the military and outsourced armed forces health care. Remarkably, the number of homicides doubles from 138 in 2001 to 281 in 2005, though again, the troop level remained the same. As many analysts have noted, much of the increase in accidents from 2000 to the current period have been due to the Bush administrations rush to put troops into the field, limiting their training and a decline in equipment quality. Looking at other agencies and organizations managed by the Bush administration, such as the Justice Department, NASA and the Department of Consumer Safety, this deadly decline in standards should come as no surprise, even to Brit Hume, who manages to hide the former failures on a regular basis at his day job.

Even, with all of the above, you might still be tempted to note that the Iraq war isn't so bad, if, poor management not withstanding, as many soldiers were dying in 1980 as 2005. After all, this level of troop mortality created not outcry at the time. But don't forget that Fox's main job is to convince you that nothing is wrong in the world except for the fact that homosexuals are teaching your children and that black people use the n-word. In this mission, foot soldiers like Hume must ignore crucial contextualizing information.

Just as important as the number of military deaths, for example, is the total of wounded. Unbelievablly over 23,000 soldiers have been wounded since the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom, according to Icasualty.org. A little over half of these injuries were serious enough to merit discharge from active duty. According to Anthony Cordesman, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, "These days, wounded are a much better measure of the intensity of the operations than killed". Indeed, while a far greater number of soldiers served during the Vietnam War (about 8 million), the number of wounded from the Iraq War is proportionately about the same. Advances in medicine and technology have also reduced the death toll while raising the injury toll; while in Iraq the ratio of injured to dead is 8 to 1, in Vietnam it was 3 to 1.

Additionally, while the total of active duty soldiers in 2005 was 1,378,014, calculating the number of deaths from that number in order to compare it to a peace-time military can be misleading in a number of ways. The proportionate number of deaths in 2005, if one calculates from the number of soldiers stationed in Iraq (160,000 or so), where most of the dying is occuring, is greater than the level in 1980 by a factor of three. And on a much simpler note, if you were a soldier serving in the armed forces from 2000 to 2005, your chances of dying effectively more than doubled by the last year on the job; your chances of being wounded increased astronomically.

And, of course, lets not forget the tens (if not hundreds) of thousand of Iraqi's killed. I'd say any study would show they were doing a little better in 1980.

Keep in mind that all of this information is in the same study Hume looked at. But he, of course, was looking for data that exonerates the Bush administration and perpetuates the war.

One of These is Not Like the Other

Today's San Francisco Chronicle had an interesting topsy-turvy view of the world. In a large photo-story on page A3, a a masked gunman points a gun at a young protester in Venezeula. You would think that such an impacting photo would have an article to match; but no, we are left with a minuscule photo blurb instead that does little to explain the dynamics of the current issues in Venezuela.

The venerable Noam Chomsky once observed that life is not a laboratory; we are rarely afforded a scientific view into the media's bias. This, however, seems to be one of those rarities, at least in terms of the SF Chron. Here's a breakdown.

Hugo Chavez: Page A3: All Photo No Story--a twice elected civilian president has faced moderate opposition to his policies over the years. As in any democracy, there is a vocal opposition movement that often holds rallies. In this instance, a rally against Chavez's proposed referendum to grant himself more constitutionally mandated powers. A few masked gunmen fired into the crowd injuring some. There is no indication that the gunmen had anything to do with Chavez. Additionally, Chavez has placed his power-grab in a referendum; that means that voters will determine its validity. Were that only the case in our democracy.

Pervez Musharraf: Page A9:All Story, Tiny Photo--Pervez Musharaf by any objective view runs a military dictatorship in Pakistan. Fearing that he would not be allowed to run for president after eight years of rule, Musharraf suspended the constitution and jailed his opposition. Police working under the color of authority, not masked anonymous gunmen, attacked supporters of opposition candidate Benazir Bhutto. In this photo, about a quarter of the size of the Venezuela photo story, you see a Pakistani policeman beating a civilian protester.

There are other differences worth noting. Pakistan has received about seven billion dollars in US military aid since 2001. The money was meant to be used to go after Al Q'aeda cells operating in Pakistan, but the LA Times noted recently, that the money had been used to finance the country's arms race with India instead. The money has never been seriously linked to democratic reforms in Pakistan; in any case, none have materialized. Hugo Chavez, by contrast, has never been involved in any attack against America and receives zip. The US for its part, participated in a failed coup against Chavez a few years back. It should be noted that Chavez participated in a coup in 1992; but he called it off voluntarily and was jailed for two years. The target of his coup, a notorious kleptocrat was impeached a year later, and Chavez was pardoned by the subsequent president.

Chavez ran for president in 1998 and was elected by 56% of voters. Incredibly, Chavez called for a new constitution which was created and approved by the legislature. This meant he had to run again for president only two years after assuming office; he won again, this time with 60% of the vote. Chavez then survived a recall referendum in which 59% of voters voted against the recall. Literally, Chavez may be the most democratically elected man on earth.

As a final note, Fox's Hannity and Colmes which frequently has guests on to criticize the Chavez "dictatorship" at random (including 80's Latina sex symbol Maria Conchita Alonzo), did not have any stories on the Pakistan state of emergency on November 4th, the day it was called. Instead, the entire nights programming was devoted to an in-depth analysis and defense of the racist musings of Dog, The Bounty Hunter. And no, I'm not kidding.

While You Were Sleeping...

While I and my political junkie cohort were obsessively analyzing the verbiage of various punditry, the economy came that much closer to its inevitable doom today. Check out this frightening article in the Washington Post today. I'm not throwing stones from a glass blog, and I have to admit to not understanding the dynamics of currency exchange and the global stock market; but I do know how to say economic collapse. I just wonder if all politics is not just a show to keep us from noticing that the economy has been on the brink for over thirty years. Not one blogger that I visit--and I consider the ones I pay attention to to be really gifted, amazing analysts and writers--carried this news today or even seemed aware that it was on the horizon.

If you don't care to follow the link, here's a synopsis. The dollar plunged to record lows today because China made noises that it might sell some of its 1.4 trillion american dollars--yes, they basically own more of our money than we do--to get a better return on its investment with the euro. Even the New York Times had to concede that the dollar looks basically worthless to the currency market. That coupled with the fact that the war has pushed oil prices into the next solar system and a seemingly bottomless credit and housing crisis, means our economy is set to free fall and there's not many Federal Reserve hat tricks left to slow it down.

If I'm not mistaken the big story in the nightly news was that Pat Robertson is backing Giuliani. A few weeks ago when the cable financial network CNBC held its Republican debate there was a unanimous chorus, unchallenged by the moderators , that the market was doing fine, that US economic growth was explosive, and even that the arthritic dollar was holding its own. This was CNBC, not Fox.

Just saying. Can we get some lefties out there who know economics to do a blog?

Things Just Happen All by Themselves

There was an amazing exchange on Hardball tonight (11/04/07). Chris Matthews chopped it up in regular barber shop style with his guest Meet the Press host, Tim Russert. They waxed philosophically about the volatility of voters during primary season and Tim Russert made this amazing proclamation:

"there's a collective judgement that's made and it seems to happen all at once, people move collectively saying, you know what, we have decided in 04, Howard Dean would not be the best nominee for the party."

This is really hard to believe, even for someone who watches as many cable news shows as a I do. Really, Tim? This collective judgement happens all by itself? It wouldn't have anything to do with say, corporate media?

Indeed, in terms of fund-raising and opinion polls Dean looked to be unstoppable in the months and weeks before the Iowa caucus. But the mainstream media had other ideas. Newsweek ran a story called "The Trouble with Dean" in early 2004, virtually stating that he was unelectable. Time ran a similar negative high profile story. A Center for Media and Public Affairs study found that 98% of network media stories about Kerry and Edwards were positive, only 58% of stories about front runner Dean were in the weeks leading up to the Iowa caucus.

Not surprisingly, Dean lost the Iowa caucus, despite all predictions to the contrary. In the aftermath came the "I have a scream speech". It was a silly non-story concerning one version of Dean's speech to his supporters that night which was recorded through the house system (i.e. without the background screaming of the riled up crowd for context). Network and cable news played the "scream" speech nearly 700 times in four days according to some estimates and took great license in poking fun at Dean and calling him un-presidential.

Russert is half-right. As Dean's wide-ranging popularity in the year or so leading up to the primaries shows, there is in fact "a collective judgement that's made" and it does seem to "happen all at once". Its called a grassroots movement, like the one that backed Dean.

And then the there's the media.

Why They Hate Us: Correction

Correction: I have just been informed by a loyal reader who lives in the belly of the beast, that reality tv is actually not written; rather, produced by the cameramen and producers. And by non-union people cameramen and producers to boot.

So, let me rephrase:

The people who write the crappy stuff you complain about on tv want more money so they can pound out more derivative sit coms and OR rip-offs. Stop the world.

Also, no I don't care if they cancel The Daily Show either. So there. Oh, who am I kidding.

Why They Hate Us, Part Two

Here's another reason why the rest of the world hates us: today, as we continue to slide toward a war with Iran, as Iraq continues to descend into chaos without seeming end and as Pervez Musharaf detains peaceful demonstrators, a group of very well-dressed picketers emerged on our front pages and tv screens, with an urgent message. “We are the Writer’s Guild. We write your favorite sitcoms, dramas, late night shows, soap operas, movies and more. We work hard to bring you our best in entertainment.”

The people who write the crappy stuff you complain about on tv want more money so they can pound out more derivative reality shows. Stop the world.

Why They Hate Us

Just a reminder that nearly all the democracies that we support in the Islamic world happen to actually be dictatorships. Pervez Musharaf, Pakistan's self-appointed military leader, has just suspended the constitution and invoked martial law because his Supreme Court won't let him declare himself president for life. You can read about the pro-democracy activists our man in Pakistan (who recieves about 150 million a month in US aid) is rounding up and jailing absent habeus corpus here. Watch in slow motion as Condoleeza Rice decides whether to suspend aid to the country.

Just so the next time some pundit or the president wonders aloud, "why they hate us" you might have a pithy answer to yell at the tee vee.

Russert Goes Easy

Tim Russert, who somehow got a reputation for being a tough interviewer, went pretty easy on Fred Thompson on Sunday's Meet the Press. There's no need to mention the lack of follow up concerning Thompson's assertion that "everyone" thought there was WMD in Iraq in 2003. That is demonstrably untrue; the Times UK reported in 2003 that Tony Blair, among countless others, in fact never believed such a thing. Yet almost any presidential candidate would get the same pass from Russert, so it seems unfair (in today's usage of the word) to single out this interview.

But Thompson lobbed Russert an easy one that I can't imagine Hillary Clinton could have gotten away with; especially in light of Russert's compulsive focus on her during the last MSNBC debate where half of his questions were either posed to her or were about her. Thompson defending himself from the recently revealed news that one of his campaign co-chairs, Philiph J. Martin, has a lengthy criminal record, characterized Martin's attempt to sell 30,000 dollars worth of cocaine in 1983 as a youthful indiscretion (Martin was a tender 25). In a further stretch, Thompson claimed he was unaware of his decades-old friend's past. But Thompson continued that he wouldn't "throw my friend under the bus for something he did 20 years ago if he's ok now."

Russert moved on to lighter issues concerning the trout-faced presidential contender's weight. But the same article that Russert referenced in the Washington Post to broach the issue also stated that Martin has been and is the target of numerous lawsuits alleging fraud and defaulting of loans. In one case that remains unresolved Martin is alleged to owe a defaulted loan of 8 million dollars to Ellsworth McKee. McKee was said to have fronted a large portion of investment money for a series of development deals that lie at the heart of Martin's wealth.

Had Russert any interest in being a journalist instead of a power-friendly television personality, he may have read the Post article a few columns further and followed up. It seems even that Thompson was almost daring him to; or perhaps demonstrating to both Russert and his public how much power he already wields.

In any case, Thompson did throw Martin under the bus today; but it was certainly not from pressure from journalists like Russert.

Why Democrats Will Never Stop the War

Here's an interesting piece in the New York Times today, about earmarks in the military appropriations bill. When last we left our befuddled Democratic representatives this Summer, they claimed that they were unable to use their most effective weapon in ending the war in Iraq--cutting the purse strings--because they would be painted as unpatriotic meanies who would leave our boys in Iraq with no body armor, no plane ticket home, not even a Luna bar.

Here we go again; except this time around, recent rules passed by Congress require all representatives to list their 'earmarked' budgetary requests, surreptitiously tack onto the bill. This may provide a parallel explanation of why Democrats in Congress have been so ineffectual in stopping the war--they don't really want to. With hundreds of million dollars coming out of these gravy train war appropriations bills every few months and little if any oversight, Democrats have been able to acquire millions of dollars to feed cronies and campaign supporters in the form of lucrative contracts--billions worth.

At the top of the list of war profiteers comes Congressman John Murtagh, who, according to the article, requested 47 earmarks for companies friendly to him in his state, equalling about 166 million dollars. The Republicans must be green with envy; their biggest parasite, C.W. Bill Young (FL), is only milking the budget for 117 mill. Oh, and don't forget Nancy Pelosi, coming in at 36 million--I'm sure its all for eco-friendly stuff. All together our congress persons are set to make about 3 billion off this appropriations bill; the Senate, which wisely chose not to hold itself to any disclosure rules, takes about 5 billion, and no one knows where any of that's going.

A Pair of Firsts; But Both are Neither

Much has been made about the historic duality of the current race for the Democratic Nomination; the two front runners being, of course, an African American Male and a White woman. At first glance, it is indeed an exciting moment in history. But a closer look at the two reveals exactly what you would expect from the current political dynamic; the appearance of an attribute is not only more important than actually having it, it has become a requirement to not have the attribute at all.

A brief detour into the sideshow that is the slate of Republican hopefuls. It is interesting to note that the three front runners for the nomination--Rudolph Giuliani, Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson--all lack exactly those attributes and experiences that constitute the core of their political alter-egos. Thompson, a womanizing, Hollywood b-actor whose political career boasts virtually no accomplishments, avoided service in the Iraq of his day by hiding out in grad school. Romney, a high stakes corporate player, who had never uttered a word about foreign policy before 2006, is a member of a universally distrusted messianic sect that banned African-Americans as late as the 1980's and believes in aliens. And Giuliani a life-long municipal player, who also managed to avoid military service and has a personal life that would make most Hollywood stars feel uncomfortable. All portray themselves as ultra-social conservatives, all portray themselves as savvy as a seasoned General. Interestingly, John McCain, who boasts all of the attributes which the top three claim to possess, is lagging in polls and campaign funds.

A similar dynamic occurs with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. There is no comparing these two to the Republican crowd, both run intellectual rings around Giuliani or Romney any day. And, of course, Barack Obama has brown skin and Clinton is obviously female. But interestingly, both lack the core of what one would expect or want from the individuals setting those milestones. Obama, the son of an African father largely absent from his life, and a white mother, was raised by his white family and attended upper middle class schools. I don't like the idea of asking whether he is black enough, that's just stupid. But if the question is: does Obama represent at least some mean within the population he seeks to identify with, the answer is a resounding no. Obama, in fact, has much more in common with Latinos, South Asians and Asians; liminal figures in society set to become the new polity, faced with a complex series of challenges in the US. Certainly, Obama could have hewed closer to the truth and presented himself not as an African-American man, but as a member of the emerging color consciousness--those who have yet escaped classification into a racial group.

Clinton's issues are similar. Yes, she is a woman, and an incredibly intelligent and accomplished one at that, but her road to the white house should give most feminists some pause. Literally, there is nothing in Clinton's career (or in Obama's) to distinguish her from literally hundreds of thousands of highly educated professionals until the year 2000 when she finally independently sought political office. Even in this case, Clinton ran on her persona as first lady, and rode the well-worn fame of her husband's presidency into office. True, she did the heavy lifting once in office, but she is a product of her husband's career--an awful way to become the first female president of the United States, and not the norm for even developing countries. Mary Robinson--Ireland's first female president--rose to power completely independent of a significant other. Likewise, from Liberia to Latvia to Germany, female heads of state of other countries are women who rose to power independently and without needing the push of an ex-president husband.

I don't seek to single out the two. Indeed, any astute observer would note that you don't get to the primary showdown by being more honest than your opponent. However, the Clinton and Obama dynamic reflects on our own country's short-comings in creating a color and gender blind nation. There are obviously no shortage of distinguished black and female politicians in the US, or governors or even personalities who have a much longer and impressive list of accomplishments (Barbara Lee comes to mind).

The answer is simple--our nation is deeply racist and sexist, and deeply ambivalent about it, to boot. Look closely at our national discourse and you'll see virtually no high-profile female or black leaders. Those who do exist--Jesse Jackson, for example--are regularly lambasted in the press. There are virtually no non-white high-profile persona who could be drafted into a presidential run--no Rudies, no Al Gores, no Fred Thompsons. White America prefers to quote the deeds of posthumous black leaders not living ones. Obama seems to realize this and avoids any association with blackness in his mainstream appearances--his current tv spots, in which he addresses a group of supporters, spotlights a few working class white faces, but no black ones.

Similarly, the United States is not ready for a female version of Rudy Giuliani, working on her third marriage and promising to crush the testicles of her competitors. Clinton rarely mentions gender issues; she may in fact be the least gender conscious candidate running. In this she is aided by her traditional gender narrative, where women only should advance to positions of power through marriage. The mainstream viability of our two firsts says more about our country's tortured race and gender psyche than it does about the merits of the candidates; while we do want to live in an egalitarian society, our core beliefs about race and gender remain deformed by hundreds of years of cultural dogma. In short, we want the appearance of progress. But real progress? That's just too scary.

So what we've gotten instead: a black man who can (and does) claim to be half-African in a pinch; a white woman who is not so threatening, for she obviously rode in on her husband's inaugural coat tails. In the rush and excitement to elect our first black or female president, we've perhaps lost sight of how much authentic representatives of those groups would threaten mainstream white male (and, if polls are any indication, female and black) voters and how small of a chance such candidates would have to be elected.

I Loved Living Here Yesterday

For months I have been bragging to friends about what a great place to live Alameda is. Not quite a suburb or an urban area, the place is definitely unique. Every year more so. Once it housed a naval base, some naval families and dockworkers, and a small affluent community. Growing up a short distance away in San Leandro, for many years I knew of Alameda as a white line city, where the very presence of a person of color brought police to escort you to the bridge or tunnel. That was perhaps a basically accurate, if exaggerated point of view. But when I moved here I found that the city had become incredibly diverse; not just racially, but economically.

I don't think I've ever seen as many Victorian mansions in one city, but at the same time, the island city is dotted with low-rent apartment complexes and on the outlying areas of the island are quite a few working class neighborhoods, where home ownership has most likely been passed down on family lines. Alameda has a great school system, and its size means that all of the people who live in the neighborhoods and homes just described attend the same schools. This is probably one of the few places in the East Bay where race and class are not a very important determinant for getting a good public education. Young people here are what anyone would consider normal--neither the pampered and arrogant progeny of the Oakland Hills and Berkeley or the neglected and angry kids of that area's ubiquitous ghettos.

I like living here. My apartment is right next to Washington Park--a beautiful tranquil place, abutting Alameda Beach and the shoreline. There is a hole in the fence separating the apartment from the park, and my partner and I usually duck through there with our dog Cecil. One of my secret pleasures is to take Cecil out late at night into the dark and expansive park and letting him run free. When the moon is full, the light glistens off the water and you can make out Great Herons and other birds picking their way across the mud flats.

I am constantly surprised at how good I have it here--a working class guy, living the life of a dot-commer, with my own personal beach and park grounds, with beautiful neighbors, and most importantly, without the class and race apartheid that seems to infect all of the other urban areas I have lived in my adult life. I don't think I've ever lived anywhere where at least one person wasn't murdered within 100 yards of my house or where the walk home from work didn't involved casting my eyes away from some soul-rending human tragedy--New York, San Francisco, New Orleans, Ramallah, Barcelona and even San Leandro. More importantly, living here has changed my view about people. Nearly two decades of living in the crappiest neighborhoods the world has to offer had left me feeling quite pessimistic about humanity. Alameda is not perfect, of course, but it does speak volumes of how different a city can be where there is at least a marginal leveling of the playing field.

That's all changed now. Last night, on Halloween in Washington Park, a 15 year old girl was murdered in a failed hold up. Reading the Chronicle this morning, I want to keep things in perspective. I find myself scanning the article for good signs, reasons to not have to change the way I think about this place, to not have to change the way I do things, so that I can still take Cecil out at night into the park, so that I don't have to worry about my girlfriend walking through there after dark. From the description, it seems that the assailant was himself a teen. Perhaps, he didn't mean to shoot her; he did fire five times in the air. It was only the last shot that struck and killed her. Maybe it was just the anomaly of Halloween. This is after all, Alameda's first homicide this year and for nearly two years, that number was zero. And maybe, like all good things, the promise of Alameda's sanctuary is coming to an end.

I am overcome by unwanted feelings. I find myself repulsed by the fact that I am relieved that the victim was Asian and the child of immigrants. Because if it had been a white person, I believe, in my deepest soul, there would be curfews, there would be red lining, things would change over night. I'm sure I'm wrong about all that. That's just my inner racist talking. The same racist that also thought "can't they just stick to fucking up Oakland?".

I think about all the money our country wastes on homeland security, and how many more people have been killed in this way than the number in 9-11; except by ones and twos, slowly like cells lost to cancer. No wonder they prefer fighting terrorists. Terrorists, at least, make sense.

Still, I don't know what to believe or how to feel, only that I loved living here yesterday.

Doing What They Do Best

While Democrats have been whistling past the graveyard for the last six years when it comes to fighting wars and legislation their constituency oppose, they have certainly gotten good at one thing in the last year: bashing each other.

In this case, Hillary Clinton, the unctuous front runner for the Democratic nomination, was the target of an incredibly unfair and fact-less pile-on by her opponents last night on MSNBC's quadrillionth candidates debate. The altercation has gotten much press in the meantime, and Chris Matthews on Hardball used it as the centerpiece of his show today, roundly castigating Clinton for being evasive (and, oddly, going after her for not using the word "illegal" to describe undocumented immigrants". He called this pandering. Can someone regulate this guy's medication?)

But actually Clinton gave one of the few bullshitless answers of her career when Tim Russert asked her if she supported NY Governor Spitzer's plan for allowing undocumented immigrants to have driver's licenses.

--from the New York Times Transcript

SEN. CLINTON: Well, what Governor Spitzer is trying to do is fill the vacuum left by the failure of this administration to bring about comprehensive immigration reform. We know in New York we have several million at any one time who are in New York illegally. They are undocumented workers. They are driving on our roads. The possibility of them having an accident that harms themselves or others is just a matter of the odds. It's probability. So what Governor Spitzer is trying to do is to fill the vacuum.

Note, she said it twice. She didn't say that giving driver's licenses to illegal aliens was a blast, or that it alone would solve the immigration problem or anything else. She said that Spitzer was attempting to fill a vacuum left by the lack of comprehensive immigration reform. What followed was a cowardly and embarrassing display of pile on. First, Dodd attacked Hillary for her desire to give this "privilege" to undocumented aliens. Clinton replied:

SEN. CLINTON: I just want to add, I did not say that it should be done, but I certainly recognize why Governor Spitzer is trying to do it. And we have failed --

SEN. DODD: Wait a minute. No, no, no. You said yes, you thought it made sense to do it.

Note, again that she, in fact, did not say that it should be done and that she did say it made sense. She did say that she understood why Spitzer was doing it, but she did not say that she agreed that it should be implemented. This is called remaining consistent on a complicated issue. Russert joined in, redirecting the question to Clinton again more pointedly:

MR. RUSSERT: Do you support his plan?

SEN. CLINTON: You know, Tim, this is where everybody plays gotcha. It makes a lot of sense. What is the governor supposed to do? He is dealing with a serious problem....Do I think this is the best thing for any governor to do? No. But do I understand the sense of real desperation, trying to get a handle on this? Remember, in New York we want to know who's in New York. We want people to come out of the shadows. He's making an honest effort to do it. We should have passed immigration reform.

What is most amazing in all the media brou-ha-ha over this episode is that Clinton is taking the kind of nuanced position that is so lacking in our for-us-or agin-us discourse and is literally being treated like she has made the biggest misstep of all the candidates both Democratic and Republican. This in a race where Romney calls Obama Osama, any chance he can get and Giuliani knowingly makes up statistics about testicular cancer death rates to condemn government health care. On the contrary, this is a rare example--especially rare for Hillary Clinton--of a politician insisting on not kow-towing to reactionary rhetoric on a sensitive subject. Clinton takes a long view--one that any citizen of this country should hope their president is capable of when it comes down to crafting legislation that will work.

And indeed, Clinton held the line under the lights and under attack from three separate interlocutors. Edwards, who fancies himself the star of a Capra film lately, diverted the next question topic posed to him so he could get a chance to attack Clinton, accusing her of saying "two different things in the course of about two minutes just a few minutes ago." Then Obama joined in saying:

"...part of leadership is not just looking backwards and seeing what's popular, or trying to gauge popular sentiment. It's about setting a direction for the country, and that's what I intend to do as president."

This from the man who always seems to leave the senate chamber whenever there is a controversial vote--the Betraeus Ad, Iran--so that he won't have to take responsibility for having done anything.

And to cap it all off, here I am defending Hillary Clinton, who is poised to round out a twenty year Clinton-Bush oligarchy and who will probably bomb Iran if Bush doesn't get to it first. If she's the only candidate showing any integrity, good god we're f&!#@d.

The Eternal Non-Sequitur: Military Intelligence

Hoping that his story catches fire. Apparently, Col. Steven Boylan, the military spokesperson for General David Petraeus has been caught sending threatening, troll-like emails to journalists who question the conventional wisdom--most noteably Glenn Greenwald. Boylan is squirreling around a denial, but Greenwald and others have conducted a pretty thorough authentication process and all of the emails sent from Boylan to Greenwald seem to come from the same military address. Even if Boylan is telling the truth, and the emails are forgeries sent from dummy addresses, this still means that there is apparently someone out there who can so closely forge a high level centcom address that not even an expert can verify it with 100% accuracy. The latter reality does not seem to bother the US military, which has not contacted Greenwald to investigate the matter. Your tax dollars at work, America.

Here's the email that got things started from Boylan. I think the most incredible thing about this is that the functionally illiterate Boylan has reached the position as chief spokesperson for the second in command of our forces in the Gulf. Here are some of the Colonel's literary flourishes:

"The issues of accuracy, context, and proper characterization is something that perhaps you could do a little research and would assumeyou are aware of as a trained lawyer."

"Sorry to burst your bubble, but a little actual research on your part would have shown that he is actually not here, but that would contradict your conspiracy theory."

"I in fact do know exactly the day and time thatit changed and want to see if you are even in the same ballpark as reality."

"I invite you to come see for yourself and go anywhere in Iraq you want, go see what our forces are doing, go see what the other coalition forces are doing, go hang out with the reporters outside the International Zone since that is where they live and work and see for yourself what ground truth is so that you can be better informed."

Leslie Stahl Bastes a Franco-American Hot Dog

I hope you're not relying on 60 Minutes to provide a factual basis for your political views. Sunday night, in a much-trumpeted feature story on Nicolas Sarkozy, Stahl seemed determined to set the land speed record for journalistic bullshit.

Stahl seemed over-eager to hewe Sarkozy's Humble Child of Immigrants saw. On more than one occasion, Stahl described Sarkozy as the child "of an immigrant". Sarkozy himself stated in the interview, "I was from a middle class family, I had no connections, no one in my family had ever been involved in politics." Stahl followed Sarkozy's cue and pursued the fanciful cinderella story in all kinds of mythical directions. But Sarkozy's rags to riches story is at best misleading, and at worst (and at honest), bears a striking similarity to the invented background of George W. Bush. If you'll recall, while it is common knowledge that Bush grew up in the Northeast to a wealthy oil family, the media prefers the Rovian saga that casts him as a hungry Texax wildcatter out to make good. Like the Bush fairy tale, Sarkozy's has a curious immunity to daylight; despite the fact that both are so easily proven false, mainstream media and punditry seem hesitant to ever call them in question.

It is true that Sarkozy's father emigrated to France as a result of the political turbulence in World War II Hungary. But Paul Sarkozy, was a Hungarian nobleman with all of the trappings one would associate with the title, including a castle. Nicolas Sarkozy's mother was from a wealthy sephardic family. The future French President with no connection to politics grew up in a mansion in one of the richest areas of Paris. Regardless, Stahl insisted on referring to the humble immigrant story when she noted with irony that the "immigrant" Sarkozy, as French Interior Minister, advocated brutal measures against France's immigrant uprising of 2005. The irony is non-existant, however; Sarkozy, the wealthy son of a Hungarian Nobleman who grew up in France's richest quarters has little in common with the poor and marginalized descendents of France's African colonial holdings.

And now a little good news

Here's a rare and thoughtful piece in the New York Times today looking into the government's lousy rate of conviction in terrorism cases since 9-11. The writer admits that the main reason that most of these prosecutions fail is that the defendants haven't actually committed any crimes. The corollary is that the juries are requiring strict proof of material support or conspiracy before they put someone away for life.

Or to put it in the words of a juror in the Holy Land Foundation case: “[prosecutors] danced around the wire transfers by showing us videos of little kids in bomb belts and people singing about Hamas, things that didn’t directly relate to the case.”

Perhaps our country is not as reactionary as it seems. In the Holy Land case, for example, jurors soundly rejected the US government's well-worn and evidence-free style of Arab prosecution. More importantly, perhaps because of the recent actions of terrorists in the US backed Iraqi-Kurdish autonomous region, opinion seems to be turning away from knee-jerk condemnation of so-called 'terrorism'. After all, the PKK went much further than Hezbollah did last year in its kidnapping of one Israeli soldier--an action that Israel claimed gave it the right to conduct a month long bombing campaign that killed nearly a thousand Lebanese. PKK operatives have killed over 30 Turkish soldiers in the past weeks and kidnapped several--and still the US has insisted Turkey do nothing about it.

The hypocrisy echoes widely in previous and present US calls of outrage against Palestinian organizations who hurt and kill far less Israelis than Israel's army does Palestinians. And perhaps Americans, though slow to react to just about anything that is not presented as a movie trailer, reality show or video game, are finally taking notice.

Conversations with a Dog Psychic

A funny thing happened walking our dog this morning. Funny, hah, no. But it was sort of a good metaphor for what’s been going on in my life—that is, as good as dog-walking/life metaphors can get.

Walking said dog, whose name is Cecil in the aforementioned park. There is a small pond and a little swampy Brier patch behind it, with numerous geographical barriers and few people. Though against park rules, I do let the dog loose here because it hurts no one and he herds the foul fecal-machines known as Park Geese back into the stagnant pond and out of the human-use grass. Coming out of the area, I was slow to put the leash back on and happened upon a middle-aged woman walking with a Pekinese hefted high against her armpit:

Pekinese Woman: You have to use a leash here. Because of people like you, I can’t let my dog onto the path.

Me: I know (thinking fast. I don’t like to be admonished in public). I have a lot of control over my dog.

Pekinese Woman: Yeah (inappropriate and overly familiar sarcasm), sure. He’s a pitbull.

Me: (white lie) He’s not a pitbull. (he’s actually half, or so they say. I take the fifth).

Pekinese Woman: He looks like a pitbull.

Me: Appearances can be deceiving.

Pekinese Woman: (walking away, shouting back, absolutely serious) You don’t have to tell me. I’m a psychic.

Good News! Bombings Are Up!

Here's a troubling article from the USA Today (today). US airstrike bombings in Iraq are up this year from 229 to 1,140. How many things are wrong with this news? Let's review:

1. I don't recall the US media of record reporting on the estimated 20 a month US bombing runs from last year.

2. Leave it to USA Today to spin an increase in violence as good news.

--More precise targeting and smaller bombs have made it easier for the Air Force to support ground troops in counterinsurgencies, such as those in Afghanistan and Iraq.

--"We're hitting within 15 feet of where we're aiming," [Brig. Stephen] Mueller said.

--Some bombs are "designed to take one building and not the whole block," Mueller said.

Apparently, the bombs of 2003-2006 took out whole neighborhoods and unintended targets. Horroray for US know-how!

3. Bomb all you like Uncle Sam, USA Today will never bother you about the casualties. The US government refuses to keep track of people they've killed in Iraq.

Do NOT try at home

To those who say I think about politics too much, here is a cheerfully dumb little post.

I found a teen newsletter in the deli this afternoon. You know the kind, sort of more about the activity, keeping kids off the street, etc. All reasonable goals, of course, but what dull reading. Except of course for this nugget--10 Things NOT to put in a Microwave. I like the me-thinks-she-dost-protest-too-much thing with the all-caps NOT. A sampling of what (NOT) to put in a microwave:

1. Do no put eggs that are still in their shells in the microwave because they will explode.

2. Do not put eggs with shells in small bowl of water into microwave because (if they don't explode first) when you take it out of the microwave and their shells they will resemble bouncy rubber balls when you drop them.

5. Do not put potatoes that are un-stabbed or un-punctured in the microwave because they will explode.

7. Do not put grapes in the microwave because they will explode.

8. Do not put frozen drinks that are in metallic pouches (i.e. Capri Sun) because they will shoot out a small visible electric current resembling a sideways lightning bolt and is very dangerous.

Yes, they did add that number 8 was dangerous. However, no danger could outweigh the satisfaction of generating a sideways lightning bolt in your own home.

Trapped in the Magic Closet

Watching the morning cable news--MSNBC--as I have been wont to do these past weeks. Thus, I have discovered one of the most urgent breaking news stories. Indeed, it is on par with the fact that Turkey plans to invade our Kurdish enclave in Iraq; that is, if the time alloted to analyzing why we created a nation whose leadership are widely known as terrorists throughout the region, is any measure.

It outweighs in urgency the fact that wildfires are consuming large swaths of Southern California, since MSNBC missed all but the last few seconds of San Diego mayor Jerry Sanders' ("...and that's it from San Diego") address to his community.

Oh, how urgent this story! Of far more note than the fact that our opposition candidate agrees to start a war with Iran if she is elected. Of much greater import than the fact that China has bought one of our largest financial companies after it was bloodied by our catastrophic housing market mess. More important even than the fact that Kid Rock got arrested or that Brittany got her kids back!

The story, of course; J.K. Rowling revealed today that the headmaster of the Hogwarts school is gay. And has always been gay.

Just what does this mean for America? MSNBC had a radio talkshow person on to go into the details. The danger here, of course, is exactly the point of the conservative commentator's main complaint. There is no reason for the character to be gay. It has absolutely no impact on the narrative arc of the book. It is not the secret of the chamber, it is not the magic in the ring, it has nothing to do with what powers the wands. The fact that Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore, the head educator and most enduring character of the series is gay, has absolutely no impact on Harry Potter, his family, his friends, the mundies or the trolls who clean up the locker room at night. Just like real life.

And that, MSNBC, is how you report on a breaking story of almost no relevance.

Jon Stewart, ahem...

Ok, I have to be honest. I have worshipped Jon Stewart for years, and I am loathe to say anything negative about him--simply because he is literally the only person out there with access to the airwaves (or cable signals) that can talk straight about the daily avalanche of distortion spewed by our politicians and their subservient pundits.

However.

Stewart's guest last night was one Lynn Cheney. Really. The interview was far from hard hitting. While Stewart made a whole skit about toning down the show in advance of her appearance, there was little funny about the way that reality indeed played out. In his defense, he did make the valid point that a spouse should not be held responsible for the actions of their significant O. Fair enough. But L. Cheney is regularly dispatched by her husband to not only defend her husband's political policies, but viciously attack anyone who would suggest holding him accountable. Check out this amazing CNN clip, where Cheney threatens the far from liberal news presenter, Wolf Blitzer, cautioning him not to refer to Bush's domestic surveillance programs as domestic surveillance or extending the innocent until proven guilty thing to anyone therein accused by her husband's administration. L. also accused CNN of running 'terrorist propaganda' and implied that Blitzer didn't want "us to win".

Stewart also went light on L. Cheney's obvious distaste for talking about their lesbian daughter during her husbands '00 and '04 campaigns, especially when she accused John Kerry of being a "bad man" for mentioning the lesbian Cheney in a completely appropriate way in one of the presidential debates.

In early 2001, when her husband was still choosing the wallpaper for the vice prez's office, she was a board member in the U.S. Commission on National Security in the 21st Century, who resigned when the panel was more interested in discussing al Q'aida than her then-favorite target for military attack, China.

In short, Lynne Cheney is a nasty and pitiless political operative in her own right, who may have even taught her hubby a trick or two. She doesn't deserve any leniency simply because she wrote a pleasantly titled book, or because she is somebody's wife.

The Good Old Days

With Fox News celebrating its 11th year anniversary this month, many fans of veracity are fond of recalling the pre-Murdoch 'good ol' days when the Republican Party and right wing idealogues did not have their own highly rated 24 hour cable propaganda device. But here to lighten that remorseful load comes this little tidbit from CNBC's Kudlow and Company's (NBC's financial cable channel affiliate) post-Republican debate special this evening.

Host Larry Kudlow asked the slippery Rudy Giuliani what he thought of Hillary Clinton's recent proposal to jump start savings accounts for all US citizens at birth. Giuliani assailed it as being a virtual copy of a proposal in George McGovern's 1972 proposal, with a nod from Kudlow who moved on with a smile and the next softball.

The thing is that Giuliani voted for McGovern, as documented here, here, and here and virtually every media stream that does not have a corporate parent. Fox, with its Sith Lord pedigree is an easy target. But don't forget that NBC's corporate parent, GE, is one of the US government's most reliable arms contractors.

In the New York Times Today

There's a couple of interesting articles in the New York Times today. Interesting because they highlight the piss-poor reporting conducted by our media of record on the issue of the Iraq war.

Busying itself with press release journalism, papers like the NYT have for years ignored the murder of Iraqi civilians by American forces, including private security contractors. Is it just a coincidence that during this whole Blackwater mess, another security company should murder more Iraqi civilians, as detailed in this article. Or is it just that these incidents are happening with regularity and have been ignored until the Blackwater issue made them sexy?

And here, it seems, that Turkey has been having some kind of problem with the Free Kurdish client state in Northern Iraq, set up and backed by the US almost as a country of its own. Apparently Kurdish forces have been staging attacks in Kurd-oppressing Turkey from the rather comfy and well-stocked base in Iraq, with funding no doubt from the oil contracts set up for them by Bush cronies. Oh, you didn't know that our great Democratic ally Turkey oppressed their Kurdish minority just a few miles across the border? I suppose if mainstreasm media reported any of this with any frequency, even the dimmest hillbilly could figure out that this whole thing makes no sense. Oh, well, i guess the answer is to bomb Iran.

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Ahmadinijad?

Well, now that the whole tempest in a university auditorium thing is over, we can finally see why so many right wing idiots--and so many media pundits--seemed so freaked out about Columbia's invitation to let Ahmadinijad speak at their forum.

And yes, I'm probably going to spell his name wrong throughout.

After listening to his rather reasoned series of speeches at Columbia and the UN, and his interview with 60 minutes, we should now be aware what those fears of the power of Ahmadinijad's voice are not based on:

1. Holocaust Denial Its obviously not the figure-head leader's statements concerning the holocaust--that is denying the current orthodoxy on the Shoah Business that so easily lends itself to almost any pre-emptive military action taken by Israel or the US. Those who understand the politics of the middle east understand the dead-end jingo that leaders in the region use is not so disimilar as our own leaders' constant Islamo-fascist diatribes. I don't apologize for it, but I would only add that while Arabs were certainly not in any way involved with the pogroms in Europe of the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th century or the Nazi holocaust, they seem to be the only people these days who are expected to take responsibility for those actions. In any case, I don't believe an Alabama racist, anti-semite is going to be especially moved by an A-rab's nod to his bigotry.

2. 9-11 Its certainly not any kind of association with 9-11. This fundamentally racist nonsequitur propigated by pundits and politicians is meant to hoodwink those who don't (or won't) know the difference between the Taliban and the Iranian government, which are about as friendly as cats and dogs. There are few public figures who want to go deeper into the debate than commenting that Ahmadinijad's desire to visit Ground Zero was an "insult' to the American people. There just isn't anything there linking Iran to that event.

3. Views on Homosexuality I think I must have been sleeping when Republicans and right wing demagogues accepted Homosexuality as a valid lifestyle. Ahmadinijad's belief that there are no Iranian homosexuals (Freddie Mercury, hello) is not so different than that of our own Christian president and his evangelical mullahs. To them, homosexuality is a spiritual disease that can be cured; thus there are no homosexuals, only people with homosexualism.

4. Human Rights And its certainly not Iran's quashing of human rights. Many of our friends in the region and elsewhere--Turkey, Israel, Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, etc.--regularly deny human rights in equally egregious fashion, and on the US dime. China's record of human rights abuse is literally beyond belief, but they remain a trading partner in good standing--in fact, our economy would collapse over night without them. And yes they have nuclear weapons.

No, none of these.

The answer for the fear of Ahmajinidad's oratory is simple and telling. Media pundits and right wing demagogues are so used to not having to back up any of their assertions about Iran, have grown so lazy about the reputation they have built up around Ahmadinijad, that they literally are defenseless when faced with an opponent who is not afraid of being smeared with the "pro-Iranian" (and thus anti-semitic) brush.

Just check out this exchange, one of many with perhaps the dumbest man ever to walk the Columbia campus, Columbia President Lee Bolinger:




American discourse has become so coarsened by the "debate" format--Hannity and Colmes, O'Reilly Factor, etc.--that many have forgotten exactly the reality alluded to by Ahmenijidad. There is a paucity of yes, no out there, and rhetoric gets us no where except into endless wars like the one in Iraq, Iran's neighbor. One of the most salient things about this reality is that one of the only people who's ever had the uninterrupted opportunity to say that on national television is the spokesperson for an oppressive state with no freedom of speech.

One last thing. I usually hate Chris Matthews. The guy talks about politics like a tipsy tailgater at a football game. But three cheers for him, anywho on this issue. He was perhaps the only person on national television who provided any context at all to our now decades long conflict with the people of Iran--referring to the CIA backed deposing of Mossadegh in the 50's, the backing of petty dictator Shah Palevi, and the US unquenchable thirst for Iranian oil.

Here's to the Lucky Ones

There's been a lot said about young Star Simpson's run in with airport police in Chicago Friday--where she was accused of being a terrorist because she had a battery and a circuit board on her chest--but I think that one thing that has been somewhat overlooked is this disturbing announcement. "She's lucky to be in a cell as opposed to the morgue"

That boast was made by Scott Pare, the airport's head of security, as he recounted his brave encounter with the 19 year MIT student to a crowd of sympathetic media drones. Perhaps Pare was referencing Jean Charles de Menezes, the not-so lucky Brazilian man shot in the head at a London Tube station last year. In the Menezes case, police had mistaken the light skinned Brazilian for an Ethiopian under suspicion of being a suicide bomber at the time. Police blew his brains out before giving him a chance to explain himself.

Even saying that latter statement--that because of the confusion and ignorance of authorities you should be given a chance to explain your existence before being shot in the head at point blank range--is a chilling testament to the climate of fear and blind obedience to authority that we currently live in.

I suppose its possible that someone really, really, really stupid, could mistake a young girl with dyed blond hair and a battery and circuit board attached to her sweatshirt for a suicide bomber, as the Airport employee who notified authorities apparently did. Perhaps the key factor here is that she was not completely white, like Menezes. In any case, Pare is right, in a sense; Simpson is lucky that he and his racist, idiot thugs did not put a bullet in her brain like their counterparts in Great Britain did to Menezes, and was only imprisoned, defamed and tried and convicted in the distorted court of media opinion as a "bomb hoaxer".

But for a lot of us not unlike Simpson--those of us who have a quirk or two, are artists or activists, dark skinned or suffering from Tourettes, literally anything that makes us stand apart from an average crowd of white men and women in our nation's terminals and stations--we're all just plain shit out of luck.

What Courage Really Looks Like

Thought I'd pass on this clip I found on Salon. There's some hope for our country yet...

Jerry Sanders publically reveals that he won't support city ban on gay marriage because his daughter is gay:

Mo' Better Hero Myth: Chapter 2, The War Widow

Just to continue what I think should be one of the most important--and least heard--conversations going on today. Anyone who hasn't noticed the way that both parties cynically use the war dead and their relatives for political gains is probably watching too many reruns of True Life. Literally, you cannot turn your head these days without tripping over the straw man argument presented by the corpses of our dead American soldiers.

Case in point, George W. Bush's disgusting use of the death of Michigan National Guardsman Brandon Stout in his post-Petraeus address ; you can read it in this transcript from the BBC . Bush argues that the death of Stout is sad, and so you should feel bad about not supporting the war because then Stout's family will feel rotten about the whole thing.

Indeed, Bush's paradigm was repeated in a much more sincere, and thus unintentionally ironic, way by Stout's widow when she appeared on Hannity & Colmes the next night. In response to host Sean Hannity's query about whether Audrey gets offended by anti-war "political rhetoric", Audrey replied,

"uh...yes, because it makes me feel like maybe his death was done in vain and he died for nothing"

Alan Colmes, the program’s ostensible anti-war foil, was suspiciously quiet for the majority of the interview, neatly proving the Bush war-widow strategy has legs; there is no longer any need for hawks to justify the war. Pulling out now will make America’s Audrey Stouts feel like their spouses died for nothing.

But despite the clever ploy, it is the very circumstances of Brandon Stout’s life and death that should dispel the glamour the Bush Administration now seeks to place on grieving military families. Brandon Stout did indeed die for nothing in a war he never sought to fight.

Bush’s claim that Stout "volunteered" for the National Guard, is technically true, but he did not volunteer for the war in Iraq. According to an Associated Press article at the time of Stout’s death, Stout enlisted in the Guard in June 2003, a scant month after Bush had dramatically and unequivocally declared victory in the war in Iraq. Officially, there were no combat operations in Iraq.

Had he been seeking foreign military service, Stout could have joined one of the four military branches. But Stout had practical matters on his mind. Wood 8, a local Michigan television station, reported that Stout had joined "while attending college in Lansing. It was an opportunity to earn money and train for a career in security services." Stout chose to get married and build a life while working at the Gerald R. Ford International Airport; he was still working there when he was called to active duty in July, 2006. Even then, according to an Associated Press report, Stout had sought to be a chaplain’s assistant during his deployment, not a combatant.

Stout’s family may accept Bush’s narrative as some measure of consolation today. But Stout was quite simply drafted and then killed in a needless war. According to Icasualties.org, four hundred other National Guardsmen—whose terms of enlistment span eight years—have been drafted and killed in similar fashion. Nearly two hundred more Army Reservists have been killed in Iraq through Bush’s cynical back-door draft.

Those of us who do not want our own dead children to be celebrated in Bush’s next speech have a simple choice. We can pity Stout. We can pity his wife and family. We can pity them and the thousands of others like them, and thus remain silent.

Or we can get angry: at an administration that uses soldiers as fodder and their deaths as a rhetorical device; at a supine media peddling military press releases instead of investigative reporting; and yes, at the manipulation of the families of dead soldiers, who in their aggrieved confusion are now joining the Bush administration in asking our children, family and friends to go and kill and die for nothing.

It may seem callous to the troops and their families, but, as our war in Iraq has proven over the last five years, there are worse things.

The Hero Myth Part 3: Last But Not Least

None of what I have written on this issue should be meant to indicate that there are no heroes out there. Certainly, I think one of the factors that makes our American polity so vulnerable to jingoist calls to war is the myth of the military hero. A casual student of history (like me) would note that almost all of our wars--excluding perhaps, WWII (but not forgetting the history of US and European empire building that sowed its seeds)--have been about capital and real estate. If there are heroes from those conflicts--or more accurately, invasions--it is those men and women who risked their lives for others once they had already been sand-bagged into service. Or those men and women who were critically injured or mentally damaged by the war they had been forced to fight, and still found a way to lead productive lives in their communities, to survive as loving humans with dignity. I don't mean to take anything away from those people, I honor them.

I don't think I'm different than most people in my gut definition of heroism--someone, who when called to serve others by circumstance, gives their all up to and beyond personal and great sacrifice. But to that definition, one that creates an impression that heroes are created by accident, I would like to add another, perhaps just as important. Those men and women who lived lives of sacrifice by design in order to serve and help others with little or no personal gain.

Certainly a few names in this latter trend come to mind. But I think that as a corollary to that definition, I would necessarily exclude anyone who ever got famous for doing so. As an example, I would provide again the Petraeus Myth, the man who, three days after being shot in the chest, secured his release from the hospital by doing 50 push ups. You just won't convince me of crap like that. Almost anyone who becomes well known for anything quickly becomes a caricature of the human beneath the hype, and will so fail at the most important part of being hero; providing an example for the rest of us.

So, in the first category of heroes called upon by circumstance, I'd like to offer all those people in our history who lived a life of sacrifice when called upon to make this a better country. Those tens of thousands of men and women who fought American Apartheid during the civil rights era of the 50's and 60's by simply insisting on dignity; the thousands and perhaps millions of men and women who have walked off the job during labor strikes, even when the strike was not theirs; the men and women, few as they may be, who took off their uniforms and went to jail or worse to protest killing other peoples; those who assumed the mantle of society's 'degenerates' and would not debase themselves by being ashamed. And so many others in so many struggles that we, as a people, have simply forgotten about and exclude from our national narrative.

In the second category, I offer the social equivalent of a tomb of the unknown soldier to those countless people who elected lives of social sacrifice, and were often persecuted in obscurity for it. Those who strove to set examples for the others in the first category of heroes, who endangered their own well being to win rights for others, who broke unjust laws, and took the risk and responsibility of urging others to follow them. In these forgotten fights, much of what these heroes did was illegal, and often considered immoral, and they did it anyway, with no choice but to accept the unjust consequences. Most importantly, they were often the first, at least in their communities, to make these choices, without even knowing if their friends, family and loved ones would support them. Though they are responsible for the eight hour day, the end of segration and our still-broadening inclusion of citizenship, one thing these heroes did not gain was acclaim or fame.

Many have died, of course, but perhaps even more are still here, all around us, though we may never become aware of them. If you want to believe in heroes, look no further than the subway or bus or streets of your city.

The Hero Myth Part 2: The Legend of David Petraeus

While it seems obvious that most people were not shocked or offended by MoveOn's full page ad in the New York Times earlier this week, right wing pundits and politicians have focused much of their energy making it into the worst violation of societal norms.

At the outset, many will agree that it was a crappy rim shot joke--the only real crime here is if someone got paid to write such sophomoric crap in lieu of good copy writing. But what has been a real eye-opener has been the virtual deification of Petraeus in some right wing circles. Of the innumerable uses of the word hero, or characterizations there of, with the name Petraeus, here are a notable few:

"The ad, placed by the hard-left paranoiacs at MoveOn.org, libeled a genuine American hero while further debasing the political debate in America"--New York Post, 9/12/07

"An American hero comes back to give his objective report as the leader of our troops over there, and he's slandered, he's libeled" ---Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson, MSNBC online, 9/13/07

"...taking a man who has lived his life with honor an integrity...someone who [accuses] him of doing these things [misrepresenting facts with a political agenda] should burn in hell" South Carolina, Republican Senator Lindsay Graham, Hannity and Colmes, 9/11/07

Any rational person can see why such political operatives would rather talk about the Betraeus affair instead of the hard realities of Iraq Year Six; the most damning testimony on the war has indeed come from David Petraeus, who, even if his manipulative statistics are to be believed, pronounced on live television that soldiers will continue to die at a rate of 70 or so a week in Iraq with no known end in sight and with no clear security gains for the US.

Luckily for free-thinkers on this issue, the Hero debate is also a slam dunk. If Petraeus is a hero, then we will have to expand the definition of the word to include most post-doctoral fellows, skydivers and victims of accidental gun play. For literally, there is nothing else of note in the hum drum story of the technocratic ascendancy of General David Petraeus. Though he has been in the military since the age of twenty or so, he has never actually fought on a battlefield--indeed he spent the majority of that time in the military-industrial complex's ivory tower--first West Point, then Princeton, then Georgetown. The man may have enough degrees to constitute an isosceles triangle, but has never ever had any mud on his combat boots, so to speak. Indeed, many of the iconographic legends of martyrdom associated with Petraeus were just dumb accidents--shot in the chest by a bumbling soldier in a live fire exercise, then some years later, breaking his pelvis in a skydiving mishap. The man has been a pencil pusher and military professor since day one.

God bless you if you still believe in heroes in this day and age. For those of you who do, those of you who believe that the Americans who invaded Iraq in our name and have caused one of the most horrifying losses of life in the history of American military adventurism, should be honored, rather than pitied, here's something to think about. The general commanding them there has never been in combat himself. If its any consolation, he has taught alot of classes on killing people.

Squeeze the Tube...

Here's a couple of YouTube links sent to me or that I found in my trawls on the iNterNets:

My friend sent me this one. A collaboration of Alfonso Cuaron, Cuaron's son, and his effects collaborator for Children of Men (sheesh, talk about lefty nepotism). Its a trailer for Naomi Klein's new book the Shock Doctrine. I didn't know books needed trailers these days, but you probably don't read anyway. Damn kids.

In this clip, a Mr. Glenn Greenwald leads you on a tour of General David Petraeus' many surreal and sunny proclamations on Iraq, starting in 2004 when the General was but a mild mannered state-side commander and bespectacled army college dean. Said a fresh faced Petraeus in the Washington Post:

Momentum has gathered in recent months. With strong Iraqi leaders up front and with continued coalition... support, this trend will continue.

Whew. Its a good thing we didn't let that dumb-ass run things over there. Oh wait.

Anyway, I love Glenn Greenwald. The astute among you will note that he is not actually as cuddly as the little cartoon caricature on the Salon blog, but don't let his robocop-like demeanor fool you, the guy knows his stuff. At the end of the video, go to the listed website to sign the petition. Yes, I know nothing will come of it, but nobody said being a witness to history would be fun.

The Hero Myth

One can never know oneself. I hope that I am not writing this for base reasons, for whatever dark urge motivates us to heap scorn on the suffering. My intent is to focus on the one group that few people ever talk about, but who have more responsibility than any other for the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq. The soldiers, those members of our all volunteer army, who could have, one by one, and platoon by platoon, taken off their uniforms and refused to serve, but went anyway. Who instead of leading Americans out of violence and repression, led us into what is now seemingly an un ending conflict. Now, as these veterans, appear in cynical ads designed to convince us of the importance of their sacrifice, we must strive to convince our own children against following their example, so that they do not get themselves killed and maimed while destroying another people's civilization; and as I have recently become aware in two of the most ironic situations, that is not as easy as it should be.

Those soldiers that were involved in the invasion of Iraq have served their tours; they have had the opportunity to go home if they did not believe the war was just. Its true that many soldiers stationed in Iraq were called from reserve or national guard duty after the invasion, or were literally shang haied into service due to faustian education bargains with the military. Their stories should also be told.

But that leaves the rest. It seems that all too many troops joined the military even after the invasion, even after the supine mainstream media had revealed that the pretexts for war as provided by the Bush administration were false, even after it was revealed that there was no plan for Iraq and that corrupt embezzlement would be the only efficient undertaking of the Bush pack. These were the pitiful soldiers, such as the ones featured in Ari Fleishcher's horrifying pro-war commercials, that still believe in the myths propigated by the Bush administration about Iraq, even after the horror that they have witnessed.

Rather than use the library or the internet to investigate the nature of the war, these men and women relied only on their intuition, jingoism, and media distortion before they made the most important decision of their lives. Rather than question, question and question again the rationales that would ask them to not only risk their lives, but, more importanlty, risk the lives of Iraqis and the Americans who will have to deal with the foreign policy nightmare that has subsequently emerged, they jumped in feet first.

Then, reality set in and there were no Iraqi children with outstretched palms bearing daisies. This was no cake walk, they were not firing mortars into undefended 'terrorist' compounds and emptying their rifles at inept and cowardly tv bad guys. They have returned with emotional and physical wounds that cannot be healed and they have no other option but to see the wasting of their lives, bodies and minds in heroic terms. But I insist we reject those characterizations.


Here is the truth about our Iraq War Hero Veterans. By the end of the invasion in 2003, at least 8,000 Iraqi civilians--or nearly 4 times the number of Americans killed in the World Trade Center--had been killed as a direct result of US military activities. It is a sad testament to the inhuman travails that we have visited on that country, that that number today seems so remarkably small. Almost all troops currently serving, especially those who have returned to the US wounded, did not arrive in Iraq until after 2003. They knew--or should have known--that the US had already been responsible for a considerable amount of misery and loss of life in Iraq. It would have been a great time for real heroes to declare that they would not support the four score 9-11's, that they would not subject another people to what we had experienced in 2001, simply because we were blinded by narcissistic calls to ideology and self-involved paens to masculinity. What is amazing is that so few did.

I know there are most likely brave soldiers who did amazing things in the war in Iraq. Men and women who risked their lives to help another in a desperate time. For doing the right thing, at the right moment in time, during circumstances out of their control, they should be commended. But there are no war heroes from this conflict. There are dupes and fools, at best, and ignorant, hateful lunatics, at worst. But not one hero. That should be remembered as the damaged survivors of the Iraq war are trotted out by manipulative politicians to convince us to send more of our children, siblings, parents and neighbors to ruin their lives and the world.

Just Thinking Out Loud Here...

But Senator Larry Craig's squirrely attempts for a do-over in both his guilty plea for disorderly conduct and his "intent" to resign at the end of the month got me thinking.

First: Apparently Craig plans to argue that the Ethics Committee case against him would be the first such investigation for a misdemeanor (Craig's lawyer likens it to a traffic ticket). That got me thinking and I did a little quick search on what Craig was doing in Minneapolis at that time. It seems to me that it could be argued that Craig was working in his capacity as representative at the time, and would place his disorderly conduct in a men's bathroom on the public dime--don't know if that makes any difference, but its sure not the way I want my representatives spending their work hours. In any case, there seems to be nothing the Ethics Committee could do, even if they censured him. I just can't see what Craig hopes to gain here besides getting what they used to say about a coward dying a 1,000 times, over the next year until elections in 2008. If he were to get the not guilty plea over turned--and I've heard some talk that its not as impossible as it might seem--he'll still have to stand trial for the original charge, not the plea that he was offered. I can't imagine that being on trial for soliciting sex in a bathroom will do wonders for his career or legacy.



Second: In my search, I happened upon a lot of info that names the Minneapolis Airport as a hub for travel to and from DC, viz layovers, etc...which piqued my interest. I'll admit math isn't my strong suit, but:

a) Minneapolis Airport is a Washington DC layover hub + b) Minneapolis Airport is a male pick up spot with nation-wide notoriety = c) Don't be Surprised if Larry Craig isn't the last public servant outed from activity there...

...Just Saying...

In Today's Issue: Justice Wept, & Somebody Should do a Study on That.

In keeping with my delusional pretense that this blog is read by more than one person (my girlfriend, if you want to be specific) I've decided to link some interesting things out there.

First: these amazing links concerning new revelations about the Supreme Court decision, Bush v. Gore. Apparently Justice Souter has been so haunted by his complicity in George Bush's presidential win, that he nearly resigned over it, and still weeps whenever he thinks about it. You can read about it on thinkprogress and the SF Examiner.

Second: did you ever wonder what the hell is wrong with the crazy &%$*$#s who support Bush and company, no matter how much they lie? This is a great little text written by psychologist Bob Altemeyer, who spent the last 40 years or so doing field studies and experiments on the "authoritarian" mind. The results are astounding, and the source reliable; John Dean relied extensively on his research for the recently published "Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush".

The 'I Don't Recall' Defense: Works in the Men's Toilet Too.

I'm not one for Schradenfruge--or however the f%$# you spell that. I would normally feel sorry for anyone in Senator Larry Craig's position--anyone that is, who had not been trying to demonize other gay people for decades. There's a lot of valid reasons why people stay in the closet, but none of them include the expediency of making political hay out of condemning homosexuality in a red state. I've heard some conservative commentators--most notably on Hannity and Colmes --claim that Craig isn't a hypocrite. They posit that just because your gay (and in the closet), doesn't mean you can't oppose gay marriage and gay people. GOOD GOD! I know Americans are stupid, but they can't possibly be stupid enough to believe that.

Which brings me to this very satisfying audio clip of Craig's police interrogation after the arrest. Pay special attention toward the end at the unique disgust Minneapolis Police Sgt. David Karsnia, the arresting officer, shows for Craig--not because he is Gay, or soliciting sex in an airport toilet, or indeed, a Gay Senator soliciting sex in an airport toilet--but because he is using terms like "I don't recall" to lie about things that happened just ten minutes earlier. My guess is that Karsnia will become the overnight hero of all those helpless constituents out there who have watched the likes of Gonzalez, Bush, and Rove insult their intelligence with lies of similar caliber over the last years.

Gonzalez: An Unctious Creep To the End

What can I say about this juridical louse that has not yet reverberated in the echo chamber of cyberspace? He was a liar, he was a tool, he gave a bad name to struggling people of color everywhere.

Arguably his most despicable act, however, was his resignation speech. Rather than apologize to the people of the US--even the people of the world--for violating the law and using his position to cover an administration's heinous and murderous policies, he congratulated himself on achieving the American dream. As if that were not bad enough, he outed his anglo-named children, who will now forever have to bear the public notoriety of having the most sniveling coward in the history of jurisprudence as their father. He even subpoenaed the balls to capitalize on his Chicano boot- strap narrative by claiming, "Even my worst days as Attorney General were better than my father's best days. "

Maybe he meant that his father would've gotten canned on the spot the first time he lied to his boss not, as in Gonzo Jr's case, the quadrillionth. Maybe that is the American dream now adays--fucking shit over with impunity, leaving others to pick up the pieces, avoiding responsibility in perpetuity. God Bless America.

Ban Lobster Fighting

I don't care much for sports. If you want my honest opinion, professional sporting represents everything that's wrong with this country; from its distraction of the public's attention from important issues in our representative democracy, to its cheapening of the competitive spirit with doping and corporate logoism, to its financial extortion of American cities.

That being said, who the hell decided Michael Vic was the most evil man in the world? For christ's sake, hundreds of thousands of cows are routinely slaughtered after living a life under the most inhumane conditions every year. In the poultry industry, the first experience of new born chicks is to have their beaks burnt off by a white hot electrical coil and thrown into a bin with hundreds of their brethren writhing in pain. This is not to exclude the game sports, where fish are ripped from their habitats with a hook through the lip, then left to suffocate slowly in a box for hours; where wounded and terrified deer are pursued for hours by hunters. And this is not to say anything of the plentitude of other creatures that we treat in great numbers with eccentric cruelty and disregard, for no better reason than we like it that way (let me just say the word Lobster here, and be done with it).

Many a discourse could have been started amongst our nation's media punditry examining our nation's innate and unique hypocrisy and cruelty to living beings vertebrate and otherwise, amphibious and hominoidal. Judging from the serious lack of reporting on the issues of our day, viz unfettered militarism and political corruption, its not like they're doing anything else.

Right to Life (but no one said a decent life)

3 Cheers for SuperSnoop Jevarra Jones for digging this from the steeped video entrails of the Internets. The author of the min-doc went to the College Republican National Convention, where he got some great footage of war mongering young reps making silly excuses as to why they couldn't join the military. The most amazing thing about the piece, however, is this anti-abortion statement by the highly-indictable Tom DeLay:

If we had those 40...million...children [fetuses] that were killed over the last 30 years we wouldn't need the illegal immigrants to fill the jobs that they are doing. Think about it.

In defense of the callous college conventionites, there was a copious and discomfiting silence from the crowd, even after DeLay added, 'think about it'.

Think about it, indeed. It seems like DeLay's real opinion about the social station of women who contemplate abortions (and, of course, the social worth of their born children) is on display here. Post fetuses, once saved from the evils of abortion, would go on to become the slave race of the assembled affluent republicans, neatly replacing the Mexican presence and all those taco trucks. What better message to college republicans; don't worry, those post fetal children will never go to college.

Getting it Wrong in Gaza Pt. 2: Pirates of the Gaza Strip

Newsweek graces its cover this week with a not-so-nice looking Hamas rep; masked, gun held high, posing like a pirate upon a tank of unknown origin. This stuff sells, of course, as many Americans enjoy being scared by "Islamofascism" in the same way that they like the thrill of roller coaster rides. But, much like the truth hidden by the steep drops and corkscrews, the danger is largely a construct.

Lets start with the tank. Though the Israeli military redeployed out of Gaza, leaving it surrounded and landlocked--but without internal occupation--Gaza is not a state, not even after the Hamas coup. Gaza does not have tanks because Israel never allowed the Palestinian Authority to have tanks, nor did it allow it to have surface to air weapons, or basically anything that could hurt Israel when Israel comes over with its own tanks. The question remains. Where did this tank come from?

If that were the only question, however, one could excuse the hyperbole of this slim periodical. But it isn't; "Back to the Stone Age", an article accompanying the mag's coverage of the Gaza events, does some pretty incredible acrobatics to avoid contextualizing the reality in which Palestine's so called democracy must function. I'm not up on the numbers, but i think that the article's claim that thousands of Gazans have left in the past months more than credible. Millions of Palestininans, in fact, have left the West Bank and Gaza for the last 40 years. Don't let it get around, but living under military occupation kind of sucks.

Interestingly, among the many destinations listed in the article for the Gazans who can afford to leave--Norway, Amman, Canada--the West Bank does not appear. Why, you may ask? Because Israel does not allow Gazans to travel to the West Bank. One could start asking many questions here, like: if that's true, then how can so many people refer to Gaza as being liberated; or, how did candidates for President who lacked funds and support abroad, campaign in both the West Bank and Gaza? You might also wonder, kind of in a basic way, if all this--a military occupation that prevents you from seeing family, working, leaving the country, etc.--was violating your human rights. Could you even call it oppression? And if Israel prevents Gazans from going to the West Bank, and West Bankers from leaving the West Bank, then how the hell can this be called a democracy? This might lead you to all kinds of other questions such as, to start with, why the hell is our country supporting Israel as they continue to screw over the most screwed over place on earth.

Go ahead and ask, but don't expect to find your answers in Newsweek.

Getting it Wrong in Gaza Pt. 1: Terry Gross, Ignoramus

I have never been supportive of Hamas politically--while there are some Hamas folks out there who sought to use their cache with the people of Palestine to lead a moderate path out of the Oslo cul de sac, the organization is just too fragmented and its brand too laden with baggage in the west. This obviously does not mean Fatah is the only way out, of course. There are other mobilizations going on in Palestine today, though the media would like to ignore them. Just the other day I was listening to Terry Gross interview Dennis Ross--the previous administrations bs artist on the Palestine case--on Fresh Air.

Ross would have us believe that there are only two options in Palestine--Hamas and Fatah. He said so point blank and Ms. Gross, apparently having not bothered to do any homework on the issue, did not follow up. The reality that Ross's boss, Clinton, and our current President would like to ignore is that there have been for years, alternate parties and there is a solid foundation of civil society in both Gaza and the West Bank.

The civil society organizations, in fact, are much more stable than either Hamas or Fatah. They have stood the test of time through the various permutiations of the occupation and enjoy large amounts of credibility in the region and they are secular. Mustafa Bhargouti, for example, garnered 20% of the vote in the Palestinian presidential election in 2005, running a campaign with literally no financing. Bhargouti's organization, the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees, has for years monitored the state of health care and health in the Occupied Territories, and has kept a sobering record of Israeli and Fatah brutality in the West Bank and Gaza. Bhargouti came in second in the polls and it should be noted that Abbas had large amounts of USAID funding and even commanded his Fatah forces to hold the polling places open at gunpoint so that Fatah could bring in extra voters.

Ross and others want us to believe that the only option against Hamas is the same old wine in the same dirty glass called Fatah, but its just not true. But that is not for Terry Gross to question, apparently.

Write Back in Anger

Its become a tradition for the letters to the editors pages of American papers and magazines to publish a dozen or so wrathful communiques in response to in-depth writing on the issue of Palestine and Israel. This is meant to make the publication appear balanced, which in this case, generallly means letting the kooks from both sides cry out for death to the kooks from the other side in great numbers. These letters are mostly reactive and badly reasoned, drawing attention to one injurious paragraph, phrase or word in the work, while ignoring much of the rest, even if it actually supports the position of the letter writer. In this genre, I am one of the most prolific offenders. Forthwith, I began writing this as a response to the following words and sentence fragments contained in Stephen Elliot's "The New New Middle East" in October's Believer:

"What the Palestinians don't understand, when they launch their rockets at Israel is that the damage may not be the same, but the fear is the same. People get distracted by the magnitude of force."

"They [Palestinians] also have to recognize Israel and recognize existing agreements"

"He talks about the right of return...its the kind of idea suggested by people who aren't looking for solutions...a Gazan individual with a good job cannot see the part his own people must play in the solution..."

I wrote a hellacious letter in response to those words, but deleted it, almost immediately. There were two reasons. I'm trying not to be that reactive person anymore. Its a purely selfish thing; I find that I get more bang from my buck by cooling my heels for a moment or two and thinking things through. But I also know Stephen, and I knew that the day would come when I would have to take responsibility for the words I wrote, and fortunately, this made me think a little bit harder about what it was that made me angry about the article.

But first I should talk a little bit about the origin and nature of my relationship with Stephen. I met him at a reading I gave for my then-nacent novel in 2003. I was nervous, I hadn't read anything in front of a group of people since high school, I had no idea what I was doing, and I was sure that my work was crap. Stephen was reading that night as well. He was already getting some acknowledgement in the small SF scene, although I'd never heard of him. Though it seemed impossible, he was more nervous than I was, the beer can in his hand almost seemed to be buckling from the pressure of his fingers, as he stood and read, and his face twitched. We ended up drinking at a bar down the street, talking about Palestine and his and my experiences there. We never became friends or anything, but I had a girlfriend attached to the SF literary scene, and I ran into him from time to time and we always had a good word to exchange.

Since then Stephen has published another novel, and his non-fiction work has appeared in several high-profile magazines. In the meantime, I struggled with my book, and with the novel format, mostly feeling as if I were failing to convey the complexity of what I experienced in Palestine and New York at the dawn of the new millenium. I also struggled with my life here. Everything felt flat and meaningless, and I saw nothing more than a large void between myself and the people around me—no matter how progressive or sympathetic to the cause. In a way, it really didn't have anything to do with Palestine, for the Bay Area is full of both Palestinians and devotees of the conflict. It was not only that the things that I saw and experienced in Palestine had filled me with a itchy kind of hopelessness; if you've seen a man ripped to shreds by your neighbors, or huddled in your home as an F-16 buzzed your block for an hour before firing a missile at the building down the street, then you'll know what I'm talking about. It was also the loss of the pristine altar of the oppressed where, for over a decade, I had hung all of my beliefs about people and the way the world should work. My peoples were not heroes, they were just people, dumber than most half the time, it seemed, just as anyone's affiliate appears from the inside looking in. More often than not, my Palestinian brethren seemed to take a certain amount of satisfaction in marginalizing me and making me feel guilty about my western upbringing—the many potential places I could travel with the magic teleportation device that they apparently thought was implanted in my little blue passport, all the years that I had not spent in administrative detention, and all the rubber bullets that had not knocked out an eye, the military batons that had not shattered a limb. To them, all of my problems seemed ridiculous, a product of Yankee self-absorption. What could I complain about? Wasn't I allowed to go to school without crossing a checkpoint, wasn't that school guarded from harm and closure by the authorities instead of being shot at and and closed by them? Hadn't I gotten laid, didn't I speak English? What did it matter if I was a working class and mired in stagnant poverty? Then get two jobs, they would no doubt say. What's the big deal? And obviously, they were right, which meant that in some way, I was a failed Palestinian by most definitions, living a wonderful life that was beyond my ability to appreciate, unlike those deserving of the name with their famous and miserable existence. All the pain I had witnessed, the murder and death, the fear and sorrow, meant nothing, it was supposed to slide off of me; for if I wasn't an authentic Palestinian, then I was one of the Westerners who had come specifically to experience those things for all the bizarre reasons that they were wont to—to earn their advanced degree, to create meaning in their lives, to make a video documentary or publish an article. To utilize the conflict for their own ends.

The burden of those tumultuous feelings alone would have been enough, but on some very deep level, I had become used to the heightened adrenalin of living in a low-intensity battlefield and the embarrasing self-importance that comes from being involved in the issue most central to the world. Returning to the US, I became a humble nobody with a dead end job involved in nothing more important than getting to work on time and making sure I turned the lights off when I got out of my car.

It occurred to me that I would never finish my novel until I returned to Palestine, if not for good, then at least for a while. I wanted to settle some of the things that had haunted me, some of the positions I had taken, the self-absorbed attitudes that had prevented me, or so I thought, from really seeing what was going on there, and later that same year I tried traveling to Palestine again. I was detained by the Israeli authorities at the airport, interrogated and deported. I could fill a book about the humiliating treatment I received. The airfare—about a thousand dollars—was wasted, of course, but that really seemed like the least of it. They confiscated my laptop, broke it open rather than taking the few moments necessary to ask me how to open it, then sent it back in the mail two weeks later. They put me in jail for 16 hours after 8 hours of interrogation and a 23 hour plane ride. The American Consul refused to help me when I called him on the phone—he implied that I had gotten into this trouble myself and Uncle Sam was not going to lend a hand. Indeed, though no one knew what wrong I had committed to end up in the predicament, and I actually never was told, I was treated like the lowest criminal by everyone I came into contact with. I know enough Hebrew to be familiar with the curse words. I haven't traveled by air since..

If I had been angry before, it was a mellow emotion compared to my new rage. I continue my life, I keep it hidden, but the anger is like one of those viruses, Mono or Epstein-Barr, it never really goes away, stays nestled in my cells waiting for moments of extreme duress or fatigue to flood my body with toxin. And the worst thing is that it gets tangled with the every day, with the mundane disappointments that constitute a life, in petty conflicts with strangers, with my own fears, my own failures. When I read Stephen's article I was angry, it was that old anger of Palestinian vintage, but it is also rage at other things no longer easily separable. As a professor, Stephen is in a position to write while earning a decent living, while I struggle on the poor man's grant—unemployment—supplementing its paltriness with humbling temp work and exhausting Craigslist jobs. Stephen had already published a few novels, was writing, and writing, was well-known and in demand. No one knew me, no one asked me to write about anything, no one gave a shit about what I had to say. Stephen could contemplate travelling to Palestine to write something important and poignant about the nation of my father's birth and that is something that I will probably never be able to do. I am 37; I have most likely missed my chance to be relevant.

The most difficult thing, what I have avoided until just recently, has been the seperation of these various rages, recognizing what is justifiable, and what is self-defeating self-pity. But once this seperation has been accomplished, what do I do with the anger that should not be set free, that I have a responsibility to contain? And I think its fair to ask Stephen, especially since he casts such an emotionally distant eye on his Palestinian interlocutors, if he has ever asked himself these questions, if he had to experience any thing on the order of these things to attain the knowledge he claims in his analysis, and if any knowledge of the conflict not gained by this kind of intrusive, withering and confusing experience has value.

I ran into Stephen just a few weeks ago as I was headed to my current job at the city's end. We talked for a moment. I must admit that I am bothered by the fact that I get kick out of Stephen's acknowledgement of me as an equal to be stopped and talked with as if I was worthy of the attention of a published writer. Looking back, after reading the article, I find it a little odd that he did not mention where he had been. We didn't talk about politics certainly, or the Believer piece. I asked him what he'd been up to, he told me about a short story collection about kinky sex and I told him that I was working for the moment but would get back to the book soon with any luck. There was an awkward moment, I'm still not sure what was said, or what gesture was made, or what was suddenly caught from the corner of an eye, but there was an uncomfortable silence and I was late for work anyway and we parted company. Perhaps, he wasn't sure how I'd react if he told me where he'd been and the perspective he had taken in his writing, and to tell the truth, I am not so sure myself.

I still want to write that enraged, breathless letter to the editors of the Believer and its general theme would be as follows: Who the fuck is Stephen Elliot to tell me what Palestinians do not understand, and what role it is that they have to play in the solution, and God, I don't even know how to address the idea that the magnitude of Israel's use of force is distracting me from understanding the effect of fear on Israel's people when Israel killed nearly two thousand people in a month and left enough unexploded ordinance in Lebanon to ensure decades of misery to come.

I want to write these things, and as I wrote earlier, the reactive person in me wants to ignore the legitimate points Stephen made in his article. There are quite a few, though they are not new. I've heard this sort of perspective often from journalogue-tourists who have no personal link to the conflict, and they are correct: clinging to concepts like the Right of Return is, indeed, a recipe for self-defeat just as Stephen observes. The homes are gone, the villages buried, the people who lived in them dead but for a few. But it wasn't always that way. Even twenty years ago, it was a tenable position, the only just way to resolve the conflict. From 1948, when it would have only taken a few months and a half dozen boats and trains and compassion and communication to solve that problem, the Palestinian people were denied the return to their homes and told that it was an unsupportable idea, that it was not realistic. In the subsequent years, as they waited for someone, somewhere who had the power to do something about such things to get moving, their homes were bulldozed, their villages buried.

Still later, as the young adults, teens and children driven from that place grew to adulthood and had their own children in exile, they were taught them about their real home, and implanted their own longing to return to the place that they belonged. Cactus and pine were planted over the turned earth that covered those villages, then Israeli housing tracts placed over them. The oldest Palestinian's who could still be called refugees died waiting. As their children grew old, forgot those dreams, became bitter, the Israeli communities that had been placed over the dead villages were abandoned then bulldozed, replaced by big box stores, factories, and, in one case, at the site of the massacre of Deir Yassin, a holocaust museum. The children, grand children and great grand children of the refugees have become a new sort of entity without a legal definition to call their own—not citizens of any land, nor residents, nor refugees, nor displaced people, nor exiles. Unjustly treated by all actors in this drama, they wait for some kind of justice to be done, but the longing, the inherited anger at the wrong, have been passed from generation to generation and it is the only thing that they own.

Stephen's analysis is accurate. The Right of Return is decrepit and toothless and the rhetoric of it being the foundation for a just end to the conflict, arthritic—no Palestinian alive can even imagine what such a return would look like, how it would be undertaken, it is beyond even dreaming. But that does not mean the Right of Return granted, would not have settled the conflict a dozen years ago. It cannot now, it is not now possible to give Palestinians a just settlement. Israel has missed one opportunity after the other to do adhere to the rule of law, or at the least, to give Palestinians justice. That time is past and granting Palestinians the Right of Return would be like repatriating descendants of African slaves as compensation for everything that was lost to slavery.

This being said, I am now more able to calmly point to the legitimate problem with the perspective adopted by Stephen. Firstly, he mischaracterizes Palestine's government as somehow legitimate; it may be the only thing Palestinians have but it is hardly a real government. It was created to suit the security and political needs of Israel in 1991 and its leadership populated with PLO insiders. If the Palestinian people had elected a legislature full of nuns, nobel prize winners and baby Pandas instead of Hamas activists, Israel would still find a way to ignore its legitimacy to avoid ending the conflict. Secondly, Stephen gives the impression by his "balance of fear" description that Palestinian missile barrages against Israel's northern communities were an institutionalized part of the conflict. The practice is only a few years old and has been largely ineffective--by design. It is meant to only cause fear, and the heavy barrages that accompanied Israel's wanton destruction of life and property during the recent period was unique and unsustainable. Israel has invaded Lebanon and Palestine countless times and in this latest invasion of Lebanon used Cluster Bombs, a weapon so cruel and inhuman that it makes any suicide attack by Palestinians against Israeli civilians appear humane by comparison. These bombs, which rain bomblets over wide areas kill and maim horribly, literally slicing people to ribbons. The unexploded bomblets can cripple and maim for years to come--there is no Palestinian or Lebanese moral equivalent in this regard.

In general, however, Stephen describes Palestine quite accurately. Indeed, almost every comparison of life in Palestine and Israel is represented with sickening vitality. So it is unbelievable that Stephen can still judge Palestinian actions and prescribe solutions, as if there is some parity in the situation, as if Palestinians have power to negotiate with Israel for anything but the right to bring the garbage to the curb, when everything he has described shows a Palestinian people at the abject mercy of an Israeli military and political juggernaut. This may be the reason why Stephen is so puzzled by Palestinian political perceptions and behavior. There is not a generation of Palestinians who have ever successfully appealed for justice from the rule of law; no Palestinian adult in the Occupied Territories has ever known a representative government, or even an indiginous tyranny. By denying Palestinians access to a legitimate juridical process designed to account to their grievances, Israel has taught Palestinians that it really doesn't matter what they do. What use would it do to honor previous committments, as Stephen suggests, when Israel dictated those commitments instead of negotiating them with a government that was in its most generous description, at the service of Israel and the US. What good would it do to Palestine to live up to its agreements with Israel? For nearly a decade while the corrupt and ineffectual Fatah led government moved heaven and earth to please every Israeli political whim, Israel doubled its population of settlers in the very areas it was supposed to give back to Palestinians at the end of the autonomous period. What neutral arbitrating body can Palestinians turn to when the International Court condemned Israel's wall as illegal and Israel kept on buildng it anyway, seizing land and displacing more people along the way, with the full support of the conflict's honest broker, the US. More to the point, what difference does it make if Palestinians under occupation recognize Israel when Israel does not recognize Palestine? It makes as much sense to follow Stephen's recommendations, as it does to lob a missile at Israel, as it does to lob a hundred, as it does to burn down an Orthodox Christian church in retaliation to an offensive pope. The net effect is the same. And it is sad and a little hard to believe that Stephen somehow missed the deeper meaning of the things he saw, and that now the readers of the Believer, a not especially politically knowledgeable bunch from my experience, will come away with this lopsided, ahistorical view of the situation.

But again, it doesn't really matter. Had I written an angry letter, instead of this more measured response, had I gotten it published and made pro-Palestinian converts of all The Believer's readers, it would not change much. The conflict would continue, writers would still travel to Palestine to retrieve narrative journalist travelogues designed to trigger a polemical response and all the while nothing will change for Palestinians, whether I get angry or not.

Celeste Victoria

I posted the little piece below up on a website that claimed to be a memorial for those who died in the World Trade Center. A few minutes after posting, I noticed that it was little more than a right-wing propaganda site. I hate this world. In any case, I'm glad I put it out there and decided to post it here as a way of counteracting its presence in neo-con cyberspace. I don't know how I'd feel about 9/11 if Celeste hadn't died there. I know that for many months afterward, while I was in the P-Place, and after the initial shock and finding out that my closest circle were ok, I began to feel satisfied in some way that someone had finally given the US a come-uppance. And so, the news of Celeste's death many months later was a shock that I still can't really come to terms with. Reading these words, I sound incredibly selfish. Apparently, what I am saying is that I would've revelled in vengeful glee--and did for a time--had it not been for the fact that someone I knew was on the top floors of that building when it was hit. I can only say in my defense, that over a thousand Palestinians had been killed by then, while Americans tuned out the news to watch Survivor. Its a fucked up world, there doesn't seem to be a wrong or right, everything is a mess of cascading victimization and brutality. I hadn't even realized it was September 11th today, until a crass announcement from the conductor on BART this morning inisting that we have a moment of silence for the "heroes and victims" of 9/11. This bothered me for a lot of reasons; for one, everyone ignored it. As I emerged at the station, the request came over the PA again. The loudest contingent of people blowing the idea off was a group of a dozen BART cops, out en force to protect America's transit riders, laughing their asses off at some dumb joke. So much for the heroes. Second, who was this guy, who was BART, who was George W. Freakin Bush, to ask me to have a moment of silence at their discretion? Lastly, over a thousand Lebanese were murdered just a few weeks ago by American made weapons. And of the most soulless kind--cluster bombs that explode a few feet from the ground tearing people into ribbons, maiming, and leaving thousands of bomblets to blow the fingers and eyes from the bodies of unsuspecting children days, months and even years later. Whereas 9/11 took only a day's worth of fury and murder on the part of those involved, the US and Israel for over a month, coldly and soullessly contemplated and calculated the destruction of every single dwelling and the massacres at every population center. There are no moments of silence for these victims of the war on terror. There have never been. Anyway, I don't mean these words to take anything away from the feelings I had this morning when I wrote the tribute to Celeste. Tribute and memorial are words I hesitate to use, polluted as they are with opportunism and false emotion these days, but I guess wrote this in the spirit of commemorating the person she was and the impact she had in my life. I hope that somehow her daughter, Jasmine, one day reads this, and understands where I'm coming from and also appreciates what I wrote, because I thought that her mother was a very special woman. The two of them had a great impact on my life.

***

I worked with Celeste for three years at Manhattan Neighborhood Network. We trained together and got the new station up and running, working a brutal 11 hour shift on Saturdays where we were the only employees in the building. Together, we ran a facility with two 3-Camera Studios, 6 editing suites and a lot of challenging would-be television producers. Celeste was a vibrant, beautiful woman, funny and energetic. We had arguments as all co-workers must, but mostly I only have great memories of her. That period of my life was an exceptionally concentrated one for my growth and she was a big character in that play; our crew at MNN was like an extended family, all brothers and sisters, who fought a lot and laughed alot and shared the madness of cable access. We were involved in a media experiment in which the lunatics were in charge of the asylum--anyone who could last through the orientation and training could have their own program, watched by nearly 40,000 Manhattanites. We, ordinary folks with not much education or training, oversaw a functioning television studio that broadcast 24 hours of programming seven days a week. We were all in awe of it in a certain way, and also aware at how often ridiculous it all was.

I loved watching Celeste with her daughter--one of the smartest people I've ever met. Seeing them together always made me feel that the world was not such a horrible place. That people really did love their children, that they wanted the best for them, and would struggle to help them be the best person they could be. And I loved going to parties with Celeste. As a single mother, it didn't seem like she got out much, so when she partied, she partied, and we always had a good time watching her enjoy the moment. She was such a great mother--I've really never seen anything like the relationship she had with Jasmine. I wasn't in NYC on 9/11, I was actually in my father's homeland in Palestine when it happpened and I didn't find out that Celeste had died until I came back the next year in March. I regret that I wasn't able to go to the funeral and pay my respects, to make her life and death real, to mourn, to share her life with the people who cared about her. Its a screwed up world. I drifted from most of the people I knew. I felt more and more alienated from my friends the longer I was in Palestine. So I didn't find out what had happened to her until long after the fact. Celeste had gotten into a marketing job at a big corporation and they had rented out the Windows of the World on the morning of September 11. It still strikes me as a ridiculous coincidence that she happened to be there on that morning. She deserved several decades more of life, to see her beautiful daughter become a woman, and to come into her full as a professional and a human being. I don't think there's a day that goes by that I don't think of Celeste because I think of that time often in my life. I guess because I was in such an extreme place myself, and I found out so much later, her death has never seemed real to me. I still think that I see her walking down the street sometimes. Anyway, I'm sending out good wishes to Jasmine, who was always one of my favorite people in New York. I hope she has the wonderful, happy life that she deserves.

What We Mean When We Say I'll Kill You

Many people think of California as some sort of liberal beacon of enlightenment, and the San Francisco Bay Area as the beacon for the beacon, but I am here to tell you to abandon such notions. Yesterday morning, I was drinking a coffee and reading the paper in front of Peet's in the Grand Lake neighborhood of Oakland--an area known for its great ethnic diversity and forward thinking people. Ok, there's a Gap across the street, but in all fairness, no one gives a shit about sweat shop labor anymore. As a testament to the progressive spirit of the neighborhood, a window or two down from the Gap, you'll find Arizmendi, the worker owned and operated collective bakery pulling down money hand over fist because they make Vegan bundt cakes and cheeseless pizza. Around the corner, the Grand Lake Theatre thrives despite its 3 plex limitations and very vocal progressive and anti-Bush messages posted on the Marquee.

Reading the paper, as I said, I was angry. I've said that alot lately, there is no other way to describe this feeling. Daily, during situations like this, when there is no PR campaign, such as the one in Iraq, to convince Americans that we are bombing the Lebanese and Palestinians for their own good, I can read a dozen articles that make it very clear that I and my family will always be slightly less important than real people. No one is trying to persuade us that the bombing will liberate the brave, democracy-hungry people of Gaza and Balbek--what would be the point? No one needs to be convinced here that its ok to kill Lebanese and Palestinians. Israel has bombed Lebanon about every half-decade or so in this way, and rarely a peep has been heard about brave A-rabs struggling against adversity.

There were a few people hanging around in front of the place. There's a long bench in front of the coffee shop that gets alot of use. Residents like to mill about and exchange pulse-pounding tales about how they secured their low mortgatge rates and whatever. One of these types, who I had noticed earlier because of the very obnoxious way he wielded his very obnoxious dog as a conversational aid, excitedly boasted "we're pounding them!" At first, I assumed he was talking about football or something. I don't follow sports. But after another few minutes, I realized that he was describing the Israeli attack when his companion mentioned with some amount of glee that the Lebanese civilians hiding Hezbollah missiles in their apartments were now getting their come uppance.

"That's bullshit!" I yelled. One of his friends, perhaps, thinking he was mediating, said, "Well, it is true. It was in the LA Times." He was a more thoughtful advocate of slaughter, having expressed existential worry of some kind or another about the conflict spilling into our democracy spreading adventure in Iraq if it dragged on too long. What did the LA Times have to say about Saadam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, I asked. His friend responded "Where are they hiding them then?".

There is a point where words fail to convey meaning. I did not want to talk to them, nor did I want to convince them, to tell them the truth about Israel, Lebanon and Palestine. That it was Israel's occupation of both Lebanon and Palestine that created Hezbollah and Hamas in the first place. That people have a right to resist occupation, even if their occupier is Israel. How preposterous it was to think that Lebanese civilians were hiding missiles in their apartments and how even more preposterous it would be to use this as a pretext for wholesale bombing of communities if it were true. But I did not want to convey such obvious truths nor persuade these armchair murderers in the hopes that they might also one day advocate peace through justice in the Middle East. To be honest, I don't want these guys on my team. What I really wanted to say was that I am going to kill you, but I wanted to say it with my fists. For a moment, I imagined leaping at the guy who started the conversation and beating him until his blood drenched my knuckles. I had to leave quickly. I would have done it.

I simply yelled "I hate you people!" as I left. I'm still not sure what I meant. Who are these people, anway? Are they indeed representative of Americans as a whole? Or did I just strike a Zionist vein in the steppes Oakland? Are Americans, on the median, this bloodthirsty and so banally evil, and if not, if it is only a few, than aren't we who know better, as bad for not stopping them? At this point, I'm not sure I ever knew and I'm not sure I care anymore. But if there happen to really be terrorists plotting against America, and if they ever get smart and start blowing up places like the Gap, and they blow up this one the next time these guys are passing by on their way to applaud genocide over their French Roast and morning buns, I would feel nothing but a great joy.

We're All Friends at the Traffic Court Line Up

A few days after my 37th birthday this year I was given a ticket for running a red light on a bicycle. This happened in Berkeley and it was my first experience with a South Asian cop. I didn't think there were any to be honest, but now I know better, and I also know that they differ little from the homegrown variety. I didn't know it was a moving violation to run a red light on a bike, either, I also know better now. I expected it to be a symbolic sum, perhaps 100 dollars at the most, but when I received the notice in the mail, I was somewhat surprised to find it at almost 400 bucks.

Being a poor person, this meant that I had to find a way out of paying the ticket by appearing in person before the judge, who is not actually called a judge in the traffic violation world, but a commissioner, I was to discover. I rescheduled my arraignment for two months later than its original May date. I did not yet know it was an arraignment. Many years ago, when I was a teenager, a trusted adult mentor told me that if I was ever ticketed, to reschedule. More likely than not, he opined, the cop would not bother to come in and the case would be dismissed. Either he was wrong, or I misunderstood, but that is not the way things work.

Firstly, you must arrive at the courthouse at 7 am, one full hour and a half before the courthouse opens, because they only take the first 50 cases, and if you arrive even a half hour later, you'll miss your chance. When I got there, I recognized one of my fellow traffic violators as someone I had worked with at a temp assignment, which, in strange twist had begun a day after I received the ticket months earlier. We began to chit-chat. There was no line as yet and everyone was waiting around lazily in their own fifedoms around the closed courthouse. A non-descript white guy in his twenties arrived with a little fold out stool and set it up in front of the doors just next to us, his back turned to the rest. He was muttering something about how he must seem crazy to everyone there, which he did due to the muttering, but that was revealed to be only a conversation he was having with someone else through one of those cellular phone borg units embedded in his ear. His pushy attitude prompted a heated exchange with another violator, a Jamaican guy, but after a shout or two they both realized that they knew one another from a couple of days earlier, when neither had known how particular the court was about its max 50 limit, and both had been turned away as number 51 and 52 respectively. The debate encouraged everyone to line up, which all agreed to be a good thing ten minutes or so later when about 60 additional violators all showed up at once.

I was third in line, behind the guy I knew vaguely from my previous job, who was behind the obnoxious white guy. Just behind me was an incredibly hot black woman, a white woman and a guy who was unidentifiable, but I assumed was Latino. I usually don't make so much of race, or I do, but not in my writing. But I find it to be of interest here. My acquaintance asked me what I did and I told him about the book I'm writing, with its liminal characters caught in the post-millenial transnational era of the double 00's in Ramallah and Manhattan. I was trying to keep an eye on the hot woman, who had moved to the edge of my peripheral vision. I’ve been pretty bold lately, and I was considering trying to get her number. A few minutes later, the unidentifiable guy asked me about an Arabic tatoo that I had, which prompted him to tell me that he was a Mizrahi Israeli with an Iranian father and an Iraqi mother. I told him that I had been in Palestine in 2000, which he tried to work with, to his credit, but ultimately found to be a conversation stopper. The black woman seemed to look away uncomfortably and I returned to my conversation with this companion that I did not really know. The other woman revealed herself to be a South American Jew from Ecuador and the black woman, the South American woman and the Mizrahi dove hungrily into a conversation about Israel's latest invasion of Lebanon. Which is really what this is all about.

Just yesterday I was walking around downtown San Francisco on a lunch break from a mind-numbing temp job. I had been entering the names of board members of a rather big and disgusting corporation that I am not at legal liberty to divulge the name of, because my employment was contingent on signing a confidentiality agreement. It was as tedious and depressing as anyone might imagine but it didn’t bother me as much as it might have because I was too upset at what was going on in the world to notice. For the last few years, after I arrived from Palestine, and after all the health problems I've had, I've focused on the day, on the hour, on getting the most I could out of life–to this end I've written my book and spent the remaining time trying to freelance enough money to survive, looking for laughs and trying to get laid. I knew that if I ever focused too strongly again on political issues concerning the Middle East, the unquenchable rage within me would be set free again, and it almost destroyed what little life I had left when I returned from Ramallah in 2002. I’d had no choice but to ignore the build up to the Iraq invasion and then to ignore the war and the occupation, who knows what I would have done to damage my life and the lives of those around me if I hadn’t. I've flirted with politics since then, but only for brief moments of writing this blog, holding my breath as if diving for a ring and then coming back up for air.

But this has been different. I am angry. I am literally vibrating at a rate so fast that I appear to be standing still but at my core, a molecular chain reaction is waiting to be triggered. I surveyed the San Francisco lunch time foot traffic, people laughing, shopping, talking about television shows and iPods. This is a nation at war, and this is the face of the nation at war, a nation that does not care who wins today's battle or yesterday's; does not want to be bothered with the news of the dead, neither ours nor theirs; does not care if the war lasts one more year, or twenty.What would it take for Americans to live the war that they claim to be fighting? Yesterday, I considered all the acts I might take against this place to make life uncomfortable; not that I am capable of much, but I could at least stop the traffic from time to time, sow hassle and confusion. I found that each idea required a greater committment than I was prepared to make. It was not that I was scared to do them, it was only that I knew that once I did there was no turning back and I would never have the normal life that I had promised myself to one day have as a pay off for my health problems and all that I gave up in my useless stay in Palestine. I knew that this moment in time requires just such a committment, here, in this place. But I didn''t want to be the one who made it. And I returned, defeated, to the little cubicle and the meaningless data entry which I am sworn to keep secret.

Back at the courthouse, the white guy turned around, rudely butting into the conversation behind me, and scoffing at the others for being too liberal--presumably for even trying to divine Hezbollah's rationale and wondering if Israel’s response might be a tad harsh. I’m Israeli, the Mizrahi said, as a qualifier for the explanation he was about to give. But he never got the chance, for the white guy said, I am too, so what. Another guy got into it from the back of the line. I tried to ignore the conversation, my acquaintance tried to help me. But I felt that if it went any further, I would explode and not with words. And I finally blurted out that we were all waiting to deal with traffic tickets, and this was the last place to have an ethnic and political melee. There was a slight pause, and a bit of laughter, but it didn't stop there, and a few minutes later I raised my voice and announced that I wanted everyone to stop, that the conversation was making me uncomfortable. That seemed to work, though pretty awkwardly and a few minutes later, we entered the courthouse. People remarked at how the metal detector was even more stringent than at the airport. We took out our keys, buzzed, took off our belts, buzzed, buzzed again and then took off our shoes, and hobbled in our socks to the courtroom with our arms full of our sundries and shoes so that we wouldn't lose our place in line. I got seperated from the little clatch I'd been party to, and watched them further on down the line as they talked about other things. The black woman remarked that when she had been ticketed the officer had asked her to remove all weapons from her person. I tried to get in on the conversation, because with a little more distance, she looked even hotter than before, but there was too many bodies between us. I got into a conversation with the older black guy behind me and he told me that my strategy would not work, for I would have to plead not guilty to get a court date and then I would have to pay the fine as bail in any case, or go to jail. He laughed and shook his head when I told him that I had run the red light on a bicycle.

As we waited on the long bench in front of the courroom the conversation turned away from geopolitics, the white Israeli guy, the Jamaican guy and the older black guy who'd been behind me in line were all sitting next close to me and we talked about the World Cup and Zinedine Zidane's headbutting, and though the Israeli guy commented that the Algerian should be kicked out of France, I let it go with a quick look of disapproval and things veered nicely away from tension and into distracting conversation while we pondered our strategies to reduce the impact that our respective violations would have on our lives. Fight, you gotta fight all the way, the older black man said suddenly. They want you to give up and plead guilty. But you need to go all the way with them. Somehow the conversation went on to pot, then to the three strikes law and everyone had a ridiculous story about that–about the guy serving 50 years for stealing pizza, and the other guy doing life for taking his cousin's written driving test for him. Then we talked about the prison industrial complex and how prisoners were making 10 cents an hour to put together Victoria’s Secret lingerie. Then the Israeli guy remarked that this was a depressing conversation. There was silence for a moment, and then I opened up the paper. The front page must have set off the older black guy, because he said that this was what the government was trying to do. Put Iraqis and Afghanistanis in little courtroom waiting room's like this. This was the democracy we were spreading. The words veered close to poignancy, but ultimately they made no sense and it suddenly struck me as the funniest thing I'd heard anyone say in days and I laughed hard enough to make many people look away uncomfortably.

We were given a stern talk by the bailiff, who lined us up against the wall, and told us that there would be no newspapers allowed in the courtroom, no gum chewing, no hats and no talking. Anyone caught in violation of these rules would be sent home and have to come back tomorrow to start the whole process once again. Not surprisingly, he received an astounding amount of compliance. We were ushered into the courtroom and I sat in silence in the same row next to the South American woman, the acquaintance and the Mizrahi, though now we were prohibited from speaking.

After watching a video that made it clear that there was no escape once caught in the maw of the traffic court, I decided to plead no contest and request community service and was given a staggering 35 hours, a 40 dollar fine and, in a complete non-sequitur, a point on my driving record. I sat down with the bailiff, who was surprisingly friendly, to do my final paperwork and he asked me if he was pronouncing my name correctly, to which I responded that he wasn't and that the J was pronounced as an H. He replied, in surprisingly good Spanish, that he was from Hispaniola, which he clarified, in English, was the island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and smiled widely.

When I left, I was no longer thinking about Lebanon or Palestine, about the American-Lebanese forced to pay a repatriation fee for their evacuation by the US government for the bombing campaign financed by their tax dollars, about the 10 to 1 ratio of Arab-Israeli life-worthiness, about the horrifying inferno of Iraq. And I think, that when they come for us, if they ever come, whoever they may be, justified or not, to make us pay, that I'd say I should get in the line just like everyone else.

Faith in Secularism

Sam Harris' The End of Faith, the New York Times bestseller and PEN non-fiction award winner, has been celebrated by punditry across the board, and even a UK Guardian piece extols readers to read Harris "and wake up". Indeed, who can argue with Harris' broad strokes when they are presented in the first chapter of the book, for his premise is everything we secularists have been brought up to believe in the era of modernity. Theistic religious faith must necessarily position itself against anything it is not, Harris posits, and thus is a singular engine of conflict. So far, so good--what reasonable westerner living in the age of suicide bombings and pro-life militancy could argue with the premise? But thereafter Harris runs into a little bit of trouble--faith, he adds, by definition requires no evidence to motivate extreme action, and thus religious faith has, all by itself and excluding external factors, generated the hundreds of escalating conflicts which plague the world today. In this light, Harris, goes on to deride liberal and religious moderates for apologizing for religious extremism as a product of oppression and poverty. Secular rationalism and adherence to scientific inquiry and advancement and the complete dissolution of religion, he argues, are the only salvation for humankind.

A further reading however reveals that Harris would do well to examine his own faith-based belief system before he gets around to condemning religion for being everything that is wrong with the world today. The idea that scientific inquiry is a never-ending evolution of positively transformative knowledge and understanding with its culmination in absolute knowledge for humans--even though what we already know suggests that we cannot possibly imagine the infinity of everything we are unable to perceive--is one of the least contested columns of the Western belief system. This paradigm has reached a nearly religious apogy as educated, secular Westerners wait for Science to prevent aging, death and disease, to create pharmaceutical methods of generating happiness and develop the capacity to visit other worlds--a literal reinterpretation of a millenalist afterlife.

Harris repeatedly disparages religious doctrine because its adherents cannot prove the basis of their belief, but while most secular Americans believe implicitly in the canon of scientific knowledge, there are few who understand the nature of the knowledge or who could describe it. There are most likely not many individuals outside of the scientific community who can explain the tenets of evolution, but this does not stop secular and educated Americans from believing in it implicitly without ever investigating its underlying proofs. Most Americans do not even realize that the term 'evolution' is a misnomer, which implies a positive and orderly progression in the biological order from less to more complex; the study of natural selection, however, implies all the opposite. There is nothing hidden about this knowledge, but secular westerners choose to believe the more faith-based version and the clerics of science allow them to because it is a more comforting way of thinking about the cruel universe they have postulated. In the same way that adherents rely on religious technicians to interpret the texts of complex and contradictory holy books, so too do secularists rely on scientists to assure them that everything they have said to be true of reality is verifiable--the fact that this reality is constantly being reinterpreted to wipe away previous errors, is ignored, for while the science of yesterday is inherently flawed, today's version is, of course, perfect. Faith in the belief system of Science, the main tenet of which is that anything that science destroys, science can remake once it understands the universe more completely, daily contributes to the erosion of the world's ecosystems, the creation of ever-crueler and inhuman weapons and dangerous genetic and biological manipulation of food. The complete lack of skepticism before the awesome power of science have led to mythologies that not even a 12th century crusader would fall for--that smart technology can fight a bloodless war, that chemical alteration of food can be achieved without harm to humans consuming it, that electronic polling booths cannot be rigged

And though it would be comforting to blame the world's conflict on the fervor generated by faith, religion is a relatively minor player in the field of war. With the backing of the nearly religious sanctity of rationalism and progress, Western societies have been capable of wielding science for the most inhuman brutality in the history of civilizations. In fact, all of the major conflicts of this century have been waged over the very earthly matters of border and land ownership disputes, ethnic affiliations and resource scarcity. The only current conflicts that Harris can point to that are ostensibly religious based are the India-Pakistan tensions and the occupation of Palestine by Israel. The former is not a conflict, however, but a border dispute, and removing the presence of nuclear weapons makes it no more serious or unusual than the many secular border disputes that regularly occur between South American states. And though Harris seems unaware, Israel is militarily occupying the West Bank and Gaza; faith can only be secondary to that reality. But in Harris' two-dimensional world of blissful political ignorance one need only root out religion, and rationalism and progress will make everything alright.

Harris' research also hews closer to a system of belief than rigorous documentation. Harris states quite confidently that "one of the greatest sources of amusement in sixteenth century Paris" was the public torture and killing of cats", demonstrating that religious morality is baseless and often immoral from a rationale standpoint. There is one citation attesting to the history of Parisian cat-cruelty in the notes, but we will never know if this is indeed true for it is impossible to ascertain with any degree of certainty what amuses people even in the current day. While our public venues are rife with staged wrestling events and reality tv, in poll after poll, Americans overwhelmingly claim to hate both. It seems less likely that we will ever know if the immolation of cats really did "amuse" the average Parisian of the 16th century, or if this was merely the opinion of the chronicler of the events based on his own prejudices concerning the people he observed. For Harris, the reality that conventional history itself is often created in much the same way as religious texts is not worthy of examination.

Similarly, Harris does not need to investigate the confluence of suicide bombing with socio-economic-political factors, because his visceral belief is that suicide bombing cannot be justified. Harris conflates suicide bombings in the Palestinian context with the kind predicated by Al Quaeda, which is much like equating shooting someone in self-defense and shooting someone during a crime, based on the fact that a gun was used in both incidents. Harris provides a Pew poll that he claims demonstrates the inherent inhumanity of Islam. The fact that less than 10% of respondents in Arab countries think that suicide bombing could be, under certain circumstances, defensible, is "hideous" proof that Islam by its nature is supportive of terrorism. Harris does not bother to investigate what such circumstances could be. Harris has no qualms about entertaining extenuating circumstances to justify cruel behavior later in the book, when he examines the "ticking bomb" rationale for torture--though no ticking bomb has ever been found in the history of modern torture. Thus to Harris, Islam, unlike every other belief system in the world, must be judged in a vacuum and taken at face value from region to region without the necessity of knowing any of the history or current situation of those involved.

Harris makes no such pronouncements of secular warfare, because of his belief that the civilian deaths so engendered are "accidental by-products" and not, as with suicide-bombing, the "intended targets". Not surprisingly, Harris is more moved by the necessity to curb religious suicide bombing than by the need to stop the secular kind, though the latter has surely represented more deaths of "accidental by-products" in just the past three years than in the half-century old history of suicide-killings of "intended targets". Harris also spends an inordinate amount of time addressing the suicide aspect of the bombings, as if this makes it particularly opposed to rationalism, forgetting of course, that the history of the wars based on rationalism are replete with irrational calls to martyrdom (a la 'give me liberty or give me death' "I regret that I have only one life to give for my country", etc). It goes without saying that secular leaders have been responsible for far more deaths by violence than any religious extremist could hope for.

This fact does not bother Harris for he reveals himself as a pushover when it comes to secular rationalizations for military activity. He quotes the attorney Alan Dershowitz, who presents himself as an expert on Israeli-Palestinian relations in his book The Case for Israel that "no other nation in history faced with comparable challenges has ever adhered to a higher standard of human rights , been more sensitive to the safety of innocent civilians , tried harder to operate under the rule of law, or been willing to take more risks for peace." Obviously, there is no data in this statement, it is the baseless opinion of Dershowitz, who is an American lawyer, not a historian of the conflict. There is no reason to accept the claim on its own merits. It is, however, a similar incantation as those made by Israeli leaders throughout the history of the country's dispossession of the Palestinian people. Israel's national character, in fact, is bound up in the religiosity of this myth that it fights its wars according to some greater moral compass, though various Israeli government documents have indicated that its military and civil forefathers believed otherwise. Even if Dershowitz's claim was as manifest as Harris seems to believe it to be, however, South Africa's previous white-minority government could have easily made a similar claim. Beset on all sides by hateful peoples of another race and culture, white South Africa showed remarkable restraint in responding to this demographic threat. South Africa, in fact, fought its battle according to an even higher moral standard, never directing its military against black rebellions, but instead using its civilian police force according to internationally agreed human rights doctrines of the day governing civilian disturbances. South Africa's oppression of its black majority generated fewer deaths and casualties than Israel's apartheid experiment, but Harris would no doubt lose the ear of many of his adherents if he claimed that black South African acts of "terrorism" were as unjustifiable as he believes suicide bombing and other so-called terrorist activities of the Palestinian battle for self-determination to be.

Interestingly, Harris is silent on the subject of Zionism--it is not mentioned in the book nor does it appear in the index, though it is the basis for the first-world's only theocracy. Harris makes few statements that Judaism is just as indefensible as the other religions he mentions, but his heart is not really in it, for Harris refers to the Occupied Territories as "disputed" even though Israel's only claim to the land is based on the same biblical texts he ridicules. The End of Faith, in fact, outside of a few interesting exercises in logic and philosophy, is little more than an attack on Islam and a defense of Western secularism, itself disturbingly similar to a belief system.

Between The Devil and the Dead Sea

The recent ascension and rebirth of Hamas as not only a political, but institutional force in the Occupied Territorries, has been greeted by many on the left as a positive landmark for many reasons. Western progressives, who would never submit to a dogmatist religeous group in control of their own legislature, approve this situation in Palestine because it is a triumph of democracy and a symbol that Palestinians are taking their fight for self-determination to the source--the cynical peace processes that have instituted corrupt regimes in the territories in lieu of the much easier to identify evil of the Israeli military. While it is a good sign that Palestinians have woken up to the lie of Oslo and realized that super-patriot personalities like Yasser Arafat have bargained away their futures for little in return, the ascension of Hamas can only bring misery. This reality is unveiling itself in the current period, as Hamas and Fatah take their fight to the streets, killing innocent bystanders and sowing chaos in the process.

It should have been obvious to most observers that things would go in this direction. After all, it is the same punditry that have been predicting a Palestinian civil war for nearly a decade which promoted the rise of the Hamas legislature. To think that Hamas, with its own numerous ideological fissures, would be able to make the political transition without resorting to its military wing to enforce its will in the wild west environment of Gaza would be the same kind of naivete that refuses to believe the same of Fatah. One by one, the layers of the argument that the Hamas election was a positive step fall aside, and have become instead, excuses for the Palestinian electoral error. Palestinians, hemmed in by Occupation, by a rigged wheel and by the institutionalized corruption of a government put in place by the very occupier, chose the least objectionable option. But there are other factors with which to use to judge such options. If a person dying of thirst is offered only putrifying, diseased water, should they drink it on the off-chance that they won't get sick? Perhaps, if they cannot wait any longer, if they are at death's door. What difference would it make.

Palestinians, however, are not at death's door. Close, perhaps, maybe even as far as the porch, thanks to years of the world's diaspora and leftist refusal to get involved in internal Palestinian politics. Who are we, pampered first worlders, they argue, to contradict decisions made under the tank tread of Israeli hegemony? It is indeed awkward to suggest to those in worse circumstances than your own what it seems like they should do, based on your perspective from the outside. And yet, because we have not done so, Palestinians, who may not be able to see all of their options exactly because of the conditions they face, have squandered option after option. When it was fashionable to support blind Palestinian faith in Yasser Arafat, the majority of progressives sung his praises, but for a few brave individuals who faced much derision in the bargain. Now we can see that there were other options available in the brief window inadvertantly offered by Oslo. There were groups and movements with platforms who sought to address not only the occupation, but the decay of Palestinian society because of it. But noone wanted to talk about such things. Thus from the ill-fated beginning of the Oslo process to its end in 2000, the official response from the world's progressives was, 'support the Palestinian people by supporting the Palestinian Authority'. These calls for support grew even more fervent after the beginning of the Intifada and amounted to the Left's only prescription to end the violence; a return to the same negotiations, with the same corrupt and useless negotiators, that led to the violence in the first place. With progressives behind him, for two years Arafat did not even address his own people concerning the missiles and bullets of the Israeli army killing them. For anyone who lived in the territories during that period, the silence was deafening. Bypassing his constituency, Arafat armed all Palestinian actors in an attempt to ride the Intifada, though it should have been obvious he would never control it--that no one was in control--and that it could never break Israel in the short term. And then he died, without having the foresight of preparing a successor or arrangements for succession. The Western Left has retreated from blind allegiance to the PA--Abbas is no Arafat--and reverted to the easy condemnations of Israel, that leave Palestinian actions unexamined.

There was a time when Palestinians had options. They might have boycotted the entire Oslo political process, bringing to bear popular pressure to make it a less one-side affair. The new Intifada, could have been characterized by ingenioius strategies and bold political manouevers, but no one expected anything from Palestinians but visceral reactions. And because so much of Palestinian initiatives succeed or fail on the strength of their ability to captivate the western imagination, Palestinians, perhaps, felt they had no choice but to oblige the world public's hunger for burning tires and kufiyah-swathed rebels. Progressives have gone on to canonize the many young men and women who lost their lives in the useless violence that followed. It is almost as if progressives prefer it when Palestinians throw their lives away slinging stones against tanks, armored only in knock-off jeans and flip-flops, polluting their own streets and air with burning tires, for this makes for much better graphics for books and posters about Palestinian resolve than less visually impactive methods. In the current period, Palestinians are also lauded when they support backwards extremists with only the most marginal strategic insight, because it delights young dissident's sense of rebellion against the status quo. Voting for Fateh was never an option, of course, but neither, realisitically is voting for Hamas. Western progressives should have encouraged Palestinians in the territories to boycott the elections, to be vocal about demanding a real democratic process conceived in a Palestine free of the concrete and asphalt manifestations of Israeli apartheid, no matter what their so-called leaders advocated.

It makes no difference to western progressives. We'll still go out for drinks on Friday night, and meet at our coffee klatch political organizing meetings and furrow our brows about all the problems in the world before we change the subject to how disappointing the new episode of Lost was. Now, car bombs and gun battles are becoming the norm on the Palestininan streets. You won't hear a peep from the Left about it because it has nothing to do with Israel, though Israel is the only party benefitting, as they now claim that the Palestinian government is too fragmented and mired in violence to offer a negotiating partner--a cynical and self-serving claim that has become impossible to dispute. Palestinians do not have much room to manuever, encircled by the Apartheid Wall and the Israeli military's closures on one side and cynically manipulated 'democratic' governments deformed by military occupation on the other. Without an infusion of creative and strategic energy from the world's progressives, Palestinians will continue along their journey, travelling from the Devil they know to the Devil they don't and back again, and, to appropriate Arafat's euphemism for screwing one's self, 'drinking from the sea in Gaza' in the meantime.

If this situation is to change, then new energy and new ideas must be aggressively brought to bear from interested progressive parties abroad--in the Palestinian diaspora, in '48, in America and Europe. Its not too late, but it requires a decisive shift in the way of thinking about Palestine, from blind support and fetishization of whatever seems most populist in Palestine, to critical support of positive initiatives and outside-the-box thinking. We do not have to risk our lives, of course, but we must risk our leftist credentials by speaking out, even if we are told that we do not understand the discourse, that we are apologists or neo-colonialists, or whatever words the Left's orthodoxy uses to marginalize us. Its become clear that Palestinian methods of resistance have not adapted to Israel's ingenious manipulations and apartheid innovations. Israel has remanufactured its conflict so that it no longer includes Palestinians, who have always been an uncomfortable x-factor. Israel must now only confront time, as the state continues to cantonize Palestine behind peace process smoke screens. Israel's track record shows that it can win this war, but Israel has not arrived at this point alone. Conservatives of the west have for decades offered strategic and material support and innovative ways of thinking about oppressing Palestinians. It is time for progressives to get behind Palestinians in the same way.

Colbert in the White House

Somehow the fact that Stephen Colbert of the Daily Show turned up to the annual White House Press Corps dinner seems to have slipped by most Americans, probably because it happened on a Sunday night and probably because Colbert seems to have torn the President a new a-hole, right to his monkey face and in front of Christ and everybody. You can see the clip here. Colbert was literally 3 feet away from the man, but issued consecutive nailings (and not in the nudge, I'm just ribbing you vein, the tone was angry and vengeful) without hesitance. Many things about this incident are confusing, however. Firstly, I can't imagine that Bush wasn't aware of Colbert and company's anti-Bush stylings. Having watched one of Colbert's post-Iraq invasion clips a few minutes or so ago, there is no doubt that Bush could have been unaware of Colbert's utter contempt for his administration. Furthermore, I can't imagine that Bush doesn't have complete mastery over what does and does not happen at this annual celebration of unabashed sycophancy, where he is always the uncontested headliner (remember that shameless 'where are the WMD's' routine) So, of course, the question must be asked; how the hell did Colbert get booked for what has always been little more than a complete homage to the good-naturedness of the commander in chief? What at first seems like an awesome victory for progressives, Bush critics and fans of funny people, must be reevaluated in this light (but it should be noted that the mainstream media--who were all there, hello--mostly ignored Colbert's participation, focusing on a rather uninspired routine by Bush). There seem to be a few possibilities here:

1. I have heard more than a few people aver that Colbert presented Bush handlers with an approvable version of his monologue and then switched at the last minute. This seems possible, in which case, its nice to imagine the sinking feeling felt by Bush at commentary about his blatant mendacity and rigid theocratic view of the world. Especially, grating to him thus, must have been the Rocky bit, where Bush is Rocky and Apollo Creed, is "everything else in the world". Or his comment that Bush believes "the same thing on Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened on Tuesday." Or Colbert correcting the metaphor for cabinet changes from "switching deckchairs on the Titanic" to "switching deckchairs on the Hindenburg" . And his bits about W.'s wife bordered on (gratifyingly) offensive. If this version of events is true, God bless this man. Unlike other hollywood types and entertainers who talk a good game on their off-hours, but change nothing about their behavior, their lifestyle, or the vehicles they star in, Colbert and his crew on the Daily Show, continue to take bold and principled risks with their careers. They have almost single-handedly kept dissidence in reach of the average disempowered every-(wo)man, who for nearly two generations have been waiting for vocal heroes with access to the airwaves to speak out their frustrations and their intolerance for any more bullshit.

2. Bush knew exactly what Colbert was up to. And, it follows, that Colbert knew that Bush knew. In that case, there is nothing here to celebrate or note. Colbert is advancing his career, Bush is shoring up another one of the weaknesses identified by his detractors, that he is close-minded and insulates himself with uninspired yes-men. In that light, the casting of Colbert is a logical progression in similar reshuffling that brought a Fox talking head supposedly critical of the President to the position of Press Secretary. If this is true, then Bush certainly looked like the better man, sitting there and taking it with a polite grimace and even congratulating the comedian after his brutal pounding.


In any case, of course, it changes little. Its not like what people think really matters. I mean, no one really thinks that people voted for this sucker to begin with, right?

The Tell Tale Heart

As more and more details of Dick Cheney's recent hunting incident come to light it becomes clear that the ever-facile Dick has been anything but forthright about the incident. That, you expect. What's really shocking and frightening is the seamless way that others have stepped in to lie for him. It may be understandably difficult to turn down a man responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people when he asks you for a solid, but you'd think a hospital administrator might have a little more backbone. With Cheney's victim still in intensive care, Christus Spohn Memorial Hospital Vice President Paul Banko seemed to be oddly non-plussed about the incident. Though Harry Whittington, Cheney's victim, was in an intensive care ward, Banko chipperly offered that, "It was like he was spending time with me in my living room". And even after Cheney's official you-gotta-laugh-version of events began to unravel when Whittington's injuries caused him to have a heart attack, Banko maintained the no-big-whup defense, claiming that Whittington "still kind of wonders what all the hoopla's about". Katharine Armstrong, Cheney's extremely well-connected hunting host, portrayed a similarly carefreee shooting-victim. While not-so subtly blaming Whittington she shrugged off what turned out to be a life-threatening accident by saying the shot merely "knocked him silly".

Outside the Loony-Tunes universe of the Bush administration, however, others offered less optimistic views based on physics and biology. Physicians interviewed by the Washington Post (2/15/06) suggested it was unlikely that the pellet in question could have travelled from the man's chest to his heart tissue via the bloodstream, as Banko has suggested. It seemed more likely that the pellet was lodged in the heart to begin with, making Banko's commentary appear glaringly sinister in hindsight. Meanwhile, no one seemed to wonder why the vice president of the private company that runs Christus Spoen Hospital was personally taking the role of press liason, when he was neither a spokesperson nor Whittington's attending physician. Banko is merely a financial administrator who has presided over a 1.2 million dollar grant from the Bureau of Veteran's Affairs for the construction of a new wing at Spoen.

Hunting experts and game officials also doo-dooed Armstrong's suggestion that Whittington was at fault because, as she insisted, "The vice president did everything right" when he turned into the setting sun and immediately shot at the first thing in his line of fire. The Texas Wildlife and Parks Commission's hunting safety rules state quite clearly:

Look around and see who or what might be in the line of fire

Avoid shots with obscure backgrounds

Identify your animal from tip (nose) to tail before you shoot. Never shoot at a sound or movement.

What is more disturbing is that Armstrong is the former head of this particular agency and should be in an especially unique position to know that the shooting was clearly the fault of Cheney, not her less politically connected guest.


Clearly, Cheney waited to see if such distortions, along with the comedy stylings of sidekick George W. Bush and Press Dictaphone Scott McClellan, would cause the whole mess to blow over before he actually had to comment on it. And it may have worked, if not for the irregular beating of Whittington's tell-tale heart. As the carefully massaged story came undone, one wonders just what truth lay at its center. As Slate points out (What the Good Ol Boys Are Saying, Paul Burka, 9/15/06) , the tight pattern of pellets in Whittington's wound areas suggests that Cheney may have been much closer than the 30 yards initially claimed and the long hours from the incident to its reporting indicate that clean-up was the priority. Even the actual time and day of the incident may be inaccurate--according to the Washington Post, Whittington referred to the incident as occuring "last Friday", and not Saturday, at the impromptu press conference he gave upon his release from the hospital (Man Shot by Cheney Released From Hospital, Washington Post, 2/17/06). If the results of the flaccid investigation on the part of local law enforcement are any guide, Cheney's actions may have been even more irresponsible and careless than hinted at by the current version of the story, but we will never know the truth; just as we will never know for sure what went on behind the closed doors of the Energy Task Force meetings headed by Cheney in 2000, or in the hours following the impact of the first airplane at the World Trade Center or at the policy-making meetigns in the years preceeding the Bush adminstration's unveiling of the Iraq invasion plan.

So one can only wonder; there are many scenarios to delight the workings of the conspiracy-leaning mind. It's quite possible Cheney was so wasted on ludes, meth, meds, mescaline and Bud Lite that he nearly blew away a member of his own hunting party. Perhaps a man like Cheney might savor the fruits of his position by offing the odd civilian from time to time. And who knows? The extra-dimensional aliens that have secretly been running this country in the guise of evangelical Christians and reality-tv producers may have wanted to test Cheney's loyalty to their ultimate master plan of cross-planar domination. But the truth behind this issue is probably as mundane as that any hunting accident. Cheney the quail-hunter was probably the same kind of morally retarded a-hole as Cheney the Vice-President; careless with the lives of others.

Long Live Sharon

Doubting Muslims, Jews and Christians of the world may now exalt and ululate in their disparate tongues, for the laying low of the wall-eyed ethnic-cleanser known as Ariel Sharon suggests there may yet be a God progressive monotheists can get behind. Indeed, Sharon's fate seems to fit neatly into 'wrath of God' framework in its details; there may be no more a fitting fate for Sharon than to exist in a permanent vegetative state. The Israeli maximalist, who grew fat on a diet of corruption and graft and lived on a ranch built on twice stolen property--stolen first from Palestinians and then from his own people via a little known homesteader law meant to induce low-income Israeli cannon fodder to populate the outer realms of the new apartheid experiment--will now waste away before the eyes of all of his supporters, much like, with any luck, their dreams of a greater Israel built on the ruins of Palestine.

So much for being honest. I am sure that many Israelis feel the same way about their Prime Minister, and his current position at death’s door has not likely altered the opinions of his opponents on the marginalized Israeli left. Sharon was once censured by his own government for participating, as Defense Minister, in the events that led to the slaughter of hundreds—possibly thousands—of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon. At that time, protest crowds of tens of thousands chanted death to his name and public pressure against the invasion of Lebanon and Sharon himself, eventually led to motions for his removal from office, a fate he narrowly avoided by resigning. Indeed, Sharon enjoys no popular mandate; while he was elected in 2001 by 67% of voters, only 60% of the Israeli electorate turned out for the election; essentially, Sharon was supported by less than 40% of Israeli voters. Indeed, the Israeli election of 2001 had the lowest turnout in Israeli voter history, which mirrored the wide-spread disillusionment Israelis felt in their government, where doves and hawks varied only by degrees in their rhetoric and often not at all in their policies. Failed cynical final solutions, billed as peace plans and named after harmless sounding European capitals, have led only to further erosion of Israeli security with the added existential burden of guilt for the increased marginalization of the Palestinian people.

You'd never know any of this if it were left up to the our nation's newspapers. The New York Times couldn't find an Israeli with a negative comment about the man on the day he lapsed into a coma (Sharon in Critical Condition after Suffering "Extensive" Stroke, 1/05/06), though there is significant opposition to his policies and well-known corruption. News of Sharon's imminent indictment for his malfeasant campaign finance shenanigans has also disappeared, though Sharon's son Omri, a former Knesset member, has already been indicted on similar charges in the affair.

Despite Sharon's illegal land grab in the form of the 'security wall', his human rights violations during several offensives in the West Bank and Gaza, his brazen rejection of the US's watered-down 'roadmap' peace proposals and negotiations with his Palestinian Authority counterparts and his outspoken commitment to retaining major West Bank settlements in perpetuity, the Washington Post described Sharon's break-away political party, Kadima, as supportive of 'peace talks with Palestinians' (1/4/05). The Post went a step further by referring to Sharon's so-called Gaza withdrawal and his plan to annex West Bank settlements as "centrist" positions, though the paper admits that the moves were meant "to separate the fast-growing Palestinian population from Israel to ensure that Israel's Jews remain the majority", which would sound a lot like a scheme to institutionalize apartheid if we weren’t talking about the US’s favorite ethnically exclusive nation (1/6/05).

Likewise, the San Francisco Chronicle in a front page 'news analysis' marveled at Sharon's peace "innovations"--the security wall and the Gaza disengagement--both thinly veiled land grabs which, instead of leading to a Palestinian state, can only lead to a morass of discontinuous cantons and the annexation of Israeli settlement areas. The paper acknowledges that Sharon founded the settler movement at the heart of the current conflict and that he also contributed to sparking the current military escalation by entering the Muslim-only Haraam Al Shareef with a contingent of hundreds of gun-toting security officers, but such acts are, apparently, to be ignored when evaluating the lineage of his policies. Viewed as a whole, however, Sharon's legacy does, indeed appear to be that of a clever series of innovations. Sharon's settler movement inserted Israeli citizens into Palestinian areas, recasting Israel’s occupation as a dispute over conflicting claims of sovereignty. The occupation allows Israel to shield its military bases with civilian communities and allows those civilian communities to arm themselves and operate as unaccountable paramilitary terror forces.

Clever provocations of Palestinians, such as Sharon's blatant desecration of the Haraam al Shareef, foment retaliation which justify military operations that have been months or even years in planning--like those implemented since 2000, which have drastically changed the political map of the area. Such military plans, carried out with little substantive opposition from the international community, have laid the ground-work for the ingenious separation fence, which cleverly subsumes key areas of Palestinian land while shifting the battle for Palestinian land rights to a completely new level. Palestinians caught within the seam of the wall are now required to apply for semi-yearly permits simply to continue living in their houses and property; the Palestinian struggle for a just end to the occupation must also include the very immediate battle for those in the 'seam' to remain on their land in six months time. Sharon's latest hat-trick, the Gaza disengagement, while inconveniencing a New York block's worth of settlers, isolates Gaza politically and economically from the West Back and turns it into a perpetual Al Quadified ghetto on which to pin justifications for further unilateral actions.

Should Sharon die, however, it seems unlikely he will be remembered as a ruthless and insidious innovator of Israel's proprietary brand of apartheid by mainstream media. No doubt, he will be eulogized in the obituary pages of our nation's papers of record as a man of peace who made bold sacrifices to negotiate with reluctant Palestinians. Therefore, its better that he linger in coma for a few years, at least to delay the torture of his public canonization as yet another Israeli leader who devoted his life to the pursuit of peace.

Suspect Sources Breed Tales of Mayhem

This article appeared as a sidebar in the November/December issue of Extra!

With a dearth of reliable information coming out of flood-ravaged New Orleans, many unsubstantiated accounts of violence and mayhem surged through mainstream media outlets in the first days of the crisis. As the waters receded, some of the sources for these stories seemed as slippery as the post-flood slime that covered the city.

Peggy Hoffman, executive director of the assisted-living facility Bethany Home, for example, claimed in an Associated Press article (8/31/05) that the facility’s evacuation vehicle had been hijacked and its food and water stores looted in the first days of the disaster. Hoffman stated that “we had enough food for 10 days. . . . Now we’ll have to equip our department heads with guns and teach them how to shoot.” (The article misidentified the nursing home as the Covenant Home.) The AP article, in one version or another, was picked up by dozens of dailies throughout the country, including the Chicago Tribune (9/1/05) and USA Today (8/31/05) and broadcast news websites such as ABC (8/31/05), CBS (8/31/05) and Fox News (8/31/05); it was posted or referred to on numerous other websites and blogs, including the white supremacist website DavidDuke.com (9/1/05).

Hoffman’s account was the “looting” shot heard ’round the world, igniting the media frenzy for accounts of violent looting and chaos in the streets. That Hoffman had done so much to provoke these scare stories was forgotten, it seems, when she entered the news again two weeks later in a different Katrina-related context: The New York Times (9/15/05) revealed the nursing home she managed was under scrutiny because “nine of her home’s 49 patients died after she chose not to move them despite the mayor’s mandatory evacuation order.” Her story that put the blame for the nursing home’s troubles on carjackers and looters was not reprised—or re-examined—in light of the subsequent revelation.

In another story that helped portray post-hurricane New Orleans as an orgy of violence, New Orleans SWAT team commander Jeff Winn told the New York Times (9/11/05) of officers who “had to storm the [Convention Center] every night” due to “armed groups of men [who] terrorized the others. . . . A number of women had been dragged off by groups of men and gang-raped. . . . Murders were occurring.” According to the article, Winn’s men responded to “muzzle flashes” by “rushing toward them and searching with flashlights for anyone with a gun.”

Winn contended that no suspects were apprehended during the actions due to a lack of detention facilities: “We’d take them into another hall and hope they didn’t make it back.” The story took another form when Police Chief Eddie Compass seemed to include himself in the action in an interview with the Connecticut Post (9/20/05): “People would be shooting at us, and we couldn’t shoot back because of the families. . . . All we could do is rush toward the flash.”

Though thrilling, there was evidence early on that these accounts of nightly heroic police raids into the Convention Center were exaggerated. On September 3, the New York Times had quoted Emily Baker, a hurricane victim who had taken shelter in the Convention Center, who stated that the police came in one night and “took two white people out of here.” “It was our first time seeing the police here,” she told the paper.

The Washington Post (9/15/05) later reported on the same incident, adding that “a Jefferson Parish police deputy” asked Winn and his team to enter the Convention Center and rescue his wife and another female relative, and that “once it became clear that the SWAT team had come with the single goal of rescuing two white women, anger exploded.” Weeks later, the New Orleans Times-Picayune (9/26/05) was the first to report Winn’s admission that “his unit saw muzzle flashes and heard gunshots only one time. Despite aggressively frisking a number of suspects, the team recovered no weapons. His unit never found anyone who had been shot.”
As the New York Times noted, it was difficult to obtain reliable facts in a city without electricity or phone service, but there are no such excuses now. Corporate media would do well to follow up on the sources behind the sensational stories that created the impression of a New Orleans more under siege than under water.

A Hurricane Insurgency

A version of this article appears in the November/December issue of Extra! Magazine

By September 1, residents of flood-ravaged New Orleans had been trapped for nearly 72 hours in a city with little shelter, food, drinkable water or dry clothing. As much as 80 percent of the city was under water as the Federal Emergency Management Agency seemed unable to respond to the situation. Police and first-responders abandoned their posts, while the National Guard’s efforts were sapped by forces and equipment deployed to Iraq. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer summed up the crisis in the opener to his daily news show, The Situation Room:

Its just after 3 pm in New Orleans, where thousands of people, tens of thousands of people, want to get out right now. They want to get out of the city, but they can't. The flood waters are there, and there are deadly conditions, including snipers.

Blitzer reiterated this concern about violence throughout the broadcast:

People with guns are opening fire, including on ambulances leaving hospitals...there are still many, many people who are stranded, they can't get out of their homes, they can't walk anyplace, A, because its too flooded; B, because its disease-ridden, many of those waters; and C, because its very ugly and violent in many parts of New Orleans.

Preoccupied with broadcasting the bounty of rumors emerging from New Orleans, Blitzer and most corporate news purveyors seemed unable to fulfill one of their primary roles in reporting on the Katrina disaster—that of verifying claims made by sources, whether officials or ordinary people. Responsible, skeptical reporters might have erred on the side of caution, anticipating that a different image of the flooded city would likely emerge once evacuation and rescue procedures finally proceeded.

Indeed, weeks later, the Los Angeles Times (9/27/05) noted that follow-up reporting had discredited most of the wilder reports, including those of pedophilic rape, murder at the Superdome and “roving bands of armed gang members attacking the helpless.” The New Orleans Times-Picayune (9/26/05), in a story headlined “Rumors of Deaths Greatly Exaggerated,” found an official count of only four violent deaths citywide for the entire flood period—a figure it noted was “typical in a city that anticipated more than 200 homicides this year.”

Similarly, Knight Ridder’s wire service (10/2/05) debunked the seminal stories of sniping at rescue vehicles, reporting that “more than a month later, representatives from the Air Force, Coast Guard, Department of Homeland Security and Louisiana Air National Guard say they have yet to confirm a single incident of gunfire at helicopters.” The article put to rest the ambulance-shooting mythologies propagated by the likes of Blitzer, observing that the account from which they germinated was mischaracterized to begin with; the ambulance driver who claimed he was prevented from dropping supplies off at a hospital because of armed crowds on its roof “never went to the hospital, turning back after hearing a warning over military radio.”

But such documentation was for the future to take care of. CNN and other corporate media had no time to concern themselves with veracity when there were apocalyptic accounts of “looting” to be disseminated, many of them based on New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin’s frantic description of looters “starting to get closer to heavily populated areas” (AP, 9/1/05). Though much of the actual “loot” being commandeered should have made journalists wary of repeating Nagin’s assertions—disposable diapers were prominently visible in frequently replayed footage—many reporters jumped in feet first.

CNN producer Ben Blake (Lou Dobbs Tonight, 8/31/05) proclaimed New Orleans to be “a city in crisis. . . . The downtown area today around Canal Street has become bedlam” because “looting is widespread.” He expressed bafflement that New Orleans police officers were letting “people take all sorts of things, including shoes that fit them. You can’t take shoes that don’t fit you, but you can take shoes that do fit you.” Blake did not seem to understand why, in a city under as much as 20 feet of heavily contaminated water, dry shoes and clean clothing in general might be considered necessities.

USA Today (9/2/05) similarly reported the opinion of a resident of one of the city’s affluent communities without counterpoint, as she described the stealing of dry shoes as “absurd looting. Shoe boxes are all over the street and old shoes that people had discarded after they’d stolen the new ones.” Unbelievably, the article was headlined, “‘The Looters, They’re Like Cockroaches.’”

Some notable journalistic exceptions, such as ABC’s World News Tonight (9/2/05), did accurately depict the actions of New Orleans residents as desperate attempts to procure food, water and clothing in the absence of federal and local aid. Most mainstream media accounts, however, exaggerated and mischaracterized “looting,” conflating a legally justifiable search for necessities with wanton violence, and giving their new creation of “looting and violence” a prominent role in reports on the dangers of the disaster.

Looting/violence became the reason why “police officers are walking off the job,” and the excuse for New Orleans police who could not or would not help other residents because “they can’t help people who are shooting at them.” (CNN Newsnight, 9/2/05). CNN’s Kitty Pilgrim warned (9/1/05): “Residents choosing to stay in New Orleans tonight are playing a dangerous game with their lives. In the city tonight, there’s looting and lawlessness.”

The Washington Post (9/1/05) reported that “the city grew more desperate as thousands fled on foot, hundreds of residents clambered onto rooftops to escape floodwaters, and looters plundered abandoned stores for food, liquor and guns”—the looters being placed on par with the flood itself as a cause of desperation (and people searching for food being conflated with those seeking alcohol or weapons).

Smoke billowing from a pair of buildings behind him while a split screen showed a convoy of military vehicles rolling across a bridge, Fox News correspondent Steve Harrigan (9/2/05) reported that New Orleans looked like the “Wild West”: “We’ve got guys riding around in pick-ups with automatics drawn.” Harrigan was apparently referring to the police, the only such “guys” visible in the footage. Harrigan, noting the fire in the background, did not attribute it to an act of arson, but this did not stop Fox’s Phil Keating (9/3/05) from characterizing it in exactly that way as he stood before the smoldering buildings and declared that the fire was set “perhaps for no other reason but just for the joy of arson. . . . Clearly it’s a sick joy.”

On September 2, Fox’s David Asman breathlessly reported “a tense standoff in St. Bernard’s Parish, where some 50 to 100 firefighters and their family members are being held hostage. And the situation is that snipers are on the outside of the building. . . . The details are sketchy.” So sketchy that the report was not revisited after that broadcast, nor was it corroborated by any other news source. Regardless, Asman used the fabricated incident as a springboard for claiming “the violence and the looting continues” and labeling New Orleans “a city where looting, murder and rape reign.”

With “looting, murder and rape” posited as one of the gravest dimensions of the disaster, it was not very surprising that mainstream media would emphasize the policing and combat roles of U.S. armed forces and the National Guard, rather than the much more crucial humanitarian assistance they had been deployed to provide. Fox’s David Lee Miller (9/2/05) boasted that the National Guard and other armed forces, arriving days after the humanitarian crisis had reached critical levels, were “highly proficient in the use of lethal force.” Almost as an afterthought, Miller added that troops were also bringing “badly needed supplies.”

Fox’s Rick Leventhal (9/3/05) mentioned a “Marine buddy of mine who I was with in Iraq. . . . So anybody who was wondering where the Marines are, well, the Marines are on their way to New Orleans.” Leventhal lamented, however, that “they are not at this point tasked to put down lawlessness in New Orleans,” but instead would carry out the somehow less important task of “bringing humanitarian relief to people who need it in the New Orleans area . . . though [they] do have, many of them, war experience. A lot of them served in Iraq, these Marines. And they are bringing that experience to the streets of New Orleans.”

During a Today show appearance (NBC, 9/5/05), this characterization of the military as an invading force on a mission to quell a virtual insurgency seemed to catch off guard the National Guard’s Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré—who was under the impression, perhaps, that he might be asked questions pertaining to the Guard’s given role in humanitarian relief. When the show’s Matt Lauer asked Honoré, “What are the rules of engagement for troops in New Orleans dealing with armed people?” Honoré could only respond that “we use the rule of engagement in foreign countries and in desperate situations. . . . In an operation like this, we have rules of self-defense. . . . This is not a city under siege, by no means.”

Still, Lauer pressed the invasion angle: “So in other words, unless they’re threatened, they are not to take aggressive actions.” It remained unclear the kinds of aggressive actions Lauer imagined the National Guard would undertake against American citizens in need of food, water and clothing.

CNN seemed especially intent on riding the wave of military fetishism, its bread and butter for over a decade of U.S.-sponsored conflicts. On Paula Zahn Now (9/14/05), guest Jon Healy of the Los Angeles Times referred to the National Guard’s humanitarian arrival as a “display of force” (9/2/05), while Anderson Cooper (9/14/05) mused, “It always interests me that in any kind of conflict zone, no matter where it is in the world, some people step up and become heroes, and some people . . . become desperate and become monsters.”

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer (Situation Room, 9/2/05) excitedly announced, “eight convoys and troops are on the ground at last in a place being described as a lawless, deadly war zone.” Blitzer also introduced correspondents reporting from New Orleans as if they were covering a conflict; “Nic Robertson is normally overseas covering major wars and other disasters. . . . And another one of our veteran foreign correspondents, war correspondents, Karl Penhaul.” Penhaul proceeded to use war lingo to describe the New Orleans situation, referring to police officers airlifted out of the city as “the last men standing at the University of New Orleans campus,” and calling looters “marauders.”

Not to be outdone, CNN’s Deborah Feyerick (9/4/05) extracted several military references from a ride-along with Wendell Shingler, a Department of Homeland Security official who called New Orleans a “war zone” and a “theater of operations,” comparing the evacuation of the city to “the evacuation of Vietnam after the war.” Standing in the muck-lined post-flood streets of the 7th Ward neighborhood, CNN correspondent Jeff Koinange asked (Situation Room, 9/13/05), “It looks like I’m in the middle of a war zone, doesn’t it?” Actually, the scene much more resembled a city recently drained of floodwaters, including the “speed boat . . . right in the middle of a dry street,” a sight rarely associated with urban warfare.

Fox joined in the war-reporting game, with Juliet Huddy (9/2/05) referring to correspondent Rick Leventhal as being “on the front lines of a hot spot right here in our own backyard,” while Bill O’Reilly (9/2/05) introduced “our primo war correspondent” Steve Harrigan.

Ann Scott Tyson of the Washington Post (9/6/05) wrote in this genre as well, with her “Troops Back from Iraq Find Another War Zone” setting an ominous scene: “Just the smell and feel of a war zone in the city put the soldiers on edge.” The article, subtitled “In New Orleans, ‘It’s Like Baghdad on a Bad Day,’” featured young Guard soldiers boasting, “If we’re out on the streets, we’ll fight back and shoot until we kill them”—though the worst first-hand example of the “violence and looting” that “shocked” the Guard protagonists of Tyson’s article was the sight of “70-year-old women in new Nike high-tops.”

As the floodwaters receded, corporate media were faced with reporting the unsensational reality that New Orleans had been devastated, not by violent looting and murderous mobs, but by a flood and by the ensuing incompetence of local, state and federal authorities that failed to provide humanitarian aid to the largely black and poor city.

As the Washington Post observed days after the hysteria began to die down (9/15/05), National Guard troops were surprised to encounter “virtually no violence” at the Convention Center made infamous by countless unsubstantiated media reports of raped babies and wanton murder. Likewise, on the streets, correspondents such as Nic Robertson (CNN Daybreak, 9/5/05) seemed almost disappointed that “I haven’t been asked to wear a bullet-proof vest” by authorities. While there had been some violence, and looting that could only have been motivated by profit, there were apparently no raping/murdering/looting gangs, nor was there any substantial devastation wrought by violence and looting.

This realization led to absurd exchanges such as this one between Blitzer and correspondent Robertson reporting from New Orleans’ Canal Street (Situation Room, 9/5/05), which offered a perfect critique of the media’s role in the disaster.

Blitzer: What about those shops, those stores, the restaurant behind you, along those streets? Are most of them--have most of them been looted?

Robertson: They haven't, that's the very surprising thing.

A-Holes in the News 10/10/05

Ron Dellums, Honorary A-Hole
I don't usually put lefties on the A-Hole list but,
hey, buddy, do you mind taking this mayor shit
seriously? I know its only Oakland, and all, but
come on now. Dellums recently responded to a
request from the 8 thousand white people who
live in Oakland to run for mayor and didn't bother
to put any time into thinking about the idea until
he got on the podium of the event they sponsored
for him. Dellums then riffed on what his
mayorship would look like, apparently never having
considered the idea seriously until he hit the buffet
table a few minutes earlier. Sure, he's progressive,
but the guy hasn't lived in Oakland, or even
California in a decade. Maybe God will put the words
and thoughts in his head come debate time, like J.C.
But honestly, is the idea of a Latino mayor in Oakland
that horrifying? Are there no other progressives
in the East Bay, California or even Nevada? Couldn't
they at least find somebody who wanted the freakin job?

Fiction Holds on at the Atlantic Monthly

A version of this article appears in Dissident Voice on line magazine

Recently, editors at the Atlantic Monthly announced that fiction would no longer be a regular feature in its pages. AM's editors billed the changed as a question of “real estate” or as "777 North Washington Street", the monthly letter from the editors, explained; more space is now required for long-form narrative journalism, because “the deeper features of the world requires a different and more expansive kind of reporting." (May 2005).

A few pages later in the same issue, ironically, the magazine’s literary editor Bernard Schwarz hints at the quality this "expansive" journalism will take, in his opinion piece "Will Israel Live to be 100", an ode to the mythology of parity in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the complex manouevers of logic necessary to maintain it. Schwarz, for example, states that both Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas, his Palestinian counterpart, are 'hard-liners' because “the Israeli prime minister connived in the massacre of Palestinian refugees and the Palestinian president wrote a dissertation denying the Holocaust”. Thus, Schwarz places mass murder on equal footing with holocaust denial, a formulation which works well within the parameters of pro-Israeli discourse. Schwarz, does not stop there in his efforts to skew a false balance for the lop-sided Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To Schwarz, Israeli moderates are those, who like Sharon, violate international law by attempting to create a Palestinian entity “composed of detached cantons”; Palestinian moderates are those who are ‘spurred’ by this naked act of imperialism to enter into Israeli-dictated negotiations. In any case, the title of the piece loudly broadcasts the editorial board’s sentiments—the question is not whether there will be a fair resolution to Israel’s domination of Palestinian territories, but whether the hero of the narrative, Israel, can survive the demographic and political problems it has created for itself while politically and economically marginalizing another people.

This inherent bias seeps into the magazine’s journalistic narratives to such a degree that one can scarcely take the editors at their word when they claim to have done away with fiction in favor of ‘deeper more expansive reporting’—fiction continues to hold a special place in AM’s journalistic narratives concerning Palestinians, as it has for some time. In 2003, for example, James Fallows wove a tale alleging that Mohammed Al Durra, an 8 year old whose death at the hands of the Israeli military galvanized world opinion against Israel in the first days of the Intifada, could not have been killed by Israelis (Who Shot Mohammed Al Durra, Atlantic Monthly, June 2003). Fallows bases his assertion on a study by Nahum Shahaf, conducted nearly two years earlier and largely dismissed by the Israeli press, public and even the Israeli military, as a hopelessly flawed and transparent public relations stunt. Fallows resurrects the Shahaf study based on additional “research” done by “a variety of academics, ex-soldiers and Web-loggers” that indicate a similar conclusion. The findings of these academics, ex-soldiers and Web-loggers never actually appeared in the article, for reasons not fully explained, leaving the entire theory resting shakily on the work of Shahaf. This was not Shahaf’s first foray into a forensic field in which he has no formal training; he had already created a dubious reputation for himself as a conspiracy theorist when he claimed he had proof, which he refused to present, that Yitzahk Rabin was murdered by officials in the Israeli government—a pertinent fact that Fallows did not mention in his article. Fallows states that Shahaf approached the study objectively and solely out of “curiosity” and that he sought to “isolate himself from any kind of political question.” But Yosef Duriel, Shahaf's partner in the study, had insisted in Ha’aretz that the Israeli military should have “released a categorically formulated statement saying that provocateurs opened fire against IDF soldiers, behind the back of a child, and made sure he would be killed in front of cameras; and after the boy, they killed the ambulance driver who tried to save him”.

None of these facts prevent Fallows from proclaiming confidently that Al Durra’s killing now lay “in the uncomfortable realm of events that cannot be fully explained.” There is, however, no mystery concerning the death of Mohammed Al Durra except in the minds of a few like Shahaf, and, of course, the ‘webloggers and academics’ that Fallows mentioned but never summoned to testify. The Israeli military has taken responsibility for the death, and still does, and Al Durra was only one of over thirty children under the age of 18, who were killed during Israeli military maneuvers in the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem in the first month of the Intifada under similar circumstances, according to the Palestine Red Crescent Society. By the time of the writing of Fallows’ article, this number had reached 391, and at the time of this writing, it is nearing 700, and shows no signg of slowing. Fallows feels compelled to present this evidence because the Al Durra case bears similarities to “two explosions in Baghdad markets in the first weeks of the [Iraq] war….Even as US officials cautioned that it would take more time and study to determine whether US or Iraqi ordnance had caused the blasts, the Arab media denounced the brutality that created these new martyrs.” Both Shahaf and his interlocutor, Fallows, might find it difficult to root for the home team if such grotesqueries were true and so the Israeli and American heroes of this narrative must be given the opportunity to disprove that their bullets and bombs kill people should the act be captured on film or videotape.

Another narrative in the same issue, “The Logic of Suicide Terrorism” (AM, June 2003), by Rand Corporation director Bruce Hoffman claimed that “two [Palestinian] suicide bombers were the sons of millionaires”. Though there is no historical record of Hoffman’s millionaire suicide bombers, this same phrase appears in a New Yorker article from November 2001 by Nasra Hassan, who conducted extensive interviews with would-be suicide bombers who, for various reasons, did not carry out attacks. Hassan never named the “millionaire” bombers, or interviewed them in the article—this one phrase is the only reference to them. Hassan found that many of her interlocutors had come from families more affluent than she expected—a point that Hoffman makes on the road to asserting that poverty plays no role in suicide terrorism—but more significantly, Hassan found that “more than half of them were refugees from what is now Israel.” Hoffman ignores this portion of Hassan’s research, because it does not fit the parameters of his narrative, which, while it ostensibly seeks to crib for the US Israel’s numerous strategies to deter suicide bombings, ignores the one most likely to get results—a just end to the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, perhaps because it would imply a simlar solution for the United States regarding its behavior in Middle Eastern countries

But the work of Fallows and Hoffman cannot compare to the exhaustingly biased, inaccurate quasi-fictional narrative “How Arafat Destroyed Palestine” (Atlantic Monthly, September 2005), by David Samuels. The article is little more than a 31 page primer on how to ignore the proverbial 800 pound gorilla, in which Samuels rarely wavers from hammering his eponymous assertion, even if it means manipulating and bridging quotes with his own opinions, and, most importantly, ignoring the very obvious impact of the Israeli government and military on the putative destruction. Indeed, Samuel’s main goal, seems not so much providing proof of Arafat’s inept kleptocracy, robustly documented by the world’s press for over a decade, but like the work of Hoffman and Fallows, erasing Israel from the equation of the region’s current woes and placing the entire onus of responsibility on a non-western villain. Arafat, Samuel’s anti-hero of choice, is made to look the part with Dickensian characterizations sometimes so far out of left field they can hardly be seriously addressed. “His [Arafat’s] lips flapped when he spoke” states Samuels, which some people “found irredeemably comic.” He was “clownish”, he had a “distended belly” which must have been catching because his inner-circle was a “pot-bellied retinue”; there are, in fact, three references to protruding Palestinian abdomens in the article, which would probably be a record if anyone was keeping tabs on such things. Physical characterizations are inherent to the so-called narrative journalism that Hoffman, Fallows and now Samuels, engage in at AM. When used judiciously, and when the underlying reporting is sound, the added impact brought by narratives can provide a layer of depth often missing from the blandness of straight daily news. But as Jesse Sunenblick noted recently in the May/June issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, there is difficulty in “resisting the very real pressures on journalists to follow established narratives, to ignore inconvenient wrinkles in pursuit of powerful tales of good and evil.”

In this particular instance, Samuels seems to have lost to those pressures, to the detriment of the Atlantic’s readership. In his pursuit of a tale of good and evil, Samuels maintains two standards, one for Arafat and Palestinians, accompanied by derision, disapproval and ridicule, and another for Israelis, who are held somehow above the fray and whose assertions are taken as fact and actions rarely editorialized. Samuels mocks Palestinians, for example, who believe that Arafat may have been poisoned by Israelis, claiming that for gullible and conspiracy-minded Palestinians, only the idea of Arafat's death from natural causes was 'deemed too far fetched to entertain’.

But the notion seems less far-fetched when viewed in the context of Israel’s history with both assassination and the usage of advanced toxins. In 1997, Israel attempted the assassination of a member of Hamas' political wing, Khaled Mish’al, with a specially designed poison delivered with a handhold spray device by Israeli nationals using falsified Canadian passports. A report from Amnesty International October 8, 1997, states, 'They [the Israelis] reportedly injected him with a poison which would have given the impression that he had died of an illness.'

While Samuels ridicules the theory, held by some Palestinians, that Arafat may have been poisoned by a team of cyclists and other foreign nationals who visited him in solidarity in the muqataa in 2003, just four months before Arafat’s death, Mossad agents were apprehended in New Zealand attempting to obtain the passport of a tetraplegic New Zealand citizen (Guardian Unlimited, 7/16/04).

This is not to say that there is any proof of an Israeli attempt to assassinate Arafat, but it is a theory certainly more attached to the factual world, given Israel's record, than Samuel’s own about the Palestinian leader’s demise, which he presents with no irony or shame later in the piece. Latching on to the word ‘immunity’, spoken by Arafat loyalist, Munib al Masri in relation to the deterioration of Arafat’s health, Samuels makes a truly incredible leap of logic to imply that the Palestinian Authority chairman may have died from AIDS. The only proof Samuels offers is the fact that ‘immunity’ is a term often used in reference to AIDS—a truly astounding conclusion which he bolsters with a barnacled rumor concerning Arafat’s ambigous sexual preferences. Such ideas are not too far fetched to entertain when they support Samuels’ preferred conspiracy theory.

Indeed, when Samuels wants to make a point via the use of an interview with a Palestinian subject, he bypasses his interlocutor completely, asking the question and answering it himself with decontextualized phrases from the response. In his interview with Tawfiq Tirawi, director of the General Intelligence Service under Arafat, Samuels claims, without citation, that Tirawi “provided the professional planning and staff required to launch terror attacks that killed hundreds of Israeli civilians.” This is a strictly Israeli government assertion, based on documents the Israeli Defense Forces claim they seized during their military operation in 2002 which have not been independently authenticated by other sources. Tirawi himself disputes these charges, so it is not surprising that Samuels never follows up after declaring them fact at the beginning of his interview. There are other things on Samuels mind, his obsession with Palestinian fitness, for one, as he describes Tirawi as ‘potbellied’—one would think by now that a flat stomach was somehow intrinsically linked to good governance. Samuels who again asserts that Arafat was “responsible” for starting the Intifada, purports to catch Tirawi lying about it. “When I press him further,” Samuels writes, “he says that there was in fact a decision to launch a war against the Israelis.” But the content of the reply that follows does not in any way support Samuels claim. According to Tirawi, organized armed activities that involved Arafat, were begun, “after tens of Palestinians were killed by the Israeli army….there was not any use of weapons at the beginning of the intifada. Only after—even after a hundred Palestinians were killed, there was not one bullet….after that there was a decision. But only after a hundred Palestinians were killed.” Aside from some hyperbole, this is a generally accurate description of the events beginning on September 28, 2000, according to both the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs website and the Palestine Red Crescent Society. Israeli forces, in fact, killed 140 Palestinians within the first 30 days of the Intifada, according to the PRCS. While there was armed violence against the Israeli military, it was sporadic, spontaneous and uncoordinated during this same time, killing 9 Israelis, according to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs website, hardly the “decision to launch a war” characterized by Samuels. Coordinated attacks which indeed may have been launched or aided by the Palestinian Authority, or elements within it, did not begin until November, with a string of killings of Israeli soldiers and settlers within the Palestinian territories.


Samuels who hardly lets a paragraph pass without mentioning the corruption of Arafat's regime, seems disinterested in following the money once it reaches the Green Line. He notes, for example, the prominent role of an Israeli, Yossi Ginnossar, revealed by the Israeli daily Ma’ariv ( The Ginnosar File, 12/02/02) as one of the linchpins in the embezzlement of a large portion of the PA’s proceeds. Samuels interviews the article’s author, Ben Caspit, who documented that Ginnosar was intimately connected with the Israelis and Americans at the heart of Oslo, so much so that he used his connections with US ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk and Special Envoy Dennis Ross to gain a seat at Camp David when Barak was unable to place him in the Israeli team (although not from lack of trying). Caspit’s article, however, goes much further toward implicating Israeli leaders and their cronies in PA corruption, to such an early period and great extent, that it seems likely that Israeli leaders enabled and facilitated the corruption for their own personal and political gain. Caspit notes that Ginnosar has historically relied on legal representation from Avi Pelosoff, who is married to Dalia Rabin-Pelosof, the daughter of Yitzahk Rabin, and until 2002 was Israel’s deputy Defense Minister. Ariel Sharon endured a great deal of embarrassment in the Israeli media when, as he was bombing Palestinian targets and assassinating Palestinian political leaders, his son Omri Sharon and his attorney Dov Weinglass were discovered meeting secretly in Austria with Ginnosar and his PA counterpart in a scheme to open a casino in Jericho, which would also serve as a money laundering device for Arafat and his cronies (The Ginnosar File, Ma’ariv, 12/02/02). Raviv Drucker, a journalist for Israeli Channel 10, claims in his recently published, Boomerang, that Sharon hurriedly designed his Gaza disengagement plan with the aid of Weinglass and pushed it through as quickly as possible, in order to avoid imminent indictment in one of two investigations into his fiscal impropriety (Corruption Can’t Wait, Shragai Nadav, Haaretz, 6/22/05). Indeed, Sharon’s son, Omri Sharon, an Israeli Knesset member, was recently indicted for his involvement in one of those alleged cases of corruption (Omri Sharon Indicted, Faces Jail Time, Arutz Shiva, 6/27/05). Moreover, Sharon’s plans for Gaza—another go at a casino in a former settlement area, this time in partnership with Cyril Cohen, who was at the heart of one of the investigations—have also come under scrutiny, despite the fact that Arafat has been dead for nearly a year. Such corruption would be worth examining, especially now, as Sharon seeks to fortify West Bank settlements by emptying those in Gaza. But Samuels cleanses Israeli actors of less than benevolent motives—‘such corruption was held by all but the most far-out critics of Arafat’s rule to be essential to the Oslo process.’ The accusation is reserved solely for Arafat and his cronies, and avoids implicating Israeli leaders and their inner circles, who, we are to assume, sacrificed their innate rectitude to placate a Palestinian Authority which wielded much leverage when it came to funneling money into Swiss bank accounts, but little when it came to negotiating a fair settlement for the Palestinian people.

But it is in his depiction of Palestine’s economy when Samuels really goes off the deep end. Samuels states that the Palestinian economy “enjoyed startling high growth rates after 1967, when it passed from Jordanian and Egyptian control into the hands of Israelis.” These growth rates, according to Samuels “stagnated and went backward under Arafat.” It is simply impossible to imagine where Samuels derived this fact. While it may be true that the Palestinian economy, as a function of per capita GDP, did increase for a brief time when Israel integrated it by force into its own in 1967, it was not because Israel developed Palestine’s economic infrastructure. A study on the impact of the intifada on the Palestinian economy (Economic Aspects of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict by, World Institute for Development Economics Research, Fadle M. Naquib), notes that Israel created a structural dependency within the Palestinian economy with arbitrary impediments to growth caused by Israel's complete control over Palestinian trade, law and policy and pathological land and resource confiscation. The study also notes that Palestine’s agricultural base shrank considerably due to an asymmetrical trade scheme that favors the entrance of Israeli goods into the Palestinian market, while making the entry of Palestinian goods into the Israeli market financially prohibitive. The income from VAT tax that Samuels at one point characterizes as a grant from Israel, is actually the product of taxation of Palestinian imports of raw materials, which the Israeli occupation and now Oslo mandate be imported though Israel. This control of what is for all intents Palestinian government income was used as leverage against the Palestinian Authority and populace. Taxes also accrued to the state of Israel on work performed by Palestinian workers within Israel, the revenue of which was integrated solely into the Israeli economy and not to the benefit of the one within the territories. In any case, the golden economic age that Samuels imagines existing before Arafat arrived in the territories was reflected in the $1626 Palestinian per capita gross domestic product or about 1/10th that which existed in Israel. The study also noted that the disparity in per capita GDP between the two economies had been increasing steadily for decades and “at the start of the limited self-rule [Oslo] was almost at the level of a quarter century before”, when Jordan and Egypt were still administering the areas. It is not necessary to mention any of these facts to negate Samuels characterization of Palestine’s economic reality, however—it is enough to say that the integration of the Palestinian economy into the Israeli one came through an act of military force, at the cost of thousands of lives and in contravention of international law and has been used since that time as a way of controlling and undermining Palestinian social and economic independence at an obvious benefit for Israel.

It does not take long to get Samuels' point—that the Occupied Territories were somehow better off under occupation than under Arafat. There is little truth to this ridiculous contention, as any objective and knowledgeable observer would note. Despite, the fact, that, as Samuels rightly points out, graft and corruption prevented all but a fraction of the Palestinian Authority budget to benefit the Palestinian people, the Palestinian Authority under Arafat still managed to provide Palestinians with a rudiment of a social infrastructure that they had not known in Israel’s previous three decades of occupation. Under the Palestinian Authority, Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza and even Palestinian Jerusalem (over which the government of Israel claims sovereignty but does not provide adequate social services), for the first time had state sponsored health services, a vaccination program, Palestinian schools using an Arab curriculum, a civilian police force for the protection and not the policing of the Palestinian population, parking and traffic enforcement, a central bureau of statistics, a ministry of health charged with the prevention and control of disease and many of the other characteristics of self-government-- including labor laws, social security, building permits. This is not, unfortunately, a credit to the Palestinian Authority which was indeed undermined by institutionalized corruption and mismanagement, but a significant critique of the social and economic impact of the Israeli occupation on the people of the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem.

Certainly Samuels was faced with a daunting challenge in the writing of his article, for he had to construct his narrative around the titular assertion that one Palestinian man was responsible for the destruction of a geopolitical region over which Israel has had paramount control for nearly 40 years, and that this destruction occurred while Israel militarily occupied 60% of the territory in the West Bank and Gaza, surrounded the rest with troops and bases and controlled completely the country’ foreign trade, policy and jurisprudence. Such a confining plot naturally dictates that Samuels remove reference to Israel’s political, military and economic machinations and its own copious corruption. By doing so, Samuels blinds himself and his readers to the narrative agency inherent on all sides of the conflict. Israel’s attacks have been waged against the Palestinian people, not Arafat. The Intifada has been fought in good part against Israel’s attempts to force a unilateral settlement to the conflict through Oslo’s one-sided process, but much of it has also been directed against Arafat, against his inner circle and against the Palestinian Authority, a device rightly recognized as a creation of Oslo. The intifada has not continued for five years because it was controlled by Arafat; indeed, Arafat demonstrated at several junctures that though he could sometimes influence the course of events, he could not shut off resistance activities when it suited his needs. And even within the Intifada there has been a struggle to determine the course of struggle—along progressive and popular lines or regressive and insular ones. In this narrative, Arafat was only one character, among many.

Big in Iraq

Many believe that a just war enobles nations--those just wars for liberation and independence or against oppression, the kind that supporters of the occupation of Iraq tend to liken to their current misadventure. If there was any doubt that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was not that kind of war, then pop media, which so accuately seems to mirror our American soul, demonstrates that it has not been. David Goyer, screenwriter of the upcoming Batman, for example, made this astonishing pronouncement about the impact of the US invasion of Iraq on his latest project in Entertainment Weekly (4/29/05).

I remember when I was writing, we were invading Iraq. And I was sitting on Chris' porch [with] The New York Times. And on the front pages there's a photograph just above the fold of this Marine in Fallujah and a bunch of Iraqi children around him. And one of the kids, who couldn't have been more than 2, had no pants and a filthy, bloody T-shirt. A Batman T-shirt. I pointed to the photo and I said to Chris, 'This is how big Batman is. This is what we've taken on here [emphasis added].'

In the same issue of the magazine, Ridley Scott worries that the war in Iraq might get in the way of box-office for his latest homage to imperialist western regimes, Kingdom of Heaven, saying "I hope it doesn't distract from the movie."

Good god, we're freakin screwed!

The Few, the Proud, the Hyphenated

Anyone who enjoys this blog--all two of you--may be interested in knowing that I am having a banner month in the periodical industry, with an article in March's Extra! Magazine "False Images, Lost Context: Nightline Misremembers Arafat and a letter published in April's Harper's, The Thin Green Line. I would have said that the latter was kind of an honor for a dumb little self-educated writer from the hillbilly flatlands of San Leandro until I read the letter that followed mine--a zionist screed lacking literary form or intellectual substance. Oh well, at least my name came first in the table of contents. If you want to read a more in-depth version of my letter, and I really mean more in-depth, then scroll down and look for "Saving Israel from Itself...and Reality" by yours truly.

The Next Logical Step for John Negroponte

John Negroponte has literally built his career on a large mountain of counter-insurgency, state-coup, murder, havoc and misery in the Carribean and Latin American. He literally invented the Central American death squad, had a hand in Iran-Contra and played a significant role in the outster of Haiti's first democratically elected President--twice. Having fucked up that geopolitical arena beyond hope of resolution, it is only logical that he turn his burning eye toward the Middle East as Bush's new 'Intelligence Czar'. Read this for more info by a smarter person with more time and better resources

Cheating: Muslim and Capitalist Perspectives

The last page of the New York Times magazine normally carries a short slice of life article, often about a white person's adventures (or misadventures) in some exotic land. One particular article "Travels with Omar" (1/30/05), is worth noting and not just because this happens to also be my name. It seems a perfect example of the particular cluelessness of the New York Times Magazine, the writers of which often find themselves remarking dryly on the humurous and immoral eccentricities of colorful yokels from the world's backwaters but seldom turn that investigative eye toward the central mores and attitudes of the West.

Jeffrey Taylor (a traveloguer by trade) , the author of this particular treatise complains of his experience being cheated by an impoverished muslim during his travels in Africa due to the "a priori notion not supported by the Koran but nonetheless widespread in many Muslim countries: namely that lying to an infidel was somehow pardonable". Again and again, Taylor tries to reason with Omar, his guide and porter, to be honest about his business dealings; and Omar agrees, only to lie to him again, to the disappointment of our white american hero, who cannot instill western values, such as capitalist honesty, into Omar via this transaction. Perhaps if Taylor had introduced a contract into the deal, such as those provided by American credit card companies, banks, savings and loans, online companies, car manufacturer's, employers, and the US Federal government, Omar would have seen more clearly that a better way to cheat people is to bury the truth in legalese that the ordinary consumer could not hope to decipher without financially prohibitive legal aid. This method works on both infidels and believers and is completely legal in America and also, thus, condoned by God.

Last Monday, for example, this Omar bounced a check for 50 dollars. I won't lie--I'm not only poor, I'm bad with money. With 60 dollars in the bank and the check out there, I took the chance that weekend that the check would not clear until Wednesday payday and withdrew the 60 bucks via ATM. The check cleared on Monday. Since, as I was later informed, transactions on the weekend are not counted until the next business day, they applied the 33 dollar fee to my 60 dollar balance, giving me a retroactive balance of 27 dollars when I withdrew the 60 dollars on Saturday. Incredibly, this meant that I also received an insufficient funds fee for the 60 dollar withdrawal. Two bounced check fees, for one bounced check. I find it interesting that BoA processed the check before it processed my ATM transaction, when there would have only been one fee if they had processed the transactions in reverse order; being a bank, I'm sure they don't pay attention to such things. I probably signed something that acknowledged their right to do this when I opened the account--along with God knows what other machiavellian cash-generating schemes their supercomputers from Space have developed.

Indeed, my obvious ignorance of fee-charging activities must have tripped some sucker-sensitive alarm, because in the past week alone, along with my official notice of insufficient funds, I have received half a dozen offers from BoA to try one of their new financial services. These range from health insurance supplements to credit card check services, all charged monthly and wired to one's checking account, with the accompanying fees charged should you be late with the bills, giving the banking behemoth even more opportunities to extract $33 from one's supine checking account. The most unbelievable of these offers, however, was for those with bad credit, such as myself, to acquire a BoA "security card" Visa. The large fonts of the mailer sing the praises of this card-- which requires only a $99 deposit but provides a credit limit of $500.00--and suggests that you can build a good credit history with its consistent use. Digging through the envelope, I finally found the shocking fee and term information, in normal sized print and in stark black and white; an APR of 16.24% compared to the average 12%--subject to change according to the prime rate generated by the Fed. Though the rate will oscillate ever upwards, it will most likely never lower if past history is any guide, for the Fed reduced the prime rate 11 times in 2002, but not one major credit card company followed suit. The card also charges $1.50 for each purchase, increases the APR to 21.24% for cash advances and applies a penalty APR of a staggering 29.24% if you're twice late with a payment. This latter fact means that the entire debt is suddenly calculated at 30% if you have a couple of bad months within any 12 month period. Add to this late payment fees of $35 and you get the idea that BoA sees folks like me as cash cows that have not yet had their udders fully connected to the milking machine.

The credit card offered to me is only a slightly more extreme version of those offered by instituitions like BoA to normal credit-worthy citizens. About 60% of Americans have one, succumbing to brilliant marketing ploys that make not having one seem an indicator of unsavory character. After 9/11, in fact, Visa ran ads that made shopping with a credit card seem like nothing less than a patriotic duty. Credit is an alpha-business because it operates outside the normal confines of the economy--when times are bad, people rely on their credit cards to tie up the loose ends and when times are good, people use their credit cards to celebrate. The members of this credit-nation, each carry, on average, a revolving debt of about $10,000, servicing about 1,500 a year on the balance in interest alone. But it is not only the interest which interests credit companies--they're making a good deal of money from late fees, which in 2000, accounted for about 25% of their total profits. Late fees make you less able to pay off the entire debt, leaving more of it to accumulate interest, making it more likely that you will end up incurring late fees; a beautiful matrix of control to which Americans gladly submit for the dubious convenience of not having to budget their money.

Lying Muslims like my African namesake, will never enjoy the fruit of such a business model, however, and will have to be content with finding other ways to hustle suckers--for loaning at interest is considered immoral by Islam's God. Go figure.

Thus, while Muslims cheat the infidel, Capitalists cheat the financially ignorant; the second half of this equation will probably evoke little outrage from Taylor, who will most likely not phone the credit card company that financed his trip to Africa to insist on the moral imperative of being clear about ballooning interest rates or to make contracts in readable size and in understandable English. Instead, he will, more likely than not, blissfully send his monthly offering to the company, never considering how he has wound up as a life-long debt servicer and captive source of income to a financial abomination, but rueing, instead, the 10 bucks he was swindled out of by a poor African Muslim merchant.

The Great Hariri

I will preface this blog entry with the fact that I do not derive any joy over such acts as the one which took the life of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. That being said, it is truly disgusting to see American officials, most notably George W., Condi and various members of Congress, as well as media outlets like the Wall Street Journal, falling over themselves to paint the man out to be some kind of billionaire saint.

Hariri, who made his fortune in construction during Saudi Arabia's US backed infrastructure boom of the 70's, used his wealth to enter into Lebanese politics (perhaps as the next step in his profit making ventures) through the back door. Hariri's first step was offering former leader Amin Gemayel 30 million dollars to step down as the coutnry's civil war wound down. When that ploy failed, Hariri's Syrian patrons orchestrated the election of a pliant parliament that voted him into office for the first of two seperate terms.

Hariri's first tenure in office literally reads like a primer on government corruption and cronyism--Hariri named the chief financial officer of his company as his Finance Minister, a company lawyer was appointed Justice Minister, his former banker at Merryl Lynch was named the head of the Central Bank. It is no exaggeration to say that the list goes on and on. Hariri, as Prime Minister, founded the Company for the Development and Reconstruction of Beirut's Central District. Hariri was the primary shareholder and as Prime Minister, expropriated the property of the district, compensating the owners with shares in his development company, often at a fraction of the property's true value. It is no secret that Hariri and his backers (many Saudi) made a killing off this business venture. Moreover, Hariri has also been accused of having funded both sides in the civil war in order to be able to reap the profits of rebuilding Beirut.

This is not to say that Hariri spent all of his time enriching himself, cronies, allies and underlings. He also invoked his position to suppress labor struggles, often by brute force, and take control of the state's media for the benefit of his Syrian benefactors. After the death of Hafez Assad, and the succession of his son, Bashir, Hariri fell out of favor with the Syrian government for a time, and then struck an uneasy alliance when he succesfully ran for president again. Hariri continued, however, to run afoul of Syria, whose former elites and friends of Hariri were now out of favor and drew ever closer to an alliance with Lebanese pro-US factions, which has, apparently led to his death. But let's get it straight, Hariri was Syria's man in Lebanon when Syria was at its most strident and authoritarian. It was only recently, as Syria's government moved to the center and began seeking dialogue with both Israel and the US, that Hariri began to have trouble with his former backers. The US is obviously creating the kind of mythology around Hariri that will soon be used to justify some sort of power play in the region, but that doesn't mean that the truth is not easily available and public. Hariri was perhaps one of the most corrupt leaders in Lebanon's history.

It is right to mourn those who die in these violent times, but let's not go crazy.

Pro-Semite

Not long ago, when first I arrived unto this blogosphere, I wrote an article called "Anti-Semantic"--ostensibly a critique of apologists who fear that strong Pro-Palestinian commentary will be construed as Anti-Jewish and thus Anti-Semitic--one of the worse things one can be accused of in the modern western order. I argued that it was impossible for a Palestinian to be "anti-semitic" for Palestinians are semites, by the strictest sense of the word while European Jews (and let's not kid ourselves, that's who we're really talking about when the term is mentioned) not truly being Hebrew, but descended from European Khazar converts to the religion, are not. I include here the definition of semite I provided in that article from Webster's and the Encyclopedia Britannica, the two pillars of occidental know-it-all-ism:

Webster’s:
1 : a member of any of a number of peoples of ancient southwestern Asia including the Akkadians, Phoenicians, Hebrews, and Arabs b : a descendant of these peoples
2 : a member of a modern people speaking a Semitic language

Britannica:
The term came to include Arabs, Akkadians, Canaanites, some Ethiopians, and Aramaen tribes including Hebrews. Semitic tribes migrated from the Arabian Penninsula beginning c. 2500 BC, to the Mediterranean coast, Mesopotamia, and the Nile River delta. In Phoenicia, they became seafarers. In Mesopotomia, they blended with the civilization of Sumer. The Hebrews settled at last with other Semites in Palestine.

Let us note here that the original waves of Jewish immigrants to Palestine up until the state was established in 1948, were European and that Arab Jews were imported only after the establishment of the state to increase Israel's weak Jewish demography. European Jews did not fit the definition of the word Semite at that time, for they were not Hebrews, were not descended from Hebrews and spoke only European languages--Hebrew itself was dead in all but the most academic sense. The only true semites in Palestine at that time--according to the dictionary definition of the word--were the Palestinian Arabs, many of which were driven from their homes and sent into diasporic exile by colonizing Europeans who happened to be Jewish. When the architects of this new state imported thousands of Moroccan Jewish immigrants, they were maltreated by a population, that however Jewish it may have been, was still European in its world view. According to Israeli historian, Amnon Kapeliouk;

Networks of good schools should have set up in the high-density Moroccan areas and industries developed, instead of sending these new arrivals into agriculture, textiles or food, with low salaries and permanent threat of unemployment...the Moroccans were sent miles from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, close to the frontier or into Palestinian towns and villages emptied of their inhabitants. In short, they formed the lowest echelon in the social pyramid, just above Israel’s Palestinian citizens. And their traditional culture, influenced by that of the Arabs, broke down under the impact of the prevailing Ashkenazi culture.

If a practical definition of the word anti-semitic were put in place--one which reflects the fact that the term Semite in every other context refers primarily to Arabs not European Jews--the only anti-semites in Palestine at Israel's birth were the European settlers who established the state, ghettoized Moroccan Jewish Semites and dispossessed Palestinian Muslim and Christian ones. But as someone recently suggested, the point I make is merely a semantic diversion--anti-semite has come to mean anti-Jewish and that is the true cultural meaning of the word, despite its schizoid etymology. Semantics, in part, focuses on the difference between the lexical meaning of a word, that is the dictionary definition, and its referential or structural meaning. After careful consideration I must admit that the word anti-semite has become synonymous with anti-Jewish. The root Semite here has been cleansed of its original meaning. Indeed, many Jewish pundits argue that the hyphenation should now be removed to do away with the natural confusion, marrying the i with the s, so that neither portion of the aggregate can be pulled out and placed into another context.

To add another layer of confusion and complexity to the polemic, the word has undergone yet another mutation since the creation of the Israeli state, so that now those who oppose Israel or Zionism, regardless of their feelings about non-Israeli Jews, can be referred to as anti-semitic. Webster's (2002 edition) definition of anti-semitism now acknowledges the western cultural conflation of the word Jewish with Israeli. The third entry in the Webster's definition of anti-semite defines it as:

3)sympathy for the opponents of Israel.

Just how did a word that for all intents and purposes means Arab get roped into a hyphenated vilification used in today's public sphere almost exclusively against Arab people? The term anti-semite has recent roots--arising from infamous German hate-monger Wilhelm Marr's attempts to shift hatred of Jews from a religious model into a purely biological one in the late 19th century. It was an era of burgeoning hope based on the belief that scientific inquiry would solve all of man's problems, including, Marr believed, the difficulty of defending faith-based bigotry. Such religious prejudice was considered unenlightened at the time, which provoked Marr to justify his hatred of Jews on biological grounds--by erroneously aligning Jews with Semitic peoples. When Marr proudly stepped into history to label himself the world's first anti-semite, there was no confusion as to who he meant and what he was talking about; he hated European Jews, a hatred he justified by conflating them with true Semites, the race-based hatred of which required no justification.

The confused character of the word has survived into the modern day. We know instinctively that an anti-semite does not hate Semites, that is Arabs and other ethnic groups from certain parts of Asia, but Jews of European descent. In the latter half of the twentieth century, the word earned currency and utility in isolating opponents of Israel's colonialist policies in Palestine, but harbored an obvious weakness. There was a much larger group of humans known as Semites who could not be included in this hyphenated term, indeed, must not be.

It has become quite a compelling propaganda tactic to relegate all criticism of Israel, especially when it comes from Arabs, to anti-semitic feelings, thus blurring what would otherwise be a classic example of colonialism and apartheid. Israeli Jews now use a word originally meant to negatively racially classify them against the group whose race provided the basis for that racial classification. Only the absurd nature of the US-fueled conflict in Palestine could produce such an upside-down situation with the accompanying non-sequiturs. For example, one may use the word against Jews who are not Israeli and, indeed have "sympathy for the opponents of the state", which causes a virtual moebius strip of anti-semitism. Rabbi David Weiss, a representative of one such group, Neturei Karta, once told the notorious "opponent" of Israel, Louis Farrakhan that "Zionism is an abomination in the eyes of God". Webster's second entry for the word anti-semitism states:

2) opposition to Zionism.

Incredibly, this makes Rabbi Weiss an anti-semite, and of one of the worst kind since he fits two definitions out of three.

Obviously, the term anti-semite, as it exists today, presents a problem for anyone desiring to enter into the public discourse concerning the legitimacy of Israel and the rights of Palestinians; the terminology warps pro-Palestinian discourse in the eyes of the West and its zealous use by Israelis has rendered it meaningless in regards to Jews who are hated not because they support the dispossession of the Palestinian people (and anyone who supports such activity should prepare themselves to be hated), but because they are simply Jewish.

Therefore, I suggest that Arab activists, speakers, writers, orators and thinkers avoid this situation by being pro-active and using the word Pro-semite in reference to opposition of Israeli policies and Zionism. It is at least a more accurate usage and it would give others the impetus to create terminology that recognizes that Jews are not Semites and have no claim over Palestine, Zionism is not Judaism and Jews are not necessarily Zionists, and Israel is but a state, not the kingdom of god made manifest. Freed, from using an inside-out word invented by a man who hated Jews, a word mutated beyond even its own perverse meaning by injustice and racism, Jews could finally set out to create their own identity as citizens of the world. That, at least, would make sense, even if nothihng else in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict does.

A-HOLES IN THE NEWS 1-27-05

Freedom! (redux)
I've, you know, heard the voices of the people that
will presumably be in a position of responsibility
after these elections said World President and Furtherer
of Freedom, George W. Bush, who doesn't feel the need to wait
for Iraqi democracy to have its say before announcing publically
that the US will maintain troops in Iraq long after this week- end's
festivities. Iraqis, who will brave death and dismemberment
to vote on Sunday, must feel heartened that the outcome is already
being called by the leader of the occupying government.

A-HOLES IN THE NEWS 1/24/05

Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! (chorus)
Many have kicked the storied word when it was down—the founding fathers, Ronald Reagan, Merle Haggard—but none so hard as this born-again goosestepper. Bush mentioned the word freedom 27 times in his 20 minute inaugural speech, apparently unaware that his previous wearing-out of the term as a shorthand for describing invasion and occupation had already greatly reduced it's selling power. Just for the purposes of perpective, George Michael, in his 1990 hit, Freedom! only used it 15 times--and that’s including the funky motown chorus! Interestingly, that song included salient advice that the President has freely embraced "All you have to do, is take these lies and make them truths (yeah, yeah)". So convincing was W. in his inaugural homage to freedom that Bush Sr. had to reassure the international community, in a special press conference two days later, that his son did not intend to conquer the earth.

Little Green Dildos

I'll admit it; I am one of those insufferable gloryhounds who google their name daily, hording each new hit as if it will get their asses on the A- list come the Rapture. I was shocked today, however, to find that an article I published in Extra! magazine and that has barely had time to hit the newstands has already earned me a new hit. Since the article examines Nightline's poor coverage of Yassir Arafat's death last month, I was disappointed, but not surprised, to find the hit coming from Little Green Footballs, a blog undiluted in its anti-Islamic fervor and old-school racism. I am not linking to it--trust me, you'd rather not read it and I don't want to promote this kind of garbage, even with criticism. From what I could gather before nausea overtook me, the site is dedicated to those wishing to vilify detractor's of Bush's Iraq fiasco, encourage the extermination of Muslims and call Ariel Sharon a pussy.

A sampling of reader replies:

-G-D gave the land to the Jewish people, and it is not theirs to give away. The land belongs to G-d and the Jewish people, NO ON ELSE!

-As long as the Arab world and the Palestinians continue to talk out of both sides of their mouths, they will continue to wallow in their own swill.

-Since Israel will be condemned for anything, including harmless fence building, I suggest dropping a cluster bomb on the next jihadi parade. That includes the Reuters cameraman. Every staged media event of terrorists and terror supporters should be met with gunships and bombs.

In my case, the poster, "Who Watches the Watchmen", has this to say:

I was just looking through the February 2005 issue of Extra! The article "False Images, Lost Context: Nightline misremembers Arafat (by Jaime Omar Yassin) has the astounding statement In reality, Arafat had never espoused the destruction of Israle, nor had the PLO charter, as the program implies. The article is not up on their website (http://www.fair.org). I had the mistaken impression that they were a media watchdog outfit, but now I see them for the LLL scum they really are.

Several things strike me as interesting about this reader response which reflect on the website as a whole. Firstly, nowhere does the poster dispute the veracity of the claim. This fits with one of the main characteristics of the site--the liberating idea that race and ideologicaly based hatred, and not factual information, should provide the foundation for criticism. The poster who label's Israel's wall project "harmless fence building" is a good case in point. There are few associated with the building of this wall that think of it as harmless. Even Israeli officials who, in their ideological fervor, consider it a necessity have no illusions about the great hardship caused by the construct for Palestinians caught within its trajectory. Foreign Affairs Law Division Director, Daniel Taub, for example, stated; "We did not want to build this fence. It's ugly, it's expensive – even though its temporary, and it causes genuine hardship to many Palestinians which we must take every measure to ease." And this was at a press conference defending Israel against the International Court's decision that the wall violated basic human rights.

Another, is the seeming belief that it is ok to remove statements from their contexts in order to analyze them. Thus, my fan on the site has left out most of the paragraph that follows in my article, which states:

Instead, the charter's Article 15 had called for "the elimination of Zionism in Palestine"--that is, an end to an officially Jewish state--in favor of a secular state representative of all its inhabitants.

The content of the blog hewes to a similar style. Take for example, a 1/23/05 posting "Ridiculuous Article of the Day". The "ridiculous" article in question, which recounts the alleged mistreatment of an Iraqi detainee at the hands of US military personell, provides full quotes, sources, names and dates, and balances the Iraqi claim with comments from two military spokespeople who deny it. Little Green Footballs makes no attempt to explain to the reader why this article should be considered ridiculous; it is in fact, a textbook example of decent journalism. Instead, we are told that another blog has already dealt with the "absurd piece". The linked blog, however, also fails to provide any valid reason why the account, which we now learn appeared in the Washington Post, should be so easily dismissed. Apparently, we should find this article ridiculous because we hate Arabs, and if that is the case, of course, then nothing more need be said to prove the assertion.

But what is most amazing is this blog offering only hateful ignorance in place of useful knowledge, has ended up on the Washington Post's Best Blogs of 2004 as the winner of the "Best International Category". Now that's freakin scary.

A-HOLES IN THE NEWS 1/10/05

Specialist Charles Graner: Finally, an order I can follow...
"War crimes will be prosecuted. War criminals will be punished.
And it will be no defense to say 'I was just following orders.'
These were George W.'s words on the eve of the Iraqi invasion
but somehow I don't think he was talking about Abu Ghraib
alumni like Charles Graner. While Graner claims he was "just
following orders", noone will admit having given such orders,
so W.'s reasoning is sound, if considered upside down and in
reverse, as is usually the case. Not that such a defense would help
this undisciplined sap anyway. A commanding officer testified
that Graner was quite fond of ignoring orders that were not his
cup of tea. He disregarded commands to cut his hair, wear his
uniform correctly and cease trying to impregnate fellow S/M
afficionado, Lynndie England. But orders to torture?
No problem, dude (I mean sir).

John F. Kerry: Spreading Election Fraud One Nation at a Time...
Nothing, it seems, could have kept John F. Kerry away from taking a stand with fellow Democrats against the Bush team's obvious election shennanigans last week. Oh, except observing a sham election in Palestine, perhaps with the objective of proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that anyone who could have possibly had faith in his candidacy was a schmuck. While more principled senators provided the necessary support for a congressional contest of the Ohio election, Kerry was in Israel, nominally as a Palestinian election observer, mostly as an Israeli propaganda device. Like fellow electoral observer and Dem, Jimmy Carter, Kerry failed to notice that the election took place under military occupation which created copious barriers to candidates not named Abbas and contributed to strikingly low turnout (less than 50% of elegible voters), which apparently, was covered up by last minute voting elegibility changes. 46 electoral officials later resigned claiming that they were forced to let anyone vote regardless of registration--this could mean that many could have voted multiple times. Said Kerry of fledgeling Palestinian democracy: "The security of Israel is the paramount concern".

Bubble Lovah
Apparently unaware that the current recession
is the result of the Tech bubble's speculating excess,
Cheney claims that "young workers who elect
(social security) personal accounts can expect to receive a
far higher rate of return on their money than the current
system could ever afford to pay them." This pearl of wisdom
ought to silence the critics; obviously, anyone who would
question an 18 year old Walmart checker's
capacity for putting together a diverse stock portfolio
is an idiot.

Saving Israel from Itself...and Reality

An abbreviated version of this article appeared in the Letters column of Harper's Magazine, April 2005

The right-wing Israeli-American detente continues to invent machiavellian peace solutions designed to seperate Palestinians from their land, leaving Israel the latter and an as-yet undetermined bantustan state with the former. Most recently, the Israeli-American block has succeeded in righting the wreck of Oslo with the engineered election of Machmoud Abbas, paving the way for another few years of negotiating hat-tricks while Israel continues the settlement land grab it accelerated during Arafat's former tenure, this time with the boost provided by the apartheid wall. The Israeli maximalists (labor and likud included), who seek the largest possible chunk of the West Bank to add to Israel proper, grow more emboldened with each passing year for one simple reason. Their plans--Oslo, the apartheid wall, and the new Oslo that will follow Abbas' installment--work. They work because they are aligned with the unanimous mainstream political objectives for Gaza and the West Bank and those objectives are clear--seperate the land from the people, herd the people in a bantustan state with malleable borders, populate the land with Israelis for eventual annexation with Israel.

But one question persists for all those who seek justice for Palestinians. How come Israeli progressives can't come up with a plan that works? It is useful to note, for example, that South Africa's transition from apartheid to representative democracy, as imperfect as it seems to be, managed at least to unite the country and create representative democracy, even if it has failed so far to right much of the economic legacy of apartheid. This process would never have been possible without the aid of progressive white South Africans, who were instrumental in developing the transition to democracy. Why can't left and progressive Israelis adopt a similar role?

Jeff Halper, for example, the director of the Israeli Commission on House Demolitions and one of the most well-known Israeli progressives, proposes a convoluted peace plan in a recent article on Mediate.com (A Middle East Union: A Two Stage Solution to the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict) which he claims could end the conflict in a two-step process. Halper's plan would:

1) create a temporary and truncated Palestinian state

2) manage the new state via a confederation consisting of Israel, Egypt and Syria with oversight from the international community.

Halper believes that such a solution would alleviate some of the economic problems of Palestinians while creating goodwill in order to eventually form a bi-national Palestinian-Israeli state. Indeed, Halper envisions his plan putting to rest much of the animosity that now exists between Israel and its neighbors. The plan has a glaring and obvious flaw, however, as it is predicated on good faith negotiations on the part of Israel, an unlikelihood considering Israel's record of increased settler projects and greater movement restrictions during the Oslo period. This is the very reason why a state like the first-phase Palestinian entity Halper proposes, does not already exist as a product of the Oslo negotiations. Halper also imagines good faith emanating from the surrounding Arab governments, which themselves are no beacons unto the world. In this light, it seems unlikely that after routing Palestinians into a more advantageous two-state arrangement than those currently on the books, subsequent Israeli governments would not instead step up the colonial project in the territories under cover of the confederation with its neighbors. The problem that has lead to the current impasse has not so much been the character of the peace plans offered--deeply flawed and unjust, to be sure--but Israel's consistent demonstration of bad faith and unwillingness to honor any of its commitments to Palestinians as dictated by the agreements. These are the very realities which Halper, and others, believe have now made a two-state solution impossible.

Then why not just move on to the next level? Accept the inexorable destiny of a one state solution, and create a plan that moves directly from this political juncture to that phase, without providing Israel the kind of interim steps that it has historically used to further its apartheid agenda? As much as Halper believes the two-state solution to now be implausible because of the Israeli colonial project, he perceives the one-state solution to be impossible in the near term because of resistance to the idea from both Palestinians and Israelis. According to Halper, Palestinians will not give up their quest for "self-determination" and Israeli's will not give up their "Jewish" state. This reasoning is questionable. There is little incompatible between a one state solution and a Palestinian quest for self-determination, just as the Black South African quest for self-determination did not exclude a non-racial representative democracy. In other venues, Halper has expanded his analysis concerning this opposition, claiming that it is not so much the Palestinian people who balk at a one state solution, but their leadership. But Halper leaves his definition of the Palestinian leadership purposefully vague; is this leadership Abbas' Fateh, transplanted into the territories via the platform of the Palestinian Authority, itself a product of Israel's attempts at creating a banustan republic in the territories? Or is this the leadership that has opposed the autocracy of the PA, taken an ethical stand against Oslo, advocated a one-state solution and will not budge from the right of return issue, the perennial two-state non-starter. Mustafa Bhargouti, openly a member of the latter group, recently garnered 20% of the Palestinian vote during the 05 Palestinian presidential election, despite the fact that he was not allowed to move freely through the territories and had no support within Israel or the US.

The two-state solution, in fact, is a Fateh creation manufactured in the Diaspora--it has no roots or tradition in the West Bank and Gaza and its acceptance in the occupied territories at the dawn of the Oslo era has more to do with collective exhaustion and lack of options than any real faith in it. Almost everything that Palestinians have ever aspired to--freedom of movement in historical Palestine, freedom to move and return outside the borders of the territories, and a return of refugees is only achievable through a one-state framework. What's more, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have already had decades to get used to the reality of living alongside Israelis, working and living in an Israeli created environment. Even the most racist, illegal and unjust power sharing arrangement in a flawed one-state solution would not be so different than what Palestinians have already endured for over three decades, except that there would no longer be checkpoints or prohibitions on movement.

What is really standing in the way of the one-state solution, instead, is Israel's insistence on maintaining a Jewish state. This is inconsistent with a representative democracy. The difference between white South Africa and Jewish Israel, is the former's willingness to admit that it's project for the Boerish nation was unjust and unjustifiable. Israel reserves the right to continue its Zionist narrative, which Halper has called "compelling". Even progressives such as Halper view the entire conflict through this prism, in which the suffering and dispossession of Palestinians must continue until a peace solution that minimally inconveniences Israel's Zionist continuum can be perfected.

Bernard Avishai’s article “Saving Israel from Itself” in this month’s Harper’s is another example of this kind of exceptionalist political thinking. Like Halper, Avishai also finds pre-state Zionism compelling and disagrees with the idea that it has made Israel an undemocratic state. In Avishai's view, this is too harsh a judgement that ignores “how radically, and for the better, historic Zionism has changed Jewish culture.” In this vein he offers the example of his love affair with the old “cooperative farms”, which he praises for refusing “to exploit” Arab labor. It is this very example which shows the true nature of Zionism, however, and Avrishai's failure to understand it. These colonizing communities began the Zionist enterprise of displacing Palestinians and show Zionism at it's heart to be chauvinist, hypocritical and blind to the moral implications of its ideology. Jewish settlers took advantage of changing Ottoman land laws which converted communal land into titled property, often without the knowledge of its illiterate peasant inhabitants. This situation was exacerbated by the very “conquest of labor” ideologies that early waves of European settlers brought with them and Avishai celebrates. Under an Arab landlord, at least, a dispossessed Palestinian might continue to cultivate and live on the land, but the Jewish collectives sought to remove the existence and influence of Palestinians completely. These communities knew full well that they took advantage of a legal structure morally opposed to the socialist model they sought to establish for themselves in Palestine. Ahad Ha-am, an early Zionist thinker of the late 19th century noted:

We abroad are used to believing that Eretz Israel is now almost totally desolate…but in truth this is not the case. Throughout the country it is difficult to find fields that are not sowed. Only sand dunes and stony mountains that are not fit to grow anything but fruit trees—and this only after hard labor and great expense of clearing and reclamation—only these are not cultivated.

Some decades later, Dr. Arthur Ruppin, the architect of the Jewish National Fund with which Avishai “fell in love”, formally took that perception to its logical conclusion:

Land is the most necessary thing for our establishing roots in Palestine…we are bound in each case of the purchase of land and its settlement to remove the peasants who cultivated the land so far, both owners of the land and tenants.

It is notable that the article praises Ha-am’s aspirations to create “a Hebrew national atmosphere”. Early Zionists knew full well, even if their modern day counterparts do not, that the Hebrew atmosphere they sought to impose came at the expense of the existing Palestinian one. It is this hypocritical arithmetic of dispossession that Avishai and other Israelis seem incapable of accepting as continuous with their history, this misperception of history which leads to an inability to face the reality of the present, and the resulting warped view of the present which produces non-sensical recommendations for the future such as the one Avishai suggests as the way of “saving Israel from itself”.

Avishai proposes converting Israel into a non-Jewish state, a secular “Hebrew republic” which retains the “Hebrew culture” he celebrates. Meanwhile, an unspecified independent Palestinian state would be established on all or part of what is now the occupied territories. Avishai spends little time examining the Palestinian state necessary for his plan to succeed, because, as becomes apparent, his motivation is not the correction of the unjust situation for Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line. Instead, Avrishai seeks to counter the threat that rapidly growing Palestinian population, which he notes will surpass that of the Israeli Jewish one within 5 years, poses to the varnished image of Israeli democracy. Avishai notes that by 2010, Palestinian Arabs on both sides of the Green Line will collectively outnumber Jewish Israelis.

Once Palestinians in the occupied territories are safely bottled up in the bantustan republic he proposes, Avishai suggests that a special kind of parity be implemented between the Arab and Jewish Israeli populations that remain in the “new” Israel by removing the outward manifestations of Jewish privilege while indoctrinating Arabs in an “Israeli” Hebrew culture from birth. Of course, it is not for Palestinians to have a hand in choosing the national culture in which they must live; that is a right reserved exclusively for Jews and why the coming Palestinian majority must be routed via the two state solution. This unspoken truth lies at the core of proposals such as Avrishai’s which seek not justice, but a juggling of demography and legal nomenclature in order to retain Jewish control of historical Palestine. Without this clever ruse, it is doubtful that the new plurality of Palestinian Arabs would have any desire to live under the Hebrew culture sung of by Avrishai. Avishai cites one Israeli Arab who agrees with his idea—a writer friend of his, who he returns to throughout the article whenever balance requires a "Palestinian" perspective.

Indeed, it seems unlikely that the new Palestinian majority would entertain much of the "Hebrew atmosphere" currently forced upon them if the kind of political power derived from demographic superiority offered them an alternative. Why tolerate the persistence of Hebrew as a national language when their own language has been historically marginalized at its expense? Why accept an artificial separation of the West Bank and Gaza from historical Palestine, when only Jewish military violence has maintained that geographic pretense? Even more to the point, it is truly impossible to imagine a Palestinian majority that accepts a right of return for Jews—which Avishai reimagines as preferential immigration quotas in the “new” Hebrew republic—but not Palestinian refugees. At the very least, Palestinians would desire those preferential immigration quotas for their Diaspora, instead of world Jewry which has benefited from this policy for generations, all the while displacing Palestinians in order to accommodate the growing Jewish population.

Clearly, correcting long-standing injustices would be the first steps undertaken by the new Palestinian majority, while perpetuating a “Hebrew culture” created by tanks, bulldozers and discriminatory legal infrastructure might rate low on the list. Rightly, Israeli Jews would have little power to insist their culture be given preferential status, unless, of course, they reserved that capacity within some apartheid scheme. That is why Avrishai’s plan first necessitates undermining the nascent Palestinian majority by defining over 70% of it as citizens of a bantustan republic.

Avishai and Halper, doubtlessly, desire a solution to the complex issues that face Palestinians and Israelis, but this will never come to pass as long as they believe that there is something noble to be salvaged from the narrative of Zionism; there is not. Zionism is an outgrowth of the age of empire-unique to be sure--but just as infected with its cultural chauvinism and delusions of divine validation. The first step toward peace in the region must be to admit that Israel, despite the real suffering and dispossession of Jewish Europeans, had no valid claim to existance. From there, anything is possible.

I Sold My Bicycle for Democracy and Other Fables of the 2004 Democratic Convention

Well its another fine mess progressives (and I use the term disdainfully) have gotten us into. Ignorance and an "anything but Bush" attitude have allowed us to be led around by the nose by a Democratic Party that varies, officially, just a few degrees from the current Republican administration. I thought Kerry was bad before I read the official party platform (find it here on PDF. Not for the fainthearted). Now I'm truly scared.

What once seemed an unmistakeable Democratic opposition to the war in Iraq has been downgraded to a minor quibble about timing. The permissable dispute has evolved from war versus peace, to navy captains versus air force pilots; an apt metaphor for the very little difference between the two wings of the American system of governance. The war is no longer wrong, since, as the platform manifesto says, "people of goodwill will disagree about whether America should have gone to war in Iraq". Over half of the document is dedicated to military and security issues. The rest is shared by the usual Democrat buzz words, health care reform, middle class tax break, etc.

In essence, Kerry and his cohorts want you to know that even though they believe strongly that Bush is evil incarnate, Democrats will only change things slightly, just in case the public only finds him sort-of-evil. Instead of Health Care Reform, Democrats will give us a tax break to buy insurance and try to convince HMO's to make services a little cheaper, instead of Tax Cuts for the Rich, we get Tax Cuts for Corporations and the Middle Class. Unbelievably, the document brags about the Democratic Party's intention to "raise the minimum wage to 7.00/hour".

The reality is we're screwed. Noone can save us. Thanks to the collective belief that Nader is unelectable, Nader is unelectable. Even if Nader could have won, we have let the Democratic party run him out on a rail in so many states that Jesus himself would have to come down and stuff the ballot boxes to give him even a chance in hell. Corporate media outlets seemed to have strived to become as useless as possible. Even the once usual alternative suspects, like NPR, became National Pentagon Radio, perhaps further embedded in the military-industrial complex than any other media organization. The closest thing the US public now has to an accessible and objective media source has become Comedy Central's The Daily Show; a fact that is not funny.

We have only ourselves to blame--hindsight could have called this one. Remember in 1992, when Clinton got the gay vote by claiming he would start a 'Manhattan Project on Aids'? Remember when he vowed to reform health care, then came up with a lame half-ass solution that he didn't even bother to defend? Clinton can't even honestly claim to have boosted the economy; he just had Greenspan monkey with things to produce the dot com bubble, a bubble he must have known, along with every other serious economic analyst, would burst by the end of his last term, leaving the next administration holding the bag.

As if all this is not bad enough, three decades of activism, culminating in a massive protest against the two gulf wars have been completely reversed. Thanks to Kerry, the Vietnam War was a great place to begin one's ascent to the highest public office in the nation. The fact that Kerry actually volunteered to invade another people's country is a non-issue. Kerry even now brags openly about the purple heart he earned after, according to his own account, helping to destroy the food supply of a subsistence farming community in an impoverished third world country (if you really want to be scared go to this link to read a defense of Kerry's purple heart. (I look forward to the expose "Kerry's Willing Executioners" to be published after our nation has collapsed from sheer heartless arrogance, ignorance and hypocrisy).

So what can we do? Here are some scenarios, but I suggest you hold your nose before trying any of them:

1. Vote Nader: Yes, he can't win, but if he gets a good percentage in the states where Democrats fail to railroad him, it is a message which may begin to turn the Democratic Party around and also add momentum to a multi-party system.

2. Vote Kerry: But don't you help put this war-mongering A-rab hater in office unless you're going to be out in the street the next day, demanding he pull out of Iraq and advocate a negotiated solution to the Palestinian issue, and insisting he come up with real solutions to health care and the economy that put people before corporations. If we don't call Kerry and his party to task immediately after we elect him, we're putting a pretty lame price tag on our heads.

That means you, MoveOn.Org, you organization that has worked so hard to indoctrinate Americans into believing that the Democratic Party offers a substantial alternative to Republican excess. I would hope that war and occupation are equally as appalling when overseen by a Democrat. That means your website better beat on Kerry like he owes the Board of Directors money.

That means you Green Party; you'd better get on that f***er's case like summer stink on a locked outhouse once you deliberately thow your presidential race and help dash Nader's bid for the presidency.

That means you progressives, now nattering away that Kerry has to get behind the war to get elected. Once you're proven more wrong than a fish with wings, you'd better get behind the real anti-IraqWar movement.

Or else? Well, it may become clear next election that with Republicans you know what you're getting. The real cynical hypocrites will be revealed to be Democrats, their puppet orgz and dim supporters. Us lower and browner classes may begin to wonder why progressives are always asking us to choose the lesser of two evils in lieu of no evil at all. Maybe we'll come to the conclusion that the reason progressives mime multi-party alternatives but do little to support them when it really counts is that they are actually getting something out of the current closed election system. Maybe Democrats are the lesser of two evils because they defend the upper middle class's right to never have to sacrifice anything no matter how bad things get down on the ground. With the global economy cycling down and vital natural resources running scarce, it's not hard to envision a very ugly class war in the near future.

Ride The Donkey

I never imagined it would come to this; the Democratic presidential candidate is such a mess that Republicans can air extended clips of his interviews, in context, with questions and responses included, and make him look bad to progressives! An 11 minute spot posted on the Republican Party website, shows the history of Kerry's public pronouncements on Iraq, from 1998 to 2003 (I actually saw this via the Washington Post website--you should check it out if the link's still alive. Look for the the column entitled "Confronting the Iraq Issue, with a link that simply says 'here') . Incredibly, Kerry is shown on This Week (2/22/98) in 1998 admonishing the Clinton administration for only bombing Iraq and not mounting a full invasion of the country. Kerry proudly boasts that he is not only "ahead" of the current presidential administration in this opinion, but also the American public. This was not just a one-time misstep or hyperbole; Kerry is quoted suggesting the use of ground troops in numerous articles from that period. In the Boston Globe, the next day, 2/23/98, Kerry again advocated invasion:

"I think there is a disconnect between the depth of the threat that Saddam Hussein presents to the world, and what we are at the moment talking about doing...we will not eliminate the problem for ourselves or for the rest of the world with a bombing attack,"


And again he implied that he would carry out this policy over the objections of the general public, congress and the senate, again repeating his line that his strategy put him,


"way ahead of the commander in chief, and I'm probably way ahead of my colleagues, and certainly of much of the country. But I believe this."

Kerry was no fan of diplomacy at the time insisting that whatever action was taken on Iraq at the time it should include a commitment to "oust Saddam" (Knight-Tribune News Service 2/23/98). Kerry's goal, long before Bush Jr. ever publically mentioned Iraq, was regime change.

In the months following 9/11, Kerry is shown publically goading President Bush into invading Iraq, "no matter what the evidence is about September 11" (on the O'Reilly Factor 12/11/01). On Hardball 2/5/02, Kerry states that a diplomatic engagement on Iraq was necessary, but only to legitimate an inevitable US invasion. On Face the Nation 9/15/02, Kerry argues, with John McCain, that Saddam is so dangerous the US should invade regardless of the existence of weapons of mass destruction.

Then, of course, Howard Dean comes along, revealing the untapped reservoir of popular resentment against the war within the Democratic constituency and Kerry begins changing his tune. Again, the most remarkable fact revealed here is that Republicans can make the anti-war candidate look bad to those opposing the war.

The Democratic Party has truly hit one of its lowest points in history. If you're a cynic, you might want to look at the entire battle over the Democratic nomination, in hindsight, in this way:

1. The Democratic Party supports the war
2. They see wildcard Dean gaining momentum by opposing it
3. The Democrat establishment, represented by Kerry, opposes the war to steal Dean's thunder
4. Kerry and Democrats then quietly go back to supporting the war once Kerry is the only option.
5. Yuck.

Speaking of hypocrisy, Al Sharpton wins the Keeping-Your-Head-up-in a-Sea-of-Bullshit award for his amazing speech last night at the convention. Perhaps the only politician to realize that most people, particularly African-Americans and other of-color groups, have gotten the shaft ( a somewhat thinner shaft than under Republicans) in previous Democratic regimes, Sharpton artfully walked a tightrope between calling the Party to task and expressing support for Kerry. Referring to George W. Bush's adress to the Urban League last week, where Bush had the temerity to chide Democrats for ignoring black needs and called the Republican party, 'the party of Lincoln', Sharpton responds:


You said the Republican Party was the party of Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. It is true that Mr. Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, after which there was a commitment to give 40 acres and a mule.

That's where the argument, to this day, of reparations starts. We never got the 40 acres. We went all the way to Herbert Hoover, and we never got the 40 acres.

We didn't get the mule. So we decided we'd ride this donkey as far as it would take us.


Referring to African-American support of the Democrats (and perhaps, specifically, of Kerry) as riding "this donkey" is perhaps the most honest sentence uttered at the Boston Fleet Center this week. (read the transcript here, though the impact of Sharpton's speech was felt through an incredibly passionate and moving delivery. Say what you want about that man, he is probably the only politician today working without a teleprompter.)

RollOver.Com

I went to a campaign rally for Ralph Nader in San Francisco the other night, an act tantamount to heresy these days in the progressive community. The SF Bay Guardian, the City's leftist weekly protector, did not print the event in its political event listing "Alerts". The paper did run an ad for the event, however; presumably the editors could hardly justify running Larry Flynt's ads for governor in last year's recall election while turning down Nader. Ralph's cash is green, at least.
 
It was a strange kind of rally, full of the kind of social retards and mysanthropes I have become accustomed to seeing at such events. Held in the auditorium of Mission High School, the rally attracted about 700, mostly white people. It took Nader two hours to show up, as he was at his book signing across town. In the meantime, we were treated to speeches from activists and politicians emanating from the Green Party and International Socialist Union. There were the usual delicacies for liberal left audiences; speeches delivered in Spanish for no discernible reason, a spoken word performance by a young black woman (the only African-American who spoke that evening), an authentic Palestinian, etc. People were encouraged to hiss and applaud at their leisure (note to progressives: the hissing thing's a little scary). 
 
Despite the customary pandering, there were several speakers who hit the nail on the head concerning anti-Nader hysteria and the hypocrisy of those who insist everyone vote for Kerry or be considered dispicable Nazis. Nader's appearance was, however, a little anti-climactic. He seemed rushed, unprepared, stumbling over his speech, spreading his index cards out haphazardly and even plagiarizing bits from the documentary The Corporation. The Nader '04 platform, as finally explained by Ralph himself, was hardly the 100 proof progressive manifesto that the night's speakers had implied. Nader veered strangley into some 'good ol' days' brand politics, praising the US military's ability to produce anti-malarial drugs for soldiers in Vietnam when corporate pharmaceutical companies would not. At one point, he sounded eerily conservative when decrying the 'pornography' that 'our children' are fed by media companies. I understood his point, and it is rare to hear a politician actually deem current American corporate-cultural trends as worthy of political action. Still, what a loaded and unfortunate word to use. On the other hand, to his credit, Nader did not blindly refer to the litany from the progressive play-book; he offered concrete solutions to every problem he mentioned, which was at least, given the content of other speeches that evening, refreshing.
 
I suspect that like Kerry, who is negotiating with Israeli Labor party representatives via his brother even as he vocally praises Ariel Sharon, Nader is trying to get the most bang for his buck. It's somewhat disappointing, as I have had admired Nader for actually being the only person running for president with some measure of integrity; he is, however, in his current incarnation, a politician. Politicking aside, there were rays of hope. Nader's Vice Presidential running mate, Peter Camejo, who was a bit of a milquetoast during his run for governor last year, came off as a left wing fire brand, indicating that perhaps the more radical elements of Nader's platform will be transmitted through intermediaries. Also, the ISO's representative that evening actually made socialists sound like they live on earth and not some alternate string-theory universe where the rules of physics and human nature do not apply. All in all, as far as integrity goes, Nader and his supporters, are the only ones discussing anything of substance.

This is a far cry from the most vocal of John Kerry supporters, whose antics lately tend to border on the psychotic. Incredibly, there were Kerry supporters protesting against Nader outside the building; their opposition is seemingly based on nothing but Nader choosing to run for President. In fact, there has been no criticism from Democrats of Nader's campaign platform. This is likely the most honesty we'll see emerge from the Kerry campaign. Attacking Nader would force Kerry and Democrats to defend their own platform to progressives. Thus, the only criticism Democrats can make of Nader is that people might be tempted to vote for him; a not especially moving argument in favor of Kerry. It is therefore not surprising that, as has lately been revealed, Democrat party officials and volunteers are carrying out legal, but ethically questionable, behind-the-scenes machinations to keep Nader off the ballot in several states. In a low point for two-party democracy, Democrats find themselves trying to head off the democratic process before it can work against them.

But what is really disturbing is the ease with which many liberals and progressives have gone from supporting candidates like Howard Dean, the closest thing to a viable anti-Kerry in the Democratic party, to the very man and apparatus that helped destroy the political viability of progressive Democrat fringe elements (creating the buzz around the overhyped and exaggerated "I have a Scream" speech among other back-stabbing tactics.). If Dean, a man with ideals, had recieved the kind of support Kerry did from the Democratic National establishment at the outset, Democrats wouldn't need to sabotage Nader's presidential bid today. All those Naderites would be voting for Dean, as I suspect, would Nader.

There are two messages being sent during this election. One, from those who support Nader, is that voters are tired of blindly aligning themselves with political machines that seem to have no interest in their needs; there are no longer only two games in town. On the other hand, those who vote for Kerry are confirming that whatever the Democrats do-- smash down real progressives like Dean, Nader and Kucinich, vote pro-war, pro-corporation, pro-patriot act, pro-corruption and roll over on any ideal when the going gets tough-- liberals will still vote for them, and do so with relish, beating down any substantive alternative.

Making the World a More Dangerous Place, One Adminstration at a Time

I happened upon an interview with Eddie Vedder in The Believer this month. Granted, the magazine is mostly written for the tastes of white upper middle class graduates of mid west art schools who are largely ignorant of any information not printed in Newsweek; still one quote stood out. Vedder, with his vast untapped reservoirs of global political accumen, concludes that “this administration has made our country a liability upon the earth.”

Yes, I know this is Eddie Vedder whose credibility, even as a rock star, is somewhat questionable. Still the sentiment is a practical lifting of the party line of the Democrat PR machine and echoes Kerry’s own critiques against Bush at a May fundraiser. At that event, Kerry offered the fanciful idea that Bush "undermined the legacy of generations of American leadership" by using force before diplomacy was exhausted. As if that wasn’t enough of a stretch, Kerry then evoked the spectre of Teddy Roosevelt, perhaps the most nakedly imperialist President of the 20th century, appropriating his ‘big stick’ euphemism, which Roosevelt used to advocate global US military hegemony, with no intended irony. Kerry believes that our overwhelming military presence in the world was somehow greatly appreciated before 2000. In this pro-Kerry/Democrat formula, the American history of pissing off the world begins with the election of George W. Bush.

It's not surprising to hear Kerry, whose doozies vie with those of Bush for sheer hubris, put forth this skewed perspective of American history (you've got to wonder if he includes Bush I's invasion of Iraq and 8 years of questionable military adventures in the Reagan years when recounting America's diplomatic salad days). What is surprising, and disturbing, however, is to hear so-called progressives also plying the unlikely version of events. Suddenly, in the rush to oust Bush, the questionable foreign policy paradigms of Democrats are no longer worth discussing. Former activists, who less than two years past were protesting Israeli policies in the West Bank and Gaza, are crossing their fingers and hoping that Kerry will somehow emerge from his neo-liberal cocoon as some kind of messianic progressive come early spring 2005. Still, even if Kerry remains the pig he seems, they hope that the American cancer will be cured with the end of Bush's reign, global citizenry will stop hating us, and the anti-American environment will decline.

Seemingly overlooked, is that the most destructive terror attacks against the US have occurred as a consequence of foreign policy either created or backed by Democrats. In late 2000, just two months after the Intifada began in Palestine, the USS Cole was bombed off the coast of Yemen. The bombing was a direct response to Bill Clinton’s pro-Israel policies expressed through nearly a decade of cynical US sponsored peace negotiations designed to disenfranchise Palestinians. Rather than break Palestinian aspirations to self-determination, the Clinton/Israeli 'peace' process culminated instead in an inevitable uprising and the collapse of the possibility of a peaceful solution to the conflict for the forseeable future.

Likewise, the largest act of terrorism against Americans in history, 9/11, was more likely a reaction to Clinton's 8 years as President rather than the 8 months Bush had logged in office. Bush at that time had virtually made no mention of the world outside of US borders and was busy devising massive tax cuts and other schemes to continue the transfer of capital from poor to rich that has been the main preoccupation of every President since Lincoln abolished slavery. Bush, in fact, ran on an isolationist platform (however disingenuously), stating quite clearly that the US should not become a "world cop" or engage in “nation building”. Bush's profile on the world stage was hardly threatening either; the popular characterization of the American President varied from illiterate-tele-prompt-bungler, cousin-bred boot-licker or stammering monkey-faced fuck-up. Besides some posturing and the infamous 'axis of evil' admonishments, he had not made a single foreign policy decision by the end of 2001, but instead continued the policies of his predecessor (aided by many of his predecessor's staff). In any case, it is doubtful that the perpetrators of 9/11 put together their plan and carried it out with only 8 months lead time.

Osama Bin Laden himself stated quite clearly, in his many straight to video releases, that 9-11 was the first salvo in a war against US imperialism and support of politically (and, from the fundamentalist standpoint, morally) corrupt regimes throughout the Middle East. The occupation of Palestine and the crippling sanctions on Iraq could not have been far from his mind or the minds of millions of other Muslims viewing the hypocrisy and barbarism of US policy. Clinton steadfastly upheld the idea of sanctions in Iraq through both his terms, though it was well within his power to end them. It should also be remembered that the Clinton administration was responsible for destroying the credibility of weapon’s inspectors by planting CIA operatives within their midst, leading to the suspension of inspections for nearly 5 years. Clinton’s failure to end the sanctions regime cost many more lives to disease, hunger and poverty than the entire current Bush misadventure, a fact that our world neighbors are quite aware of.

The Clinton administration also mid-wifed the Oslo period in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which is widely perceived throughout the Arab world as an unjust cynical strategy for institutionalizing apartheid in the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem. As the plan progressed through the Clinton years, it became more and more apparent, at least in the world beyond the US, that it was never meant to foster justice for Palestinians, but was instead intended to expedite their dispossession. The impact of this on the world opinion, especially in Arab and Muslim cultures, cannot be overstated; the US’s credibility, if it exists at all, was severely weakened by its one-sided involvement with Israel’s apartheid scheme. More to the point, when the Oslo plan failed to fool Palestinians into giving up their right to self-rule, Clinton blamed (and continues to blame) Yassir Arafat, and by proxy, Palestinians themselves. Clinton continued to blame Palestinians, even as barabaric Israeli military tactics in the West Bank and Gaza killed hundreds within the first months of the Intifada, at least one third of them, children.

Obviously, the Bush adminstration's invasion and occupation of Iraq have inflamed anti-American sentiments throughout the world, and it is quite possible that 9-11 sequelae are currently in the planning stages as a by-product. But there was certainly no love affair with US foreign policy in the Muslim or Arab world before the Bush administration. To lay the blame for US unpopularity on the Bush doorstep is to conveniently relegate Clinton’s foreign policy, repleat with arrogant denials for Palestinian self-determination, unjustifiable bombings of civilian targets (in Iraq, Sudan and elsewhere), and a legacy of pro-corporate globalization schemes that have impoverished third world people, to the memory hole.

This is important to remember when considering the argument that Kerry, if elected, will somehow reverse the US's downward trajectory in the eyes of the world. Kerry has been militantly anti-Palestinian, much more so than Bush. In fact, the last presidential candidate who so approximated right wing Israeli policies was Bill Clinton. Interestingly, Kerry has appropriated a Clinton-era pro-Israel device, the aptly named Jay Footlik, as his "senior advisor on Middle East and Jewish affairs" (in a bizarre twist, a Jay Footlik is apparently listed as an extra in the Michael J. Fox vehicle Teen Wolf) . Footlik is currently responsible for an ambitious PR campaign directed at "synagogues, federations, youth groups, sisterhood and brotherhood groups" to get the word out that Kerry's Pro-Israel voting record in the senate is "second to none". Kerry offers no just solution to the Iraq mess but champions Bush's own plan—a continued occupation that could outlast his own term as president, should he win. These facts are no secret to the rest of the world, though they may be here.

Perhaps what has really given the US a bad name in the world and fed the rise of fundamentalist extremism in Muslim nations, is a foreign and economic policy that has hardly wavered in its arrogance and brutality for nearly 40 years. From Fall to Spring, Centrist Liberal to Right Wing Wacko, Democrat to Republican, US unjustifiable invasions, sponsored coups, economic chokeholds, occupations and bombings have been the norm, not the exception. As I am writing this article, Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer, perhaps the two most progressive Democrats in the US Senate, are vocally protesting the International Court of Justice ruling that the construction of Israel's "seperation wall", miles beyond Israel's border with the West Bank, violates the human rights of Palestinians. Clinton and Schumer, like their counterpart Kerry, who has carefully and quietly applauded the wall, seek to deny Palestinians the one avenue they have besides violence to counter Israel's colonialist endeavor - the very international diplomatic forums Kerry claims Bush has ignored. In this opinion, Clinton, Schumer and Kerry find common ground with George W. Bush, who made similar comments this week.

The copious hatred of the US in the third world may be less a reaction to Bush than a decade of withering globalization and generations of US foreign policy bullying. Maybe the world has finally had enough of the US, presidents notwithstanding.

Beware the Evil Ad Bar

I just noticed that Blogspot, along with the seemingly harmless (but secretly insidious) Google, have collaborated to offer disinformation in the form of links placed in Ad Bars above our blogs. Taking key-words from entries, the Ad Bar offers convenient website links where you can get more information. While this may be something we have to live with to keep this thing free, please be aware that you may be steered towards websites advocating specious views.

This method of generating ad revenue might be harmless for those blogs dealing with Hi Fi's and GameBoys, but it is a seriously bad idea for Google to think that political views are as interchangeable as cell phones. BOYCOTT THESE SITES! 'nuff said.

Anti-Semantic

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators and speakers have recently taken up the very bad habit of defending their views against western sensibilities by claiming, "I am not an Anti-Semite, I am Anti-Zionist" or 'anti-whatever' as long as it does not implicate Jewish people as a whole. I think it is time to reverse this trend and to do so without rancor or shame. I will supply three good reasons to strip the word anti-semite of any meaning when used in reference to a Palestinian.


One) Let's take a look at the term and its orgin; obviously, the word semite existed before anyone ever tacked an 'anti' in front. According to Webster's a Semite is:

1 a : a member of any of a number of peoples of ancient southwestern Asia including the Akkadians, Phoenicians, Hebrews, and Arabs b : a descendant of these peoples

2 : a member of a modern people speaking a Semitic language


The Encyclopedia Britannica elucidates:

The term came to include Arabs, Akkadians, Canaanites, some Ethiopians, and Aramaean tribes including Hebrews. Semitic tribes migrated from the Arabian Peninsula, beginning c. 2500 BC, to the Mediterranean coast, Mesopotamia, and the Nile River delta. In Phoenicia, they became seafarers. In Mesopotamia, they blended with the civilization of Sumer. The Hebrews settled at last with other Semites in Palestine.


But who would argue that an anti-semite is anti-Palestinian? By virtue of the fact that prevailing discourse has created a dichotomy between Palestinians and Jews, and because Jews are the favored half of the dichotomy, anti-semitic can mean only one thing- being anti-Jewish. Worse, since being Pro-Palestinian is often perceived as being anti-Jewish, Palestinians are put in the anti-semantic position of being called anti-semitic when asserting their identities as semites. Excluded from the meaning of a term in public discourse even as current English dictionaries include them in it, Palestinians are robbed of agency and wiped from the ranks of humanity. Using "anti-semitic" in its current usage is tantamount to excluding women from the term "person"; in an interesting parallel, this is more or less the way things were before the launch of aggressive women's rights movements. In any sane society, therefore, we would conclude that the use of the term "anti-semitic" is too polluted with racism to be of any meaningful use in categorizing bigotry.

Two) Even discounting the above, Palestinians should feel no stigma when referred to as "anti-semitic". As mentioned before, many Palestinians now feel pressure to qualify their statements by demarcating a distinction between Jews and Zionists. But is there really any sense in making this differentiation? I would argue that Zionism has become as much a cultural value of Western Judaism in the last century as any religeous practice or tradition; perhaps more, as Zionism is the lens by which Judaism is projected to Jewish communities and not vice versa. Indeed, a wealth of statistical (see below) and real world data reveals virtually no functional difference between being Jewish and Zionist. In national US elections, for example, it is obvious that American Jews are almost a one note demographic group. The "Jewish" vote is won on who can be most supportive of the state of Israel(see article in Slate or recent article in LA Times ). In previous decades, the Democratic party regularly proved itself to be the most compliant with Israeli needs. Choosing Joseph Lieberman, an outspoken Zionist, as his Vice Presidential candidate won Al Gore 80% of the Jewish vote in 2000 because he promised to make Lieberman his "advisor" on Middle East issues. Republicans for their part are rapidly losing the stigma of openly courting Jewish votes; George W. Bush has succesfully used the carte blanche he has given Israel in the Occupied Territories to make serious inroads into the Democrat Jewish niche. In essence, as George W. Bush's popularity plummets with the US mainstream due to his policies in the Middle East, it has actually grown with Jewish American voters.

Zionism has become so entrenched in Western Jewish culture that most Jews are not aware that supporting the state of Israel as a Jewish-only entity, by itself, is a Zionist position. Seperating Zionism from modern western Judaism would be the equivalent of dividing "American" from "capitalist". Immersed in a life-long deluge of pro-capitalist propaganda, most Americans, no matter how aware or progressive, live and act like capitalists to some degree, perhaps without even knowing it. In much the same way, Western Jewish communities are so immersed in the mythology of the creation of the Israeli state that it may be nearly impossible for them to think of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict outside the confines of Zionism. Even so called Anti-Zionists often believe that Jewish immigrants had the incontrovertible right to displace Palestinian natives before 1967. Jeff Halper, one of the most arguably radical of Israeli Leftists who has worked tirelessly for the rights of Palestinians, calls himself a "post-zionist" and believes that the Zionist narrative should be validated even if there should ever be a bi-national secular state in Israel. Tanya Reinhart an Israeli professor at Tel Aviv University and leftist, comments in the introduction to her well-researched and insightful book "Israel/Palestine: How to End The War of 1948,:

"...the Israeli land was obtained through ethnic cleansing of the indiginous Palestinian inhabitants...Had Israel stopped there, in 1948, I could probably live with it."

Indeed what Halpert, Reinhardt and many other Israelis and Jews find unpleasant today is being personally implicated in the on-going colonialist endeavor of occupation that lacks generations of polishing to make it appear virtuous or the distance of memory to mitigate its impact. Because Israelis and Western Jews seemingly cannot give up the holiest of holies - the Israeli Creation Myth - they are unable to understand how to end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in the dynamics of the real world; they continue to produce peace strategies designed to ensure Israel's ethnic exclusivity first and justice for Palestinians second. If the overwhelming support for Israel's right to exist as an apartheid state is any measure, most Jews seem to believe that you can have ethnic exclusivity and representative democracy at the same time. Halpert and Reinhardt both support an independent state for Palestinians, the two state solution, even though their entire acadamic ouput has been dedicated to pointing out the political cynicism and disastrous consequences of the Oslo Years. The solution to the conflict, however, envisioned outside the boundaries of the Zionist perspective, is completely at odds with a seperate Jewish and Palestinian state; Israelis must share Palestinian land with Palestinians.

That solution, however, remains outside the realm of polite discourse because it would eliminate the "Jewish Only" stricture from the state, a scenario most Jews and Israelis cannot even bring themselves to contemplate. A recent Haaretz study found that "only 47 percent [of Israelis] support complete equality between Jews and Arabs and only 23 percent support making the Arabs partner to decisions crucial to the state". Most disturbingly, given the nature of those majority views, the study found that "only 51 percent agree with the statement that Israel's Arabs are discriminated against". Taking a stand against the vulgar colonialism of the settler movement may be increasingly popular among Jewish communities worldwide; actually giving Palestinians a fair shot at economic and political justice in the West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem or even in the democractic continuum of Israel itself, is another matter.

Three) Taking all this into account, what's so bad about a Palestinian resenting Jews, anyway? If even Israeli leftists can "live with" the dispossession of nearly a million Palestinians in 1948, then we're definitely going to have some problems getting along.

The reason Palestinians are required to feel shame for hating their oppressors has everything to do with Western guilt over Europe and America's barbaric treatment of Jews, and nothing to do with the brutal realities of Israeli occupation, ethnic cleansing and colonialism. Americans, heirs to a western culture that includes the Nazi regime and other societies guilty of pogroms, segregation and acts of genocide, must constantly be on guard not to appear in any way supportive of the sort of thinking that led to those inhuman times. Fair enough; but Palestinians had nothing to do with those pogroms or genocides. On the contrary, before the deluge of immigration that preceeded the Israeli state, Palestinians were more than happy to share their land with Jews fleeing the hatred and inequality of Europe. Palestinians should feel no guilt or responsibility over the European crimes against Jews any more than Guamanians should.

On the other hand, the early history of Zionism, an ideology created by Jews and still enjoying some level of support even among progressives as noted above, is repleat with arrogant calls to ignore the desires of Arabs as if they were cows grazing on unused land. Vladimir Jabotinsky, one of the forefathers of the Israeli state, claimed that Palestinians could go live in "Arab state No.4, No.5 or No.6" and that Palestinian desires for statehood were like "claims of apetite versus the claims of starvation." This view of Palestinians has remained a dominant one in pro-Israeli discourse, with Palestinians just another group of Arabs who could pitch their tents somewhere out of the way without so much as a hiccup of resentment. Even today, Palestinians are scolded for not having jumped at Ehud Barak's generous offer of 2000, which constituted a meager fraction of what had been stolen from them since 1948. Israelis, along with virtually every first world country, still insist that Palestinians settle for bantustans and reservations and to be sure, no matter what the cost, to avoid appearing resentful towards their Jewish oppressors so as not to offend Western minds.



If there is a good reason to overlook the narrative of dispossession left to us by Israel and the global Jewish community, it has certainly not yet been presented. If anything, too many Palestinians today are expresssing gratitude when offered a small measure of control over the large prison camp that has become the Palestinian homeland. I do not mean to say that our anger against Israelis and Jews should lead us to contemplate the kinds of horrific acts predicated by groups such as Hamas and Jihad. It is important, however, to realize that the anger we often feel towards Jews as a group is legitimate and fed by the fact that so few Jews take a stand not only against the occupation, but on the apartheid nature of Israel.

Palestinians have not asked to hate Jews and they would gladly be rid of the emotion; however, asking Palestinians to feel something less is negating their humanity. Any people would feel the same under such circumstances. Perhaps when there are fewer Jews advocating putting us in bantustans or erasing our existance as a people, we can be more reasonable and take the higher ground. That would require Jews to take Pro-Palestinian peace positions, not just self-serving Pro-Israeli ones, and be fearless and vocal about them. That would mean accepting Palestinians as full partners, not just in the peace process, but in humanity, with the same right to self-determination as Jews. And finally, that would mean accepting the end of a militarized apartheid state in favor of an inclusive democracy. Only then can a conversation about anti-semitism occur in any meaningful way.

Pope o Matic

Is it me, or was Bush just the cleverest little pentecostal cracker figure-head of state this week with his surprise Papal drop-in visit. With Orwellian ease, Bush took the Pope's on-going critique of the war and turned it into an endorsement of his now-you-see-it-now-you-don't Iraqi exit strategy. Of course the headlines in papers like The Washington Post and The New York Times, would have you believe the Pope admonished Bush; in fact, the pontiff's suggestion, that the US turn over power to Iraq and the UN ASAP, is already planned for the month's end. In the worst case scenario, Bush will now only appear to have succumbed to the will of God, which should give him plenty