Israel's "Up Yours" to Arabs Goes Down Wrong-Way Street

This calls for a toast. Israel, in a celebratory send-off to Favorite Neocon Dick "Mr. Torture" Cheney, is slaughtering "terrorists" (Israeli-speak for Palestinians) en masse in that super-powerful Security Threat, Gaza.

Gaza, where the civilian population has been under an indefinite siege, deprived by Israel of food, medicine, water, gas, and other staples as "collective punishment" for being ... for being ... in Gaza, and somewhat "self-governed" by Hamas. What crime could be worse than "self-government"? Gaza, where unemployment is the highest in the world at 49%. Gaza, where

Half the city's residents receive water only once a week for a few hours.

Gaza, which most of the world recognizes as a "humanitarian disaster." Gaza, where the average income was estimated in better times, last summer, to be about $2/ a day. And that's for those who can find income. Gaza, which has been reduced to living on the dole:

more than one million Palestinians in Gaza live on the modest assistance provided by the UNRWA and FAO in addition to other Arab and Islamic charitable organizations.

Gaza, where no one goes in or out without first passing through a surly Israeli guard at a checkpoint:

The population of Gaza is subject to Israeli closures and checkpoints, which often make it impossible to travel to or work in Israel and the West Bank, and Hamas' leadership are at constant risk of being killed by Israeli security forces.

Gaza also lives under a tight blockade, which often makes it impossible for food, water, medical supplies and other essentials to reach the population.

Gaza, governed as much as that is possible by Hamas, called a "terrorist organization" but which is also a political party and provider of public services in a population which has none of the above - and with less corruption that Yasser Arafat's old party. Gaza, from whose soil Hamas soldiers fired rockets into Israel in protest of Israel's provocative killing of 5 Hamas soldiers. Israel, of course, is always in the process of killing anyone associated with Hamas, having been given that neocon green light for assassination by Bush/Cheney, the darlings of the right-wing in power these days in Israel.

Rockets? Oh, yes, those rockets. Disturbing Israeli civilians. The answer? Death to thy neighbor. And all thy neighbor's wives, children, parents, grandparents, relatives, friends, and anyone and anything that is thy neighbor's. Of course, Gazans are not "neighbors" to Israelis. They are "terrorists". Every man, woman and child.

Oh, yes, Israel must attack Gaza, of all places. After the people have been starved nearly, but not quite, to death. Gaza, a prison masquerading as a "territory" masquerading as a "homeland" masquerading as a "dream". Well, not exactly a prison. Unlike a prison, people can procreate. Unlike a prison, they get no food or water to feed their children. Unlike a prison, they are told to fend for themselves, while being prevented from being able to do just that. Unlike a prison, they are not convicted of any crime, except being Palestinian, which is not a crime, and of defending themselves or fighting for their human rights, which is called "terrorism", which is a neocon crime.

But like am unjust prison, Gaza's only hope of human dignity is for its people to riot. And like a prison, all the power is in the hands of their jailers, guards, and executioners.

But...if all the power is in the hands of their jailers, the Israelis...who are nuclear armed...have supersonic jets...advanced weaponry...a well-trained standing military machine...

WHY THE HELL ARE THEY THREATENED BY A RAG-TAG, STARVING, IMPRISONED POPULATION WITH NO ARMY AND ONLY HOMEMADE OR STON-AGE PRIMITIVE WEAPONS??????

Because Gazans have lots of one things Israelis have less of: powerful motivation. You se, unlike the Israelis, Gazans are fighting to SURVIVE. And everybody knows, ain't no motive like that survival motive. It shoots adrenalin into the brain. It makes guys blow themselves up just to spite their tormentors. It takes people to their extremes, in endurance, in passion, in uniting for a cause. And Israel'[s attacks are increasing that motive, exponentially!

Israelis, on the other hand, have a more amorphous, philosophical motive: The Dream. The Dream of a Homeland for the Jews, especially after the Holocaust. Never mind that to achieve the Dream one must displace millions of inhabitants from that land. Compassion, comesmash'em! It's all about the Dream. It's like, more ideological. We're number one, and you're number nothing!

But what really is problematic here is that the Israelis are also amorphously-guided, by a cloud, as it were. A pillar of fire from the bombing of innocents by night, and a pillar of smoke from their ashes and the ashes of homes, hospitals, schools are more destroyed by day. They have no clear plan, except to react to every little perceived "provocation" like a high-strung cliffhanger on steroids. All they have to go on is a Dream and a Prayer.

The Dream: God told us to take this land OR ELSE.
The Prayer: Please take all those nasty Palestinians offa my land NOW.

The Tactic: Nuke 'em! Screw 'em! Bulldoze 'em! They're not even human! They're terrorists! They hate us! They're out to kill and destroy us! THEY ARE GOING TO DESTROY OUR DREAM!

The Strategy: Kill the Palestinians' motive to survive, their will to live, their human dignity, their pride, their children, whatever they hold dear, to totally annihilate their humanity, so they will agree to be placed in a Gulag Archipelago under Israeli supervision where they can be brutalized and never raise their voices, hands, heads, or hearts in any meaningful way.

Sounds a lot like Cheney's "robust interrogation".

Problem is, it doesn't work. You can't kill the human soul. Correction: when you try to kill the human soul, the only thing you succeed in killing is your own conscience. And with it, your own soul.

Ooops! That means, the Israelis are messing with their own conscience! Their own collective souls! And then...we all know God doesn't "choose" people without a conscience. And...wasn't that the Dream? The Motive? The Biblically sanctioned Holy Land of Israel? Wasn't it supposed to be...divinely ordained? But if God doesn't choose people with dead souls and dead consciences, then he... will choose someone else. A different people... a people who do not idolize the ideals of Dick Cheney and the neocons. A people who don't slaughter to impress their own constituency, as if the Israeli people vote based on bloodlust - whoever slaughters the most Palestinian children gets voted into office. Please tell me it ain't true! It sure as hell looks and sounds like it. But I don't want to believe...

Is THAT what Israel is all about? Is THAT what Israel represents? Power at all costs? Comfort for a few privileged - "comfort" meaning "lack of rocket volleys that shake us up" - at the cost of starvation of millions? Or the direct, deliberate, intentional murder, genocide of hundreds???? Is that the Dream? What the hell kind of a Dream is that, Israel????

This genocide will not go down easy.

Remember when "tough guys" didn't gun down women and children because it was beneath them? When it was too "low" for them to kill those who were weaker than them? How do you talk to Israelis who forgot that murder has consequences? Is it not "murder" when you're in power and using a military "machine" to do the killing? So it has no consequences? So Israel is blame-free? Why do they always attack those weaker than them, at their weakest point? Why don't they ever show that higher ground of "tough guys" in Westerns, of days gone by? Why don't they give a damn about families?

The world may croak like a freshly-slaughtered capon. The Arabs may make Very Strong Statements, signifying nothing. The U.S. may IN NO UNCERTAIN TERMS, ask ("pretty please") Israel (the beautiful, cruel, temptress girlfriend) to "try" not to kill "too many" civilians. Israel may answer "OK, we'll try, but...we'll won't promise, and we're not gonna stop bombing, invading, etc..."...

Yes, the whole world may join with Cheney in a rousing chorus of "So?"

But you can't eradicate the soul and heart of a nation in order to find the soul and heart of your own nation. It doesn't work that way.

Face it, Israel. Or better yet, say goodbye to right-wing Zionism like we're saying goodbye to Dick Cheney and the discredited neocons. For Israel to survive, it's got to have a goal that INCLUDES the existence of REAL, LIVE, NON-TERRORIST, NON-KOWTOWING, UPPITY, PROUD, HONEST, HUMAN......PALESTINIANS. With dignity. On both sides, not just your side of the border.

And while you're at it, watch your morals when you claim divine rights. Or the disaster you are toasting:
"Up Yours!"
may be your own.

Despots Rejoice! Israel Massacres Palestinians, Drops Seeds of Extremism

In a move guaranteed to increase violence and ensure there will never be peace in the Middle East, Israel slaughtered over 290 Palestinians in the already-beleaguered Gaza strip, in an air attack during which on Sunday, over 100 tons of bombs were dropped.

Recall for a moment that residents of Gaza have been under siege, without food, water, gas or medical supplies for what seems an interminable amount of time, and Israel has only allowed such humanitarian aid to "trickle down" in a sort of perverse economic starvation plan. We're talking, of course, about civilians. The "plan" was ostensibly to starve the people into submitting to Israel and rejecting Hamas. The result has been to create more hatred and extremism and despair. Great "plan", Israel! And now we're ready to witness more extremism and despair! Especially with the Arab world being run by megalomaniacs and despots. All hail the kings and dictators! As long as they feed us our oil, let them bulldoze their constituencies. To hell with people, constituencies, and the rule of law. Let the slaughter begin!

According to the AP, here's an update on how it went down:

Terrified prisoners fled a Gaza City jail bombed by Israeli warplanes on Sunday, their faces white with dust and red with blood as they stumbled over huge piles of rubble.

Across the territory, grieving families pitched traditional mourning tents of green tarp outside the homes. Yet the rows of chairs inside these tents remained largely empty, as residents cowered indoors for fear of new Israeli strikes. Plumes of gray smoke rising into the sky marked the site of the latest Israeli attacks.

Even for war-weary Gazans, who've lived through countless Israeli incursions, air attacks and months of bitter Palestinian infighting, the latest surprise Israeli air offensive was unusually traumatic. In all, more than 290 people — most of them Hamas policemen, but also 20 children — were killed in some 300 Israeli air attacks over two days.

On Saturday, shortly after Israel unleashed the deadliest-ever offensive against Hamas and its rocket squads, hospital morgues quickly overflowed. In the initial chaos, the dead were wrapped in blankets and lined up on the ground, as frantic relatives searched for their loved ones.

On Sunday, 25 unclaimed bodies still lay in the morgue of Gaza's largest hospital, Shifa, their faces disfigured beyond identification. In the southern town of Rafah, residents held a mass funeral for 14 people, including two brothers, and a father and son, all of them members of the Hamas security forces.

The shelling began at 11:30 a.m. Saturday, a work day in Gaza, just as children returned home from school, women shopped in local markets and police directed traffic.

So again, Hamas will come off to the Palestinians as the hero against the evil Israelis, if it's PR you care about. But who gives a damn about PR? The same people who have NOT ONE QUALM about killing 300 relatively defenseless people from the air? So what? Hiroshima killed far more. Can't come close to Hitler's murder roll. So why do we bother? The whole nation of Palestine is being wiped out from the air. Or no! The U.S. "kindly advised" Israel to "try" to avoid civilians, and the Israelis, from the goodness of their hearts, said "OK, we'll try"... And they added that they can't tell when this slaughter/siege will end, but "probably" not any time soon.

And why should they? Who gives a damn? The so-called Arab world is being held by the testicles by their Sacred Cow Dictators. I'm sure the Saudis are in a huge rush to stand firmly on the side of everybody and nobody. The Gulf States are equally castrated. The whole world is answering in chorus with Dick Cheney: "So?"

So what's new? How does Israel imagine that Palestinians will ever think of Israelis except as torturers, killers and usurpers? Gee, thanks, pal, for killing my parents, children, sisters, brothers, grandparents, and friends. Help yourself to my hovel of a home so you can bulldoze more space for your rich DNA-approved High-Caste Israelis to enjoy their superiority while we, the Untouchables, go homeless. Reasonable expectation, n'est pas?

Obviously, Israel has no intention of ever working towards peace. Their sole aim is to create such extreme and abject despair as to cause the Palestinians to agree to being herded around like cattle within a territory that is in fact a gulag archipelago. Their "homeland" is now a prison, without freedom to move, to make business, to live. All they are free to do is leave, give up, and kiss their Master Tormentors goodbye, while the Tormentors look at them in disgust and disdain, denying them the dignity of being called "human", except, or course, in asides in op/eds in certain newspapers that perhaps fear some weird ancient buried thing called "conscience". What was that?

Oh, yes, the great and holy Reasons! How could I, a pawn in a machine going nowhere, dare not to mention the Holy Fair & Honest Reasons! Dear World, We, the Israelis, because of the atrocities of the Holocaust, have taken residence in a spot of land once called some other name, but now called Israel, and sent its previous residents, bunch of backward pastoral/nomadic types, packing. They sold out - what were we to do? And it was and is a beautiful dream, for Zionists to find a Jewish Homeland by replacing Palestinians and removing their rights not only to live on their land, but to do business, eat, educate their families, or have medical care on their land. And if they DARE to FIGHT BACK, WE WILL DESTROY THEM!

Perfect reasoning! The Dream. Remember, the most important thing in the universe is to Have a Dream, and then Live That Dream. It trumps everything else. And Zionism trumps compassion, certainly. Of what use is compassion? People are being killed every day. Why pick on Israel? What did they do wrong? Have they no rights, in your view, to defend themselves?

So killing 300 Palestinians from the air is simply Israel's way of stopping what had become a sort of stone age "Offensive" from Hamas, throwing rockets and grenades into Sacred Israeli Territory by not Palestinians, not People, but... Terrorists.

Ah, yes, Terrorists! Notice that Israelis frequently refer to any Palestinian as a Terrorist. And they really believe it. So what is terror? It's an emotion. And why did Palestinians resort to terror? Because they had nothing else. You take a people without an army, without half-decent weaponry, without a country, without much in the way of land, many of them homeless or crowded several-families into a home so as not to be technically homeless, and then slaughter them from the air. Gee, it sure looks bad. But the important point to remember is to BLAME THE PEOPLE. BLAME THE PALESTINIANS. BLAME, ABOVE ALL, HAMAS.

You see, Israel is not responsible for anything it does. Everything it could possibly think to do is absolutely justified. It was first justified by the Holocaust. Now it is justifiable by the Palestinian Resistance. How dare those uppity niggers rise up in rebellion? After all, they ain't got the right DNA. If they did, we might have to leave them alone. In fact, if they had the right DNA, they would be sympathetic. How do you make people sympathetic to Israel? By showing your humanity. Too bad that's not the tactic du jour in right-wing neocon-run Israel...

Or am I insane? Yes, all the world is insane, and only Israel and the U.S., aka Israel's nana, are sane. They are sane because they are in power. But if they were not in power, they, too, would be despised. So power is just a way to not be despised.

But I really hate to believe there is no hope to get to the Israeli heart or its people. Is it true, the neocon idea that only terror fights terror? What do Gazans feel when their children are killed from the air? Happiness?

And how many Israelis were killed by Hamas in the rocket-firing binge that brought down on their heads this horrific overkill of retaliation? How many? 300? Let's see:

Israeli sources said more than 21 rockets and mortar shells landed on Western Negev. There were no reports of casualties.

Oh, and there is another total disaster in the way of Israeli "interpretation of facts." There is no distinction made between Hamas policemen and Hamas "militants." What the hell kind of security or peace do you expect if people cannot have policemen? What does it mean to kill police? So if they were Hamas? What other political party is there, pray tell? Calling them terrorists does not make them terrorists. They were protecting schoolchildren. But of course, who can protect schoolchildren from Israel? Israel fights from the air with supersonic jets against folks with primitive, ineffective weapons.

Yes, I can see they were in imminent danger. What a sense of balance!

Am I not Human? Blog Campaign: The Untouchables in India

Although this story is about one of the most aggregious forms of human-against-human abuse ingrained into a long-established social system, it also brings one of the most moving triumphs over such oppression.

Oppression and discrimination are almost set in stone, it seems, for the lowest group in the Hindu caste system in India, the Untouchables. Considered as if less than human, even though such caste discrimination is now illegal in India (per the Untouchability Act of 1955), their plight is unimaginable in every way. From simple things like being able to obtain water from a well - they are considered to "unclean" and cannot touch the pump, but must wait until a higher caste woman takes pity on them to pump water for them - to social punishment for success - such as happened to a leatherworker whose business and financial success led to his family being beaten, his home burned down, and tractor stolen by a gang from a higher caste for "rising above" - it is really the human soul and dignity that they aim to destroy. The reality of this caste system is so horrific as to be almost unfathomable.

To be born a Hindu in India is to enter the caste system, one of the world's longest surviving forms of social stratification. Embedded in Indian culture for the past 1,500 years, the caste system follows a basic precept: All men are created unequal. The ranks in Hindu society come from a legend in which the main groupings, or varnas, emerge from a primordial being. From the mouth come the Brahmans—the priests and teachers. From the arms come the Kshatriyas—the rulers and soldiers. From the thighs come the Vaisyas—merchants and traders. From the feet come the Sudras—laborers. Each varna in turn contains hundreds of hereditary castes and subcastes with their own pecking orders.

A fifth group describes the people who are achuta, or untouchable. The primordial being does not claim them. Untouchables are outcasts—people considered too impure, too polluted, to rank as worthy beings. Prejudice defines their lives, particularly in the rural areas, where nearly three-quarters of India's people live. Untouchables are shunned, insulted, banned from temples and higher caste homes, made to eat and drink from separate utensils in public places, and, in extreme but not uncommon cases, are raped, burned, lynched, and gunned down.

They are also called "Dalit":

Dalit, a term that has become synonymous with Untouchable, is the name that many Untouchables, especially politically aware individuals, have chosen for themselves. The name means "oppressed" and highlights the persecution and discrimination India's 160 million Untouchables face regularly. First used in the context of caste oppression in the 19th century, it was popularized in the 1970s by Untouchable writers and members of the revolutionary Dalit Panthers (the name was inspired by the Black Panthers of the United States). Dalit has largely come to replace Harijan, the name given to Untouchables by Gandhi, much like the Black Power movement in the United States led to the replacement of the labels colored and Negro with black. For some activists, Dalit is used to refer to all of India's oppressed peoples whether Hindus, Muslims, Christians, tribal minorities, or women.

In 1997, K.R. Narayanan, an Untouchable, was sworn in as President of India, marking progress in the banning of discrimination against Dalits. In cities, that is. But in the rural areas, that prejudice is being largely practiced, due to ignorance and poverty.

One of the most inspiring stories about conquering that discrimination, which shows a path toward fighting oppression and ignorance in the most effective and miraculous way possible - using, of all things, health care - is here - in the story of Untouchable women selected by a group called Jamkhed to be health workers for their respective communities in rural India. Their transformation from outcasts to respected community leaders, performing most of the functions of doctors and to some extent city (or should I say village) planners, from "stones without a soul" to vibrant, life-saving and heroic human beings and role models is truly amazing.

This excerpt lets the miracle-workers speak for themselves:

The real benefits, the women say, cannot be measured in rupees. "When I started, I had no support from anyone, no education, no money," said Sathe. "I was like a stone with no soul. When I came here they gave me shape, life. I learned courage and boldness. I became a human being."
In 2005 Babai Sathe, Untouchable, was elected the sarpanch—village leader—of Jawalke.

(Jawalke is her village.) Even the most heart-rending tragedies can have a transformative, compassionate, uplifting ending - if we work together on it. If India can conquer their long-standing institutionalized oppression, certainly the rest of the world can learn from that, too. But there is much left to be done in India, too, of course. At least this is a start.

Darfur: Is It About "Arabs" Killing "Black Africans"? Or Is This View Racist?

Everyone is sickened by the tragedy in Darfur. But who is responsible, really? Is it a case of racist Arabs slaughtering black Africans? Or is there more to it?

In this incisive article, Carina Ray asks the question, Are "Arabs" killing "Black Africans" in Darfur? The usual take on this needs a closer look. Her view is that the commonly held view on Darfur is "racialized" and the situation is more complex. Much more complex. And its solutions will not be reached if we don't deal with the reality on the ground.

African newspapers have followed the war in Darfur closely over the last several years. Yet, much of the reportage casts the violence as a race war perpetrated by “Arabs” against “Black Africans”. This racialised language clouds, rather than clarifies, the complicated nature of this deadly conflict, in which a brutal government counterinsurgency strategy has mobilised Arabised African nomads in its fight against a just armed uprising by Darfur’s settled population.

After a survey of over 1500 articles on the subject in African newspapers - not to mention Western newspapers! - these were her remarks:

As I surveyed the articles, I was struck by the fact that most African newspapers posited race as the primary causal factor of the obscene violence in Darfur. The war was regularly described in oversimplified racialised terms that reveal an anti-Arab bias and construct Darfur’s so-called Arabs as foreigners. Indeed the complex identity politics involved in the conflict have been largely reduced to a narrative of “good versus evil” or “African versus Arab”. Strikingly, the racial labels that have been used to demarcate the fault lines in this conflict are often the same as those used by the Western media.

Of course, the "Western media" has its own agenda, promoting the Global War on Terror, which is well served by demonizing Arabs. But in fact, the issues on the ground are more complex, and it is always better to deal with issues with facts and practical steps, taking the balance of power(s) into the equation, than to go full-force into ideological rants, as the West has done, and maybe Africa in some way has followed suit.

Given the absence of any other explanatory tools for understanding the multiple sources of the violence, and most especially the central government’s longstanding practices of marginalisation, underdevelopment, repression and neglect of its “peripheries”, the reader is left to conclude that what is occurring in Darfur is a race war perpetrated by “Arabs” against “black Africans”. Racial antipathy is therefore posited as the reason why groups that historically lived, traded, intermarried, and interacted with one another, for the most part, in a synergistic fashion, are now in the midst of a deadly war in which the obscene imbalance of power between a well-armed brutal government and its ruthless militias on the one hand, and the Darfurian rebels on the other, has led to the unconscionable deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Darfurian civilians and the displacement of millions more.

She doesn't try to minimize the conflict, only the "racism" factor in it, going so far as to suggest that the media created the impression that the cause of this conflict is merely racism, while it is more complex. As she says,

there still emerged the sense that many perceive the conflict in Darfur as being primarily motivated by anti-African racism, on the part of “Arabs”. But who are these so-called Arabs? Are they not also Africans? Ironically, this false dichotomy, which implicitly relies on the old trope of a geographically-cum-racially divided North and Sub-Saharan Africa, is being used to describe a conflict in the African country that perhaps best defies, indeed obliterates, the idea of two distinct Africas.

Or in other words,

The idea that Sudan’s “Arabs” are not “Africans” and that its “Africans” are not also, in many cases, “Arab” is what is in need of being rewritten.

Although there is racism, certainly, involved, on the part of those who identify as "Arab" in Sudan, blaming the conflict on this alone doesn't help.

Accordingly, instead of being held responsible for empowering and financing the Janjawid to do its bidding in Darfur, the government is simply accused of not doing enough to reign in the renegade Janjawid. Indicative of this is the fact that the government’s use of its own officially recognised troops and military equipment in perpetrating the violence is rarely mentioned. In short, the de facto reliance on “Arab versus Black African” as the basis for understanding the fault lines of the conflict is reflective of the profoundly reductive nature of much of the reportage on Darfur and what amounts to an almost willful denial of the historical relationships and overlaps between Darfur’s so-called Arabs and Africans.

And the "racist" issue is confusing, too.

Indeed, “Arab” and “African” are falsely constructed as mutually exclusive categories – once someone is labelled “Arab” he/she ceases to be African and vice versa. Based on this formulation there is, moreover, almost no recognition of “Arab” indigenity; rather those who are defined as “Arab” are conceptually relegated to being permanent outsiders and usurpers of the land, while those labelled “African” are conceptually defined by a static and timeless rendering of history in which their ties to the land are primordial rather than shaped by patterns of migration, state-building, and ecological change. One need only look at photos of the so-called Arab Janjawid and the so-called Black African rebels to see how these categories cloud rather than clarify our understanding of how identity factors into the war in Darfur. The deceptive power of these labels is simultaneously made possible by the fallacy of race and the steadfastness with which people invest in racial categories as explanatory tools.

She does recognize the part played by racism with the Sudanses government.

Yet, we must also acknowledge the very real role that local actors have played in the internal racialisation of this conflict. The Al Bashir government in Khartoum has both invoked and evoked Arab supremacy in its efforts to garner regional support and to mobilise the Janjawid to carry out its dirty war. Members of the Janjawid, despite their African ancestry, have willingly bought into this ideology as a means of securing their own interests in a time of increased competition over diminishing resources.

So too has the Africanisation of Darfurian identities among the rebel movements and their citizenry emerged as a powerful means of coalition building within Sudan, especially among the SPLM/A and its broad base of supporters. It has also been an effective strategy for eliciting support within Africa and from the international community in the context of the current conflict. Beyond this, however, we must ask about the wider political agendas that are being promoted through the constant deployment of such problematic and obfuscating categories as the primary lens through which the violence is explained.

This eye-opening article might help others to work to reach a nore practical solution than war. And start by laying the blame on the real perpetrators of this genocide: the Sudanese government.

Naomi Klein: Economic Crisis Part of Shock Doctrine

Although this was a long time comin', Klein's point is that the sudden, extreme, shocking, and Totally Now Emergency way the bailout went down is part of the Shock Doctrine she speaks about in her book.

Shoe-Thrower's Bones Broken in Custody

Now it's really getting bad - In custody for throwing 2 shoes at GW Bush when the latter was in Iraq at a press conference, presumably trying to get his "legacy" in order, now Muntadar al-Zaidi has been beaten to the point where

suffered a broken arm, broken ribs and internal bleeding, his older brother, Dargham, told the BBC.

So shall we believe this? Or shall we believe the highly trustworthy Iraqi military?

A spokesperson for the Iraqi military says the journalist is in good health and said the allegations were untrue.

It is unclear whether the reporter may have been injured when he was wrestled to the floor at the news conference, or at a later point.

The head of Iraq's journalists' union has asked the government for clemency towards the journalist who is still in custody.

A spokesman for Iraq's High Judicial Council said that Mr Zaidi, accompanied by defence and prosecution lawyers, had been brought before the investigating judge, Reuters news agency reported.

Abdul Satar Birqadr said Mr Zaidi had been charged with aggression against a president.

But al-Zaidi at least isn't lying.

"He admits the action he carried out," the news agency quoted Mr Birqadr as saying.

Earlier, Dargham al-Zaidi told the BBC's Caroline Wyatt in Baghdad he believed his brother had been taken to a US military hospital in the Iraqi capital.

A second day of rallies in support of Mr Zaidi were held across Iraq, calling for his release.

Meanwhile, offers to buy the shoes he threw are being made around the Arab world, reports say.

Mr Zaidi told our correspondent that despite offers from many lawyers his brother has not been given access to a legal representative since being arrested by forces under the command of Mowaffaq al-Rubaie, Iraq's national security adviser.

Is this Iraqi democracy? Or are they following Cheney's lead on this?

Muntadhir at least was patriotic, that much we know.

Dargham al-Zaidi told the BBC that his brother deliberately bought Iraqi-made shoes, which were dark brown with laces. They were bought from a shop on al-Khyam street, a well-known shopping street in central Baghdad.

And he's doing something for the Iraqi economy.

The shoes themselves are said to have attracted bids from around the Arab world.

According to unconfirmed newspaper reports, the former coach of the Iraqi national football team, Adnan Hamad, has offered $100,000 (£65,000) for the shoes, while a Saudi citizen has apparently offered $10m (£6.5m).

And he has family values.

Mr Zaidi said his actions were for Iraqi widows and orphans.
The daughter of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, Aicha, said her charity would honour the reporter with a medal of courage, saying his action was a "victory for human rights".

The charity called on the media to support Mr Zaidi and put pressure on the Iraqi government to free him.

Mr Zaidi, who lives in Baghdad, has worked for al-Baghdadia for three years.

Muzhir al-Khafaji, programming director for the channel, described him as a "proud Arab and an open-minded man".

He said that Mr Zaidi was a graduate of communications from Baghdad University.

"He has no ties with the former regime. His family was arrested under Saddam's regime," he said.

Mr Zaidi has previously been abducted by insurgents and held twice for questioning by US forces in Iraq.

Hmmm... seems he was more of a sympathetic character before we "turned him around."

In November 2007 he was kidnapped by a gang on his way to work in central Baghdad and released three days later without a ransom.

He said at the time that the kidnappers had beaten him until he lost consciousness, and used his necktie to blindfold him.

Mr Zaidi never learned the identity of his kidnappers, who questioned him about his work before letting him go.

Mr. Zaidi looks to me like a brave, thoughtful, and frequently-victimized man who reflects the world around him in Iraq, where Bush is symbolic not of liberation, but of death, destruction, war, and the breaking up of families, promises, and the hope of democracy and freedom.

Maybe we should find a way to democracy that doesn'tuse war. Democracy by force??? Oxymorons, oxymorons...

The Shoes Heard & Seen 'Round the World

Virtually everyone has seen this "send-off" for Bush's "Victory Tour". Now the shoe-thrower's become a folk hero to much of the Middle East, and no doubt elsewhere, although he faces possible criminal prosecution. He's got the best defense in the country, apparently, though - lawyers were lining up to get the job. And the likely charge would be defaming a public figure, the punishment of which could set him back what's described as a "small fine". Small price for such a big impression...

ABC "Homeland Security" Series Propaganda for Xenophobic Policies

ABC announced a new TV series "Homeland Security USA", premiering Jan. 6, which is supposed to be a reality show that is produced with the Giant Helping Hand of Homeland Security, which certainly wants and needs lots of entertainment-style propaganda. According to this NYT article:

In an announcement Thursday, ABC said the production "has been given unprecedented access to the agencies," including Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Transportation Security Administration and the Coast Guard.

But this isn't about anti-terrorism efforts. This is about immigration.

The show will spotlight the work of border patrol officials who work on land, sea and air to keep the United States secure.

Secure from what, or whom?

Migrants, perhaps? Migrants from where, I wonder?

When news of the series emerged in May, the show was named "Border Security USA." Although the name has evolved, the show will still focus on the border patrol mission.

Although it's been compared to cable's "Ice Road Truckers" & "Deadliest Catch" as a sort of "spotlight this interesting job" thing, in reality it's propaganda for the most aggregious human-rights-violating branch of the Federal government. Sort of like Montsanto or Shell Oil saying: "we're people, too." That's always the PR plan of choice when polluting, human-rights-smashing, otherwise-slimy organizations want to "clean up" their "profile": just show the "human" side. Always, every company has "Real People" doing "positive" work for a "purpose".

The producers know what they're doing.

The executive producer, Arnold Shapiro, acknowledged at the time that the show was meant to portray Homeland Security in a good light.
"I love investigative journalism, but that's not what we're doing," he told The Reporter in May. "This show is heartening. It makes you feel good about these people who are doing their best to protect us."

And what could be wrong with that?

Well, it just happens that there are issues with what we are being "protected" against. Against migrants from Mexico? And what threats do they now pose? Are they "hurting" our economy? And if that's the reason, why don't we expel some of those nasty banks with their toxic assets that are doing much more to drag the economy into the tank?

Why don't some of these "people" try "doing their best" to get rid of the real threats to the United States? Like the law-breaking, torture-condoning, human-rights-degrading secret policies of the Cheney/Bush administration and their cronies. Like hiring a special prosecutor to make that administration, especially the Angler (Dick Cheney) face the consequences of their actions.

If the immigration "threats" were merely considered civil, then this would be a job-highlighting light-hearted adventure series. But when they are considered criminal, it makes this a propaganda series for the agency assigned the task of making migrant-type work as deadly, dangerous, and dead-end as humanly possible. Good luck, farms and factories, finding any employees with half the work ethic of most of your current, "threatening", but yet cooperative, Latino workers.

Btw, you're not gonna find anybody. Until then, though, this series needs to die a fast, scandalous death. First, Homeland Security is charged with too many contradicted tasks. Immigration should all be under one roof as it used to be, not the "enforcement arm" under the same wing as the anti-terror task forces and other 911-inspired bureaucracies-in-funding. Not to mention FEMA. Since when is disaster relief a "security issue". It implies the public itself poses some kind of threat. And if nature poses a threat, is the DHS then posed to "protect" us from "acts of God"? Why don't we put the heads of several religions in charge then, if that's the case? The whole organization is wrong-headed, and needs an overhaul.

In the face of these issues, not to mention the issues of excessive force and excessive punishment against migrants from Mexico in particular, this show is in really bad taste at best, and encourages more anti-migrant public sentiment on the other. All we need is more emotion to make a rational Immigration Bill all the more impossible to achieve.

All we need is more propaganda to vilify populations that already are practically under siege, right? Anyone who's sick of this, join this Facebook group and maybe we can show ABC there's more to entertainment than promoting borderphobia.

Cheney Publicly Admits Torture "Process": So Our Answer is "So?"

Valtin brings this insightful post referencing Dick Cheney's latest interview with ABC, where the Angler practically admits to allowing torture in violation of international law, and points out Andrew Sullivan's post putting the timeline for these violations way back in 2001:

The decision to torture individuals was made by Bush and Cheney before the CIA ever asked for legal cover for the torture they had been ordered to commit. The torture and abuse was planned before even the January 2002 presidential memo that authorized torture:

In December 2001, more than a month before the President signed his memorandum, the Department of Defense (DoD) General Counsel’s Office had already solicited information on detainee “exploitation” from the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), an agency whose expertise was in training American personnel to withstand interrogation techniques considered illegal under the Geneva Conventions.

As the "Angler" himself put it:

"I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared," Cheney said...

Valtin gives some ideas of how this promoting, aiding & abetting of torture could be prosecuted, suggesting the possibility of a conspiracy charge and an independent prosecutor. When some suggested this interview was a "hook" to get a pardon from Bush (which would require an admission of guilt! and that would put Bush himself on the table! so I don't think they'd go that route), Valtin pointed out that a pardon would not absolve Cheney or any of his co-conspirators from international prosecution. But not so fast... would an international prosecution really be likely?

US prosecution might be easier to pull off, if the public would only demonstrate en masse their disgust at this horrific behavior, at this resurrecting of torture without public discourse, consent, or even, as they wished, knowledge.

Where is the outrage? Where is the courage? Where is the accountability? Where are the prosecutors?

Don't Keep Preston Geren As Army Sec'y, Barack!

Preston "Pete" Geren may possibly be kept on by Pres-Elect Obama as Secretary of the Army. This would be a complete disaster, as Geren was a promoter of using the Army as DOD-funded "missionary soldiers" - yes, that's right! Goodbye, Separation of Church/State as we had to say goodbye to separation of powers, separation of govt branches, and other constitutional amenities. As this article shows,

In 2004, Geren participated in the infamous Pentagon Christian Embassy video, a promotional video filmed inside the Pentagon that, at the request of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), led to an investigation by the Department of Defense Inspector General. In July 2007, the IG issued a 45-page report finding seven officers, including four generals, guilty of violating a number of DoD ethics regulations. But, because of the IG's narrow choice of which regulations to focus on, the civilian DoD officials who appeared in the video, including then Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense Geren, got off scot free.

It's his ties to the CCC (see below) that are particularly alarming:

The Christian Embassy endorsed by Secretary Geren in the video is an arm of Campus Crusade for Christ (CCC), a fundamentalist Christian organization whose far reaching Military Ministry has become entrenched in every part of the military. Geren, who was a Congressman from Texas from 1989 to 1997, first became involved with Christian Embassy through their Capitol Hill branch. He continued this relationship when he came to the Pentagon in 2001, joining the organization's Senior Executive Fellowship. To understand why having a Secretary of the Army with long time ties to any part of this organization is of such great concern, here are a few examples showing what the goals of CCC are for our military.

And what are the CCC's goals?

"Responsibilities include working with Chaplains and Military personnel to bring lost soldiers closer to Christ, build them in their faith and send them out into the world as government paid missionaries."

and

A former CCC program director at the Air Force Academy, Scott Blum, said in a promotional video filmed at the Academy, CCC's purpose is to "make Jesus Christ the issue at the Academy" and for the cadets to be "government paid missionaries" by the time they leave.

According to MRFF (Military Religious Freedom Foundation) founder and president Mikey Weinstein,

In July of 2005, the Air Force's Deputy Chief of the Chaplains Corps, Brig. Gen. Cecil R. Richardson, boldly asserted in a front page story in the New York Times that the Air Force's official policy would continue to be to reserve its right 'to evangelize the unchurched.' I immediately registered my shock, telephonically, directly with Acting USAF Secretary Geren. Further, I demanded that the Air Force immediately retract this completely unconstitutional religious policy statement of evangelical Christian supremacy, which must have been vetted beforehand, as it had appeared in the New York Times -- the one newspaper most despised by the Pentagon.

Geren and I spoke several times on the phone over the next several weeks.
What disturbed me the most was that he was absolutely clueless as to the constitutional illegality of his service's ignominious declaration/intention of evangelizing the unchurched.

This is an ominous precedent that does not bode well for people of other non-Christian religious persuasions, such as Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, or atheists. But it also does not bode well with the tone and character of how wars themselves are conducted, notably the Global War on Terror. It really DOES fulfill the extremists' charge that this war is a war on Islam itself, not a war against terrorism per se as a method of battling perceived injustice, etc.

Another area of concern are the indications that Geren, like many who subscribe to the views of organizations such as CCC, may see the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a religious struggle, and that our own religious freedom here in America is somehow dependent on victory in these Muslim countries.

Is this what America is all about? Promoting religious war? Are we federally-funding a crusade? Are non-Christian military men and women being pressured to "convert" in order to form "God's army"? If that's not Obama's vision of America, then it's time

to weed out those DoD officials who have been complicit in promoting or endorsing what has in recent years evolved into a full-fledged constitutionally prohibited religious test for countless members of our armed forces.

Starting with Preston Geren.

War On Terror is Not What It Thinks It Is

Responding to the horrific attacks in Mumbai is not as simple as incorporating it into the general Global War on Terror. In fact, the GWOT is not really accomplishing what its proponents say - or wish - it was. Arundhati Roy's great article, "9 Is Not 11", examines the Mumbai attacks and the West's response to them,

We've forfeited the rights to our own tragedies. As the carnage in Mumbai raged on, day after horrible day, our 24-hour news channels informed us that we were watching "India's 9/11." And like actors in a Bollywood rip-off of an old Hollywood film, we're expected to play our parts and say our lines, even though we know it's all been said and done before.

As tension in the region builds, U.S. Senator John McCain has warned Pakistan that, if it didn't act fast to arrest the "bad guys," he had personal information that India would launch air strikes on "terrorist camps" in Pakistan and that Washington could do nothing because Mumbai was India's 9/11.

But November isn't September, 2008 isn't 2001, Pakistan isn't Afghanistan, and India isn't America. So perhaps we should reclaim our tragedy and pick through the debris with our own brains and our own broken hearts so that we can arrive at our own conclusions.

Her examination of the issues is heartrending and brutally, refreshingly honest.

The war on terror is not the Savior advertised in fear-mongering, simplistic propaganda. India is a showcase of how off-the-mark the GWOT is and how it merely creates more of the same - war and violence.

Almost always, when these stories unspool, they reveal a complicated global network of foot soldiers, trainers, recruiters, middlemen, and undercover intelligence and counter-intelligence operatives working not just on both sides of the India-Pakistan border, but in several countries simultaneously.

In today's world, trying to pin down the provenance of a terrorist strike and isolate it within the borders of a single nation state, is very much like trying to pin down the provenance of corporate money. It's almost impossible.

In circumstances like these, air strikes to "take out" terrorist camps may take out the camps, but certainly will not "take out" the terrorists. And neither will war.

It is not simply a "mistake" to overlook "cultural complexities" or to paint ideological fantasies over totally different realities on the ground, as Bushco has done. It is the sort of turn of events that creates unstoppable monsters.

Thanks largely to the part it was forced to play as America's ally, first in its war in support of the Afghan Islamists and then in its war against them, Pakistan, whose territory is reeling under these contradictions, is careening toward civil war.

As recruiting agents for America's jihad against the Soviet Union, it was the job of the Pakistani Army and the ISI to nurture and channel funds to Islamic fundamentalist organizations. Having wired up these Frankensteins and released them into the world, the U.S. expected it could rein them in like pet mastiffs whenever it wanted to. Certainly it did not expect them to come calling in the heart of the homeland on September 11. So once again, Afghanistan had to be violently remade.

Now the debris of a re-ravaged Afghanistan has washed up on Pakistan's borders.

Nobody, least of all the Pakistani government, denies that it is presiding over a country that is threatening to implode. The terrorist training camps, the fire-breathing mullahs, and the maniacs who believe that Islam will, or should, rule the world are mostly the detritus of two Afghan wars. Their ire rains down on the Pakistani government and Pakistani civilians as much, if not more, than it does on India.

If, at this point, India decides to go to war, perhaps the descent of the whole region into chaos will be complete. The debris of a bankrupt, destroyed Pakistan will wash up on India's shores, endangering us as never before.

And the worst way to deal with these dangers is to launch a Global War on Terror. It requires a particular mindset, one familiar to empires who have to make other people's decisions for them without knowing what the hell is going on.

It's hard to understand why those who steer India's ship are so keen to replicate Pakistan's mistakes and call damnation upon this country by inviting the United States to further meddle clumsily and dangerously in our extremely complicated affairs. A superpower never has allies. It only has agents.

Look at the history of the Indian subcontinent, when the last Superpower, Great Britain, partitioned India arbitrarily on ethnic/religious/cultural lines. Where's their democratic ideal here? Ah, the whims of the powerful, and their consequences...

The Radcliffe Line, which separated India and Pakistan and tore through states, districts, villages, fields, communities, water systems, homes, and families, was drawn virtually overnight. It was Britain's final, parting kick to us.

Partition triggered the massacre of more than a million people and the largest migration of a human population in contemporary history. Eight million people, Hindus fleeing the new Pakistan, Muslims fleeing the new kind of India, left their homes with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

Each of those people carries, and passes down, a story of unimaginable pain, hate, horror, but yearning too. That wound, those torn but still unsevered muscles, that blood and those splintered bones still lock us together in a close embrace of hatred, terrifying familiarity, but also love. It has left Kashmir trapped in a nightmare from which it can't seem to emerge, a nightmare that has claimed more than 60,000 lives.

Pakistan, the Land of the Pure, became an Islamic Republic, and then very quickly a corrupt, violent military state, openly intolerant of other faiths.

But it's not so simple. There's the same exact intolerance and militancy coming rom the Hindu side, back in "democratic, open" India.

Babu Bajrangi of Ahmedabad, India, of the Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party, BJP, and a perpetrator of the genocide at Gujarat, said:

"We didn't spare a single Muslim shop, we set everything on fire… we hacked, burned, set on fire… we believe in setting them on fire because these bastards don't want to be cremated, they're afraid of it… I have just one last wish… let me be sentenced to death… I don't care if I'm hanged... just give me two days before my hanging and I will go and have a field day in Juhapura where seven or eight lakhs [seven or eight hundred thousand] of these people stay... I will finish them off… let a few more of them die... at least twenty-five thousand to fifty thousand should die."

Their playbook is taken from Mussolini, their racism and hatred open and violent. Yet, unlike the Muslim terrorists, these are re-elected to public office, condoned, and encouraged as "partners" in the War on Terror.

The GWOT has taken the stance that all real terrorism is either local, or Islamic. Once terrorism is labeled "Islamic", it immediately becomes "global", drawn into the GWOT, where there is a no-holds-barred scorched-earth policy of bringing in every force available against the "Universal Foe". This creates reactions, complications, and worse, feeds into the very thing it supposedly is trying to fight.

The War on Terror has become a global industry. It has its own product - war - and the attendant arms industry that feeds off the mass distribution of that product. It has its own advertising sector - the largest ad firm being, of course, the U.S. government. But other governments, such as that of, say, Britain, are working hard there, too. It has millions of employees, from the US Department of Defense and all that entails - and it entails a hell of a lot - to Blackwater and all those mercenaries, to all those who want to cash in on this lucrative business in nations around the world. It has, of course, a megaladon of a distribution network, of which the intelligence industry in Western nations is often a part. And it has, like the Mafia, enforcers. The enforcers are those who serve the vast prison industry in the U.S., from Gitmo to the lesser-known terror prisons, to those country who do the GWOT's dirty work through "extraordinary rendition".

With this industry dominating the world economy, it has left many people without a sense of the value of their own lives, let alone the lives of others. They or their relatives were treated or perceived themselves as being treated, as pawns, as "collateral damage". In a sense, it's a huge ego-blowout. It's not about the reality of their stated goals at all. It's not about Islam, or Hinduism, or, in the case of Israel, the Jews. It's about pride. It's about saying to the world - a world which one day destroyed their very pride and sense of value as human beings - or rather, declaring loudly to the world, "We ARE HERE! You can't get rid of us! We have value! We are something which you have to deal with!"

And the only voice they seem to find satisfying to get that message across is violence, oppression, destruction of things "the world" finds valuable - especially human life. They choose a specific target, an enemy, and seek to humiliate it.

For example, with the Mumbai attacks,

If the men were indeed members of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, why didn't it matter to them that a large number of their victims were Muslim, or that their action was likely to result in a severe backlash against the Muslim community in India whose rights they claim to be fighting for?

Same question is asked of Osama bin Laden. What the hell was he thinking? His own son popped that question. We still await the answer.

Terrorism is a heartless ideology, and like most ideologies that have their eye on the Big Picture, individuals don't figure in their calculations except as collateral damage.

But the War on Terror itself does the same thing. The "Big Picture" is an exceptionally vague idea of "democracy" and "freedom" which, translated by war, meanings the diametrical opposite. It means, in application by war, the destruction of freedom, of peace, of any hope of individual participation or voice. War loves dictators, not representative government.

It has always been a part of, and often even the aim of, terrorist strategy to exacerbate a bad situation in order to expose hidden fault lines. The blood of "martyrs" irrigates terrorism. Hindu terrorists need dead Hindus, Communist terrorists need dead proletarians, Islamist terrorists need dead Muslims. The dead become the demonstration, the proof of victimhood, which is central to the project.

And then there's the backlash, like GW Bush's Republican backlash:

Though one chapter of horror in Mumbai has ended, another might have just begun. Day after day, a powerful, vociferous section of the Indian elite, goaded by marauding TV anchors who make Fox News look almost radical and left-wing, have taken to mindlessly attacking politicians, all politicians, glorifying the police and the army, and virtually asking for a police state.

It isn't surprising that those who have grown plump on the pickings of democracy (such as it is) should now be calling for a police state. The era of "pickings" is long gone. We're now in the era of Grabbing by Force, and democracy has a terrible habit of getting in the way.

And this is the worst of all possible attitudes. India needs to get a grip. We all need to get a grip.

There are those who point out that U.S. strategy has been successful inasmuch as the United States has not suffered a major attack on its home ground since 9/11. However, some would say that what America is suffering now is far worse.

If the idea behind the 9/11 terror attacks was to goad America into showing its true colors, what greater success could the terrorists have asked for? The U.S. military is bogged down in two unwinnable wars, which have made the United States the most hated country in the world. Those wars have contributed greatly to the unraveling of the American economy and who knows, perhaps eventually the American empire.

(Could it be that battered, bombed Afghanistan, the graveyard of the Soviet Union, will be the undoing of this one too?)

The answer to this question is more powerful than we like to think. It's time for a decision, no doubt. Will Obama or the US Congress be up to it?

Terrorists like those who attacked Mumbai are hardly likely to be deterred by the prospect of being refused bail or being sentenced to death. It's what they want.

What we're experiencing now is blowback, the cumulative result of decades of quick fixes and dirty deeds. The carpet's squelching under our feet.

The only way to contain -- it would be naïve to say end -- terrorism is to look at the monster in the mirror. We're standing at a fork in the road. One sign says "Justice," the other "Civil War." There's no third sign and there's no going back. Choose.

This is a message to India. But also to a greater extent, to the United States. Only the "civil war" is fought on a larger turf. where will that turf be? The world economy? Get out of the GWOT business. Before it's too late.

Tonight's Moon Biggest in 15 Years, Maybe Close As It Gets

Out with those telescopes, all! Away from your computer, astronomy happens. This from New Scientist:

The full Moon will loom larger in the sky on Friday than it has since 1993, as it will be nearly as close as it ever comes to Earth in its orbit.

The Moon does not orbit Earth in a perfect circle. Instead, it follows an elliptical path that brings it 50,000 kilometres closer to our planet on one side of its orbit (called perigee) than the other (apogee).

On 12 December, the Moon will enter its full phase, when its disc appears completely illuminated by the Sun, just four hours after reaching its closest point to Earth. This will make it 14% bigger and 30% brighter than other full Moons in 2008, though the difference will be hard to distinguish by eye (see the difference in the full Moon's size in 2004).

It will be eight years before the Moon appears so big again. "This evening's Moon is not only the largest for 2008 but also during the period 1993-2016," says Anthony Ayiomamitis, who lives in Greece.

For observers in the northern hemisphere, tonight's full Moon will also appear higher in the sky than any other this year. Around midnight, it will shine down from nearly overhead.

Ecuadorean Brothers Victims of Hate Crime

NYT reported this hate crime:

The two brothers from Ecuador had attended a church party and had stopped at a bar afterward. They may have been a bit tipsy as they walked home in the dead of night, arm-in-arm, leaning close to each other, a common tableau of men in Latino cultures, but one easily misinterpreted by the biased mind.

Suddenly a car drew up. It was 3:30 a.m. Sunday, and the intersection of Bushwick Avenue and Kossuth Place in Bushwick, Brooklyn, a half-block from the brothers’ apartment, was nearly deserted — but not quite. Witnesses, the police said, heard some of what happened next.

Three men came out of the car shouting at the brothers, Jose and Romel Sucuzhanay — something ugly, anti-gay and anti-Latino. Vulgarisms against Hispanics and gay men were heard by witnesses, the police said. One man approached Jose Sucuzhanay, 31, the owner of a real estate agency who has been in New York a decade, and broke a beer bottle over the back of his head. He went down hard.

Romel Sucuzhanay, 38, who is visiting from Ecuador on a two-month visa, bounded over a parked car and ran as the man with the broken bottle came at him. A distance away, he looked back and saw a second assailant beating his prone brother with an aluminum baseball bat, striking him repeatedly on the head and body. The man with the broken bottle turned back and joined the beating and kicking.

“They used a baseball bat,” said Diego Sucuzhanay, another brother. “I guess the goal was to kill him.”

At least five calls were made to 911. As police sirens wailed in the distance, the assailants, described only as black men by the police, jumped into their maroon or red-orange Honda sport utility vehicle and sped away. Jose Sucuzhanay was listed on Monday in very critical condition at Elmhurst Hospital Center, where he was on life support systems and in a coma after an operation for skull fractures and extensive brain damage.

These guys were a conservative's dream, proving a conservative weakness: open condemnation of gays and Latinos leads to criminal behavior targeting them, even when they espouse your values. The men were good citizens, doing everything right and legal. Note that, Pat Buchanan. Their crime was physical display of affection, which in this culture is sexualized. And that means, "only between a man and a woman." YOu don't see them protesting nearly-nude displays of heterosexual "affection". The sexualization of physical affection is a total disaster for the human psyche, and you can see it in the sterility of emotions contrasted with the richness of lust in much of what passes for entertainment.

It brings up another point: victims of injustice, such as African-Americans, can sometimes become perpetrators in a sort of "revenge". Same goes for some folks in Israel who see nothing wrong with walling off a native population from sources of food, gas and survival in a show of power without compassion. Hey, didn't they learn something back in the 40's? After how bad it was? Where is the compassion?

And these two perpetrators above displayed pointless violence expressing hate. Why?
I hope they are found, prosecuted, and punished. But beyond that, how can we prevent this from becoming a pattern?

Escalation in Afghanistan Elicits Total Silence from US Public

Are we again acting like mere protoplasm, without opinion or mind?

Now Afghanistan is becoming the New Iraq. Just wait and check out this article.

Untouchables Become Miracle-Workers: Transforming Health Care

Much is said about health care, a subject that frequently borders on the dull. But in India, "health care" means the struggle between life and death, poverty and survival, superstition and rationality, being human and being nothing - "a stone without a soul". The unimaginable transformation of a small corner of rural India and those who inhabit it has a wider, deeper meaning for all humankind. What these people have done transcends ordinary heroics. It gets to the bottom of everything wrong, and right, with people.

This is the story of Sarubai Salve, Babai Sathe, and a mind-boggling "community health" (but really way beyond this paltry subject line) project called Jamkhed founded by 75-year-old Raj Arole and his wife Mabelle (who died in 1999) in one of the poorest areas in India. The idea was to provide health care for India's most destitute people, people without hope, people like the Untouchables.

Of course, we may know Untouchables as the lowest caste in the Hindu caste system of social stratification. Arole sought to reach the most impoverished people by training some of them, preferably among the lowest castes and most reviled, to be health care workers for the rest of their community. And the results have been jaw-dropping.

(Their native village of) Jawalke is a very different place because of Salve and Sathe. Salve has been doing (women's health care) rounds in Jawalke since 1984. By her own count, she has delivered 551 babies and says she's never lost a single infant or mother. "When I started, the children all had scabies and there was filth everywhere," she says. Small kids used to die. Pregnant women died during and after delivery. Poor sanitation led to malaria and diarrheal diseases. Children went unvaccinated. Leprosy and tuberculosis were common.

I ask Salve about Jawalke's health problems today. "Hypertension and diabetes," she says— rich-country illnesses. In most of rural India, only the fortunate suffer from such diseases.

They would perform services that doctors do not.

Even doctors who do treat villagers, moreover, rarely spend time teaching them about nutrition, breast-feeding, hygiene, and using home remedies such as oral rehydration solutions. They don't help villages acquire clean water and sanitation systems or improve their farming practices—ways to eliminate the root causes of disease. They don't work to dispel myths that keep people sick. They don't combat the discrimination against women and low-caste people that is toxic to good health. Doctors also present a powerful institutional lobby that can block the real solution for places like Jawalke: training villagers like Sarubai Salve and Babai Sathe to do all these things.

It's difficult to describe how these women became health workers without appreciating their background:

When Salve and Sathe started their work in Jawalke, they were destitute. As members of the Dalit, or Untouchable, castes, they were considered nonpersons, so reviled that higher caste people would throw out food if it even touched the edge of their saris. They went barefoot in the village, as Untouchable women were not allowed to wear shoes. Sathe remembers standing for hours at the local water pump—which she could not touch—waiting for a higher caste woman to take pity on her and fill her bucket. Salve was so poor she washed her hair with mud and owned a single sari. When she laundered it, she had to stay in the river until it dried.

It's hard to imagine living as a "nonperson", destitute, unable to touch the water pump to assuage one's own thirst. But it gets, if possible, even worse. Women's status in rural Indian society is so low, creating a sense of self was job one in transforming these women into the health care providers for their villages.

The health workers' first task was to transform themselves, beginning with two weeks of training on Jamkhed's campus. The Aroles' daughter Shobha, 47, a doctor who is now associate director of the program, conducted some of the training. "I would ask, ‘What's your name?' and they would say the village they come from and their caste. They had no self-identity," she says.

"They wouldn't look into your eyes or talk to you. They didn't even feel a woman has intelligence." Shobha's mother would ask the women, "Who is more intelligent—a woman or a rat?" "A rat," they would say. Shobha had the women practice saying their names in front of a mirror. She asked them, "Who is the one person who will never leave you?" Then they would walk behind a curtain to be confronted by the mirror. The training boosted their self-confidence. "Everyone can give technical knowledge," says Shobha. "What makes it successful is time spent building up their confidence." Training is an ongoing campaign: Every Tuesday many of the women return for two days to discuss problems in their villages, review what they learned the previous week, and tackle a new subject, such as heart disease. The women sleep on the floor under one enormous blanket they sewed together from small ones.

The idea is to improve the lot of people so poor, "health care" was a matter of bare survival, of staving off starvation and crippling diseases like leprosy. Doctors, says Raj Arole, cannot provide health care like local women-turned-nurses/midwives/healthcare providers.

A village health worker, Arole says, can take care of 80 percent of the village's health problems, because most are related to nutrition and to the environment. Infant mortality is actually three things: chronic starvation, diarrhea, and respiratory infections. For all three, you do not need doctors. "Rural problems are simple," Arole says. "Safe drinking water, education, and poverty alleviation do more to promote health than diagnostic tests and drugs."

In fact, local health care workers such as Salve can provide superior care to that of doctors, precisely because of their close ties to the community and their motivations being other than simply the "profit motive." Health care is ultimately about more than treating disease.

Even doctors who do treat villagers, moreover, rarely spend time teaching them about nutrition, breast-feeding, hygiene, and using home remedies such as oral rehydration solutions. They don't help villages acquire clean water and sanitation systems or improve their farming practices—ways to eliminate the root causes of disease. They don't work to dispel myths that keep people sick. They don't combat the discrimination against women and low-caste people that is toxic to good health. Doctors also present a powerful institutional lobby that can block the real solution for places like Jawalke: training villagers like Sarubai Salve and Babai Sathe to do all these things.

"Doctors promote medical care because that's where the money is," says Raj Arole. "We promote health."

Although this approach is specific to rural India, it has much wider applications than that: most of the undeveloped/developing world is in dire need of such health care, and much of what keeps such care from people is the wrong approach. Jamkhed's example shows how sympathetic people from within the community can totally transform the lives of themselves and their villages. It is a transformation that involves education and regular, local, hands-on care by people whose motivation is not money, but rather a sense of fulfillment and pride. And compassion.

If you think about it, even in the "developed" world, there is a need for affordable health care. Were the day-to-day preventive medicine that keeps people healthy given to people in the community, it would certain both cut costs and allow people to receive basic health services without the intervention of expensive, profit-motivated doctors. And it would also help bring communities together.

And amazingly, these victims of the worst form of oppression have now become transformative, inspiring figures of prestige within their communities. Jamkhed's training has truly remarkable results. But importantly, the greatest changes have been in the mind, in conquering superstitions and fears and ignorance.

Perhaps the hardest territory to colonize has been inside people's heads, where superstition and stigma prevailed. To villagers in the Jamkhed area, disease came from the gods. When a new mother died from tetanus because a dirty instrument was used to cut the umbilical cord, no one would take care of the child, says Salve. "People said the mother would become a ghost and take the child away." There were superstitions surrounding basic nutrition: Pregnant women were not supposed to eat very much, and new mothers would wait several days before starting to breast-feed. And sufferers of certain diseases, like tuberculosis and leprosy, knowing full well they'd be shunned by their neighbors, didn't dare to openly seek treatment.

Little by little, Salve and Sathe have banished such attitudes, demystifying health. Leprosy, for instance, is now treated like any other disease, which it is—leprosy is actually difficult to catch and curable with medication. The change is visible in the hands of Sakubai Gite. Now 32, she is in her sixth year as a health worker in the village of Pangulghavan. She was in her teens when leprosy took parts of her fingers before it was cured. Her hands are gnarled and deformed.

Those hands are one reason Jamkhed wanted her. "We wanted to show that a cured leprosy patient can be a village health worker," Gite said. "Today I am even permitted to deliver babies."

Jamkhed also succeeded beyond anyone's imagination because it trains workers to be responsible and not to be dependent on doctors or other "superiors."

It provides an ongoing weekly link for the village health worker to the hospital, a mobile team, a source of drugs and supplies, new skills and knowledge, and perhaps most important, it keeps her in touch with her fellow village health workers, which helps her stay motivated. Also, Jamkhed's health workers train villagers to diagnose and solve their own problems. "It is unique in truly getting people's involvement," says Carl E. Taylor, a professor emeritus at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and the world's foremost guru of community health programs. Taylor was the Aroles' teacher. "They were among the most stubborn students I had," he says. "They rejected anything that gave decision-making to the professionals and didn't involve the people."

And the results?

Among those that have been in the program for more than a few years, the traditional scourges—childhood diarrhea, pneumonia, neonatal deaths, malaria, leprosy, maternal tetanus, tuberculosis—have virtually vanished. Jamkhed villages have far higher rates of vaccination and an infant mortality rate of 22 per 1,000 births, less than half the average for rural Maharashtra. Almost half of all Indian children under age three are malnourished, while in Jamkhed villages there are not enough cases to register. In rural Maharashtra, 56 percent of births are attended by a health worker, compared with 99 percent in Jamkhed villages.

But the long-term results are more than just "health-related". This program has transformed the way people live and think.

Today, because of Jamkhed's business training and small business grants, its village health workers are no longer particularly poor. Salve, for instance, is one of the richer women in her village. She sells bangles and earrings, owns two houses, a flour mill, and, she proudly says, 15 saris; she also has a Jeep she rents out. This is a good strategy—the wealthier the health worker, the more weight she carries in the village. But it isn't the whole story. Perhaps the real secret of Jamkhed is how it motivates poor, sometimes destitute, women with overwhelming burdens to spend hours of their day on work that offers them no financial remuneration other than the occasional gift of a papaya from a grateful patient. Something clearly does. Most Jamkhed health workers are lifers. Very few leave.

The real benefits, the women say, cannot be measured in rupees. "When I started, I had no support from anyone, no education, no money," said Sathe. "I was like a stone with no soul. When I came here they gave me shape, life. I learned courage and boldness. I became a human being."
In 2005 Babai Sathe, Untouchable, was elected the sarpanch—village leader—of Jawalke.

The statistics are startling, too. From starvation to ... now the health issues are diabetes and heart disease - diseases of the rich. The story is much more - please read award-winning Tina Rosenberg's entire article for total immersion in this moving story.

Is Obama's Security Team Too Right-Wing Hawkish?

Many are now expressing dismay over President-elect Obama's choices for a security team, including Bushco's Defense Secretary Robert Gates, as being far too hawkish to give us hope for "change" when it comes to conduct of the wars and foreign policy. As this article put it,

The assembly of Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, Susan Rice and Joe Biden is a kettle of hawks with a proven track record of support for the Iraq war, militaristic interventionism, neoliberal economic policies and a worldview consistent with the foreign policy arch that stretches from George HW Bush's time in office to the present.

Although Rachel Maddow in her 12/2 Show brought out the brighter side of this, being that all the undersecretaries and lower level posts in Defense will not be Bush appointees and will be changed, and that these positions have considerable power when it comes to what goes down on the ground - this does not necessarily bode well if Obama's choices are consistently hawkish. If that's the case, it means Obama himself is leaning to the right on security. And that is something we should not be shocked about.

Even during the VERY FIRST DEBATE when all the Democratic hopefuls were given a voice, Obama stood out as pretty strong on security, a moment many in the media and the general population took as a sign of "strength" and "leadership" and, in fact, highlighted as one of the "high points" of the debate. Mike Gravel's anti-war arguments, on the other hand, were roundly castigated as "extremist".

Being as Obama always has to fight off false assumptions that he could be "extremist", "Muslim sympathizer" and "liberal" (read "peacenik") in order to have any slight hope to be elected, I'm sure that moment stuck in his mind as a tack he'd be well-advised to take.

It's also been widely reported that Obama and Robt Gates somehow hit it off, a sort of mutual respect. At the same time, there's something to be said for experience, even if that experience is under a discredited Administration. In the military, continuity is particularly essential, because one's adversary must not perceive that a change in government means a "gap" in security has been created through which that adversary could drive a wedge.

Note I said "adversary", not "enemy". Even if it wasn't a war, even if lives weren't at stake, not to mention other people's countries, even if it was just an adversarial contest, "winning" or the perception of "winning" is critical. And the perception of winning cannot be obtained if there is a simultaneous perception that one's side is undergoing some sort of upheaval. So now, if there are lives at stake, how much more important is continuity, the perception of one unified team, and that an Obama-led US will be just as strong as, if not stronger than, the Bush-led nation?

I believe that Obama's choice is reasonable and reflects his style, given that he is presenting an image to the world - an image of a strong nation, not backing down, run by someone new who nonetheless holds his alliegiance to the United States, not the world. It's easy for him to gain kudos as a more liberal, understanding and intelligent guy. What he's working hard on is gaining respect as a security-conscious, fearless, and no-pushover leader, who at the same time has more diplomacy possibilities up his sleeve, should the adversary decide the military option wasn't really working.

But one could have trepidations, nonetheless:

Karl Rove, "Bush's Brain", called Obama's cabinet selections, "reassuring", which itself is disconcerting, but neoconservative leader and former McCain campaign staffer Max Boot summed it up best. "I am gobsmacked by these appointments, most of which could just as easily have come from a President McCain," Boot wrote. The appointment of General Jones and the retention of Gates at defence "all but puts an end to the 16-month timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, the unconditional summits with dictators and other foolishness that once emanated from the Obama campaign."

Boot added that Hillary Clinton will be a "powerful" voice "for 'neoliberalism' which is not so different in many respects from 'neoconservativism.'" Boot's buddy, Michael Goldfarb, wrote in The Weekly Standard, the official organ of the neoconservative movement, that he sees "certainly nothing that represents a drastic change in how Washington does business. The expectation is that Obama is set to continue the course set by Bush in his second term."

Was Obama's voice for peace and change and hope just an image to gain votes? Somehow, I refuse to believe that.

But we really need to see how all these hawkish appointments play out in the conduct of foreign policy. Rahm Emanuel's hawkish-on-Israel stance and Biden's I-am-a-Zionist stance does NOT bring cause for hope to Palestinians, for example. Let's hope what I believe to be Obama's core compassionate streak overpowers his big guns in places like Darfur, Somalia, and Burma, as well as Palestine.

Others have said,

Obama's familiar-looking team of national security fixer-uppers does not inspire confidence. Nor do his vague answers to detailed questions on specific policies. "We're going to have to bring the full force of our power, not only military but also diplomatic, economic and political, to deal with those threats not only to keep America safe, but also to ensure that peace and prosperity will exist around the world," he told reporters. Obama seems to think he can wish away the world's evils with his eloquence and charm.

With a "strong" team, it doesn't seem that he is "wishing away the world's evils". I think it's more like a tour de force to show the world he's no wimp. From that position of strength, we hope to see the other "diplomatic, economic and political" efforts coming into play. It's too soon to say what will actually happen.

We don't want all this hope to just fall flat...do we? After all, the strongest security comes from diplomacy, NOT guns. Let'e hope Obama puts this team on the path of intelligent diplomacy, not "intelligence"-engendered war-mongering.

"All the News That's Fit to Neuter" Gives the Lie to "Balanced Journalism"

Marty Kaplan's post on the false notion that Journalism with a cap "J" must somehow present two sides on an equal footing really gives this much-maligned point a great argument:

Straight news puts the defensive blather from top executives of Moody's and Standard & Poor's on the same footing as testimony about conflict-of-interest by former officials of those firms at the hearings. Each piece of damning evidence is juxtaposed with a flack's denial. Each incriminating e-mail demonstrating the corruption of the ratings process is laid against the executives' contrary assurances of integrity and high standards. Straight news is stenography: these guys say "day"; these other guys say "night." It's up to you, dear reader, to decide whom to believe.

The trouble with this conception of journalism is that it inherently tilts the playing field in favor of liars, who are expert at gaming this system. It muzzles reporters, forbidding them from crying foul, and requiring them to treat deception with the same respect they give to truth. It equates fairness with evenhandedness, as though journalism were incompatible with judgment. "Straight news" isn't neutral. It's neutered - devoid of assessment, divorced from accountability, floating in a netherworld of pseudo-scientific objectivity that serves no one except the rascals it legitimizes.

However important facts are, no human being can be an "omniscient observer" and will definitely bias his reporting. Look no further than right-wing Fox News' trademark line: "fair and balanced". It's not gonna happen. So for honesty in journalism, one must simply state his opinion, label it as opinion separately, and present facts on both sides. You can't decide without knowing the reporter's bias, so it's only fair and balanced to give that away at the outset.