thinkbridge

Tyrant Gaddafi Killed!

2011-10-20T17:10:00.000-06:00

Gaddafi has been killed in Sirt and theLibyan people at last ae free!

Gaddafi Falls! Seif Arrested!

2011-08-21T15:57:00.003-06:00

Last night's push from Libyan rebel forces into Tripoli has met with rousing success and almost no pro-Gaddafi resistance. Seif al-Islam, Gaddafi's notorious son, was arrested, the brigades guarding Gaddafi himself surrendered to the rebels, Gaddafi himself is in direct talks with the head of the NTC, Mustafa Abdul-Jaleel, and the Libyan people are streaming into the streets of Tripoli in celebration. Pro-Gaddafi forces' uniforms are being thrown and trampled in the streets, and the Libyan rebel flag is flying everywhere. Victory for the brave Libyan rebel fighters and victory for freedom and democracy! And huge thanks and victory for NATO in this, their finest hour, and to all the brave supporters of Libya's freedom from the brutal dictator Gaddafi!

The West Needs a New Friggin' Brain

2011-06-12T16:36:00.004-06:00

When it comes to the Middle East, the U.S. usually looks like a clueless dwerp. A few well-enacted and clear principles would go far to change that.

1. Human beings are all human. The West tends to think of Arabs as non-human. A sort of mongol race, with a terrorist bent. Think of all the paranoia about the Muslim Brotherhood, as if it's back to its 1950's ascendancy, as if it proposes a return to "the caliphate", GW Bush's touted raison d'etre for the GWOT (war on terror). Think of the cries of "we don't know who these people are!" when considering aid to democracy movements in The Middle East. This is all bullcrap. Drop that load and get real.

2. Freedom and Peace are legitimate goals to defend. Humanity is diminished without them. But... they CANNOT be achieved by FORCE! It must be a willing achievement of the free will of those seeking freedom.

That's why Iraq and Afghanistan failed. We sought to IMPOSE freedom. That's an oxymoron ... moron!

3. In the Arab Spring, our help, no matter how military, is asked for by willing seekers of freedom from oppression. Examples: Libya and Syria.

To compare that to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is either ignorant or political posturing to an ignorant power base or both. Or worse, it could be mean-spirited cynicism appealing to a snarky, nasty power base.

Helping Libya is the same as helping France fight Hitler in WWII. What's in it for us? Our high ground. Freedom is a universal good. Who's gonna defend it? Unarmed civilians?

4. Terrorism cannot be successfully fought as if it's a foreign army with leaders, etc. while ignoring what it is: a freedom-seeking rebellion against oppression. Yes! In this case, seen as superpower-imposed dictatorships and repressive regimes. The latter includes, from the point of view of the Palestinians under their brutal thumb, the state of Israel.

Terrorism is not some sort of pro-caliphate ideology described by George W. Bush. Its idea (in Islamist-style terrorism) is that Islam will make people free from tyranny by non-Muslims. Look at the Palestinians under the Israelis, look at the Arab streets under their dictators. The dictators are all westernized, including the Saudis, whose duplicity is legendary. What could the people be expected to assume??

The only way terrorism could gain a power base of any kind is by the existence of repression that it appears only terrorism could remove. It gained a foothold only as a means to conquer oppression. PERIOD.

Many Arabs and Muslims believe that the word "terrorism" is a ploy invented by repressive regimes - including that of Israel vis-a-vis the Palestinians - in order to maintain and excuse their repression. We have clearly seen how Mubarak used the "threat" of terrorism to justify atrocities against his people. Do the people then not have good reason to believe this, O men and women of supposed minds???

5. Israelis are human beings. And therefore responsible for their actions. They are not fetuses. They are not angels. If the Israeli government is a repressive regime to the Palestinians, then how can they tout their "democracy" while denying Palestinians their basic human rights??? The word "security" is the same reason given by ALL midde eastern dictators for their repression. Are we not then supporters of oppression? Are not taxpayer dollars lavished on oppression? Then what is meant by "freedom-loving"??

6. The naming of groups of people as "terrorists" and thus justifying all manner of torture, murder, repression, abdication of human rights and principles CANNOT be a path to freedom or democracy. It is immoral, unjust, hateful, hypocritical, is itself oppression and repression, and destroys everything we claim to uphold as principle.

Without principles and a high ground, what exactly the hell are we???

Note to the U.S.: The View from the Arab Street

2011-03-13T16:07:00.004-06:00

When the U.S. and the West wallows in heartfelt indecision on Libya, and decisive ambivalence about Mideast democratic revolutions in general, it sends a clear message to the Arab "Street" - as opposed to the Arab "throne", from which emanate winks, nods, and solemn, secret applause. The message is that the U.S., and the West,
WANT, NEED, tyrants in the Middle East. The U.S. and NATO want to avoid "instability". They can't "interfere" in "civil wars". The West will help with "humanitarian efforts" - the band-aids. But to get at the cause??? Well, everybody loves a tyrant!

Arabs on the Street see the West has adopted their much-loved "domino theory". If one tyrant goes, others could fall. And the U.S., apparently, NEEDS tyrants.

Oh yes, we condemned Qaddafi. Reagan even tried to assassinate him back in the day. And we have no problem with regime change, assassination, fomenting civil wars in other countries, or even occupying them. Just look at Iraq, and don't forget Vietnam. But Libya?? Heavens, no!

Why? Simple. We're not calling the shots. We didn't start the revolt. Libyans did. Therein lies the issue, the trigger-finger block. We loathe any revolution that wasn't, shall we say, "made in the U.S.A." If it wasn't our idea, to tell with it.

But...let's look more closely at this domino theory. We're not talking about nations falling to communist revolutions. We're talking about repressive regimes falling to democratic revolutions, about fights for freedom, democracy and representative government - the West's rhetorical ideals. We're talking about the very sorts of revolutions we've been blaming the Arabs for not having for decades, the lack of which has been brought out ad nauseum as proof of Arabs' "backwardness" and lack of "readiness for democracy". And now, here's your true-blood, liberal, Western-style revolt! These are not Islamists. They want a real, free democracy. They want out of dictatorships.

Yet the West gives credence to the worst of all regimes, buying into Qaddafi's "civil war" story, buying into his propaganda that his people "love" him. The West doesn't quibble with this, presumes - for their own convenience - that he has loyalists who have not been bought or terrorized into submission, and that these loyalists are fighting for what they conceive of as a legitimate cause.

The U.S. backed Mubarak until it became openly hideous to do so, and now backs Qaddafi by allowing him to decimate his population and call it a "civil war" instead of a massacre. It seems the U.S. is also trying to shore of Yemen's Ali Saleh, and OMG don't mention the Saudi regime - now there's one hell of a repressive regime if there ever was one! Let alone...please don't say it... the unmentionable, the sacred, the fetus-in-a-jar...Israel. (When Israel openly supports fellow democracies in the region instead of trying to decimate them in some way as per Lebanon, I'll stop calling it a fetus. A democracy that doesn't support democracy is not a democracy, but some kind of hybrid. Is the US trying to rebrand itself, too?)

So what is the Arab on the street to presume? That the West loves democracy? That they believe in human rights and freedom? Or that they only impose, by force of arms, "freedom" when it suits their needs, when they are in full control of that freedom. But isn't "freedom under someone's control" an oxymoron???

Massacre Is Not Civil War: The West Buys Into Qaddafi's Paradigms

2011-03-13T01:09:00.009-06:00

A pathologically insane tyrant and his pathological tyrant sons are massacring their civilian populations with total impunity as the West engages in its usual lap-dancing, hypocritical vacillations. It's not that anyone actually likes Qaddafi. It's not that people are not disgusted by his massacre of Libyans in Zawiya and elsewhere or by Qaddafi's and his sons' obvious lies and cover ups. It's that the West basically doesn't give a damn.

Obama doesn't know what he's doing. Most of Europe doesn't give a damn. Cameron wants to look like he gives a damn, but he doesn't really...and so on...So why? Why don't the deaths of civilians being crushed by heavily armed troops inspire enough rage? Why are Libyans being categorized in Qaddafi's terms as "rebels" instead of as protesters forced to become fighters with no experience, weapons or training? Why does the West buy into Qaddafi's "rebel" and "civil war" line instead of calling them wheat they are - civilians who began what was conceived as a non-violent protest against the brutal Qaddafi regime modeled after the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions?

When more and more Libyans joined the once-peaceful revolution, Qaddafi decided to call it a "civil war" and threatened via Seif - his son-turned-War-Pimp - that there would be "blood in the streets." He made good on his promise and massacred unarmed civilians by armed troops from air, land, sea, and close range, calling it "civil war". Now NATO says they can't take action because this is a civil war and they don't "interfere" in civil wars.

Yes, the U.S., NATO, the EU, the West all buy Qaddafi's repackaging of violence. It's not a modern weaponized and mechanized armed force decimating its civilian population to keep them under a madman's repressive tyranny. No, it's a "civil war" with two sides: "the government" vs. "the rebels". But those are not "rebels" and never were. They are civilians who are fighting for their own freedom, for their lives, for their own country on their own land, for the democracy so touted in Western rhetoric. But Qaddafi, whose personal life centers on women, sex, and drugs (he's obviously strung out on drugs most of the time), will kill every man, woman and child in Libya who opposes him to keep the power and money he pathologically craves. He is hell-bent on holding the reins of his psychopathocracy and will stop at nothing. Slaughter is child's play to him. And as for his so-called devoted "people" - Apparently, no one noticed the protests in his so-called "stronghold", Tripoli, which he crushed by nothing less than all-out slaughter, coupled with fear tactics and propaganda. If he has so much "support", why does he have to bribe them? Why does he need to important foreign nationals to fight for him? So to adopt his "civil war" line is itself crazy.

Is NATO crazy? Is Obama crazy? No. But there's a sense of fear of getting mired in this, and there's political liability. There's no self-interest in backing the Libyan people, at least not in the Machiavellian sense. If he stays, the West gets oil. If he leaves, they get oil. So what's the diff? And Qaddafi knows this. He knows the West is all talk, no action. Qaddafi says when it comes to oil, Libya is important. When it comes to human rights and crimes against humanity, Libya is unimportant. The West has clearly bought into this and is currently acting on it. This plays directly into his regime.

The Generals say we need weeks, months, and the "rebels" will lose. Note: not "get slaughtered", no - "lose". We just can't take action like that in a civil war, they say. But these are Qaddafi's words.

Who said this was a civil war? Qaddafi. Who proclaimed there will be a civil war? Qaddafi. Who said when it comes to freedom, de,ocracy and human rights, Libya is unimportant? Qaddafi.

And who are happily mouthing Qaddafi's words, using his terminology, his repackaging of horrific massacre into another entirely different "internal struggle" scenario? Who are choosing when Libya is important or unimportant exactly and solely based on Qaddafi's own set conditions?

NATO. America. The West.

Now tell me - who is calling the shots? Who sets the agenda here?

And the Libyan people's hope for democracy? Their faith in Western nations' willingness to support the cause of freedom? They were hoping for Western leadership, moral backbone. Good luck with that.

Total Joy! Mubarak Finally Steps Down - Democracy for Egypt!!

2011-02-11T12:51:00.004-06:00

The Torturer and Veep of Egypt, Omar Suleiman, announced that Hosny Mubarak will vacate his presidency and the army will supervise a secure and orderly transition of power while Gen. Tantawi will be the de facto president. After 18 days of protests, after 80,000 protesters marched on the presidential palace, after the most amazing showing of people power on the face of the planet, Egypt is at last a free country. Now the path to democracy, the effort that requires, begins.

Links:
al-jazeera english:
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2011/02/2011211164636605699.html

bbc

Mubarak Attacks Protesters with Thugs, Dogs, Weapons

2011-02-03T00:46:00.007-06:00

Embattled Egyptian dictator Hosny Mubarak played his usual game: attacking peaceful civilians and citizens with paid thugs and secret police, both posing as civilians and in this case, as "pro-Mubarak protesters".

For those journalists who worry that these could be genuine citizens who want Mubarak in power, let this be proof to their cluelessness: those "pro-Mubarak protesters" were all armed. They were mostly paid goons, thugs who were sent by the Ministry of Interior to drive the protestors out with violence, and "support" Mubarak's ruthless dictatorship with violence.

Thousands - by Egypt's Health Ministry estimate, 5,000, but probably more - were injured, some critically, and at least five were killed. Chaos erupted in the streets. Some of the goons arrived, ploughing through the crowd on horseback and camelback, some cracking whips. Brave protesters pulled them off their horses/camels, and subdued them, turning some to the army, but keeping most of the attackers in a makeshift detention area in Tahrir Square.

There was also a concerted effort by Mubarak and his goons to attack journalists, as well as anyone who "looked foreign". Anderson Cooper of CNN was one of the more prominent victims of this violence, though he returned to the air later from an undisclosed "safe" location in Cairo (presumably). As many as 26 (or more) journalists were either beaten up or detained, hooded and interrogated in unknown locations. Protesters took down the license plate number of a car from which an official-looking individual was seen paying money to some of the thugs that had been violent with pro-Democracy protesters.

This is clearly a case of peaceful pro-Democracy protestors who want an end to the brutal dictatorship being roughed up and threatened by dictator Mubarak. It also shows that he wants to brutalize his people without journalists reporting it. It is also a sign that Mubarak wants to show off to the West his anger at their abandonment of his repressive regime (in calling for reform, to step down, etc.) after years of his being their man in the middle east, doing favors for them, clamping down on Muslims in the so-called War on Terror, and torturing terror suspects for the West. In other words, he's angry that the West is now abandoning their pet goon.

But the protestors have retaken Tahrir Square, pushed out the goons, and set up hospital areas to treat the wounded, and responded to the situation in the most admirable, civilized, and cooperative way. This bodes well for Egypt.

But the battle for Egypt has just begun. The pro-Democracy movement in the streets will not back down, saying they will die for their freedom and that of their children. Mubarak says he will not step down or there will be chaos. It's obvious now to the world that the only chaos is coming from his side.

Victory to democracy in Egypt. It is and will be a model of liberty for the world.

Conceived in Liberty: Egypt vs. The Tyrant

2011-01-25T23:34:00.008-06:00

The end of acquiescence is the beginning of freedom.

Today, Egyptians demonstrated - from 20,000 to 100,000 strong - in Cairo, Tanta, Alexandria, Asiut - against Hosny Mubarak, the draconian Oppressor of the Egyptian people - who are not "his" people since he considers them his enemies (!). The force of sheer human will towards freedom has been unleashed in Egypt.

And met with Mubarak's domestic "policy": a wall of brute, black-helmeted, robotic, ironclad police who arrived in armored caravans and pressed, with US-trained professional brutality, against the life-force of youth, of their own country, their own youth rebelling to finally, after generations of complacency and soul-killing, despairing acquiescence, stand and march as human beings for the right to breathe, to walk freely in their own streets, to speak freely in their own nation on their own ground, to not be tortured or killed or imprisoned or see family members disappear - for simply speaking, thinking, or walking in a group of three.

There is no faith or motive in despair. but once despair is removed, what power can be unleashed! Fear is irrelevant in challenging such abominable tyranny as Mubarak's criminal regime. Partisanship dissolves. Even religious differences collapse. All Egyptians own their country and they will wrest it forcibly, by the force of thousands growing quickly to millions, from the tyrant and his cronies. All Egyptians are Hosny's victims. Look at those riot police. They are his victims, too. They are often forced by need, by poverty into protecting the very regime that imprisons them and their families, their own nation, in a hopeless, pointless, world without freedom.

Yes, the police. Look at what they must do to themselves to turn against their own sons and daughters in the streets. They must kill their own conscience, lie and cover up for what they know is true. But they cannot be freed from these shackles until the movement gains more power, momentum, and sheer numbers.

The defiance and brashness of protestors is life, invigorating and despair-crushing, death-defying, liberating. But this force needs thousands and the thousands need millions. It needs to grow to overwhelming numbers to create inevitability. The demonstrators must know, not merely hope, believe, but know that their cause - the complete and permanent ouster and overthrow of Mubarak, his family and his cronies is inevitable, will happen, as a consequence of this force of human will on its determined, shared, cooperating trajectory toward freedom. But to make this happen NOW, that is, SOON, requires non-stop, unrelenting action!

Action day after day, week after week, whatever it takes as long as it takes, unrelenting, never giving up, no matter if it takes lives, deaths. The police WILL lose their stomach when it comes to mass murder. Remember, they have families, They are Egyptians. They have very weak and trembling excuses for being on the side of oppression and very powerful urges to break free just as the youth in the street do. But they need to feel the inevitability, the necessity, the massive power of great numbers of fellow countrymen, to lay down their arms and join the force of their own people.

Mubarak's only self-defense will be a call for "security" and "stability". This has been his sole measly, transparently empty excuse for imposing martial law over 3 decades and counting. How worthless is this excuse? How valuable is being a human being with free will? What life can be secured when life without freedom has no taste of life, when faith under oppression cannot be faith, when love under tyranny cannot grow, when under the banner of security and stability the reason to live and to even exist is crushed??

All Egyptians must put pressure on that very security and stability. Make Egypt insecure. Destabilize the streets. Close the shops. Refuse to show up for normalcy. Don't participate in normal daily life (if that's what it even was). Make the streets a place not of commerce and entertainment, not of peace and quiet, not of normal traffic, but a place of revolution. Make the streets the birthplace of liberty. Force liberty out of the streets and the tyrant out of his power-vault.

Make the streets a place where nothing is what it was before. Shops do not sell. Shelters do not shelter. Pedestrians do not mill aimlessly. Everyone is out in the streets in their unarmed bare clothing, more people than can possibly ever be arrested, all marching in one direction, one force, calling in one voice and many voices for the ouster of the tyrant.

Make the streets for Mubarak what Mubarak made them for the people: a place controlled by force. But this time, the force of all Egyptians, young and old, men and women, employed and unemployed, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, friends, Muslims and Christians, impoverished and people of means, all moving in one direction calling for the demise of the tyrant Mubarak.

When the police can no longer control the crowds, when the media no longer can suppress the news, when the tyrant no longer can sleep in his vault, when the army no longer can pretend they despise freedom, when the police find their own families and neighborhoods marching in the force towards long-desired liberty, who - I say, who? - imagines that any outcome is more inevitable than what God has ordained and promised - complete and irreversible victory over tyranny and the demise of the tyrant Mubarak???!!!

The Smell of Revolution

2011-01-25T01:56:00.007-06:00

Tunisia's "Jasmine Revolution" was more coffee than perfume - a sign of morning, beginnings, waking up. And smell is the most penetrating, intangible, evocative of senses. It feels almost unreal. You can't hold it, suppress it, drive it away. It is the cumulative force of masses of people rising up, self-motivated, determined, as a wall of uncompromising resistance. This pungent, irresistible smell aroused latent rebellious urges in the masses of Arabs who live undeer the most draconian and fervent oppressions and tyrannies. The Jasmine Revolution is the aphrodisiac of freedom grasped by force of desire and will power shared as a wall of mass, spontaneous rebellion. Who will be inspired by it? Millions. Who will take action?
That...depends.

The Western media categorizes the threat to Arab regimes as "North African", specifying Libya, Algeria, and Egypt. Morocco doesn't play well into this, since Mohammad VI has managed to ease authoritarian rule and give a strong impression of freedom-to-be-released from its cage. But the others are ripe for picking. Overripe, one could say.

Going further east, one shouldn't ignore the totalitarian regimes in Syria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Jordan - and while we're at it, the Gulf States (although like Morocco, they are liberalized to the point of losing that draconian dictatorship vibe).

All these countries have large populations under varying degrees of oppression - notably large populations of unemployed youth, the very group that spearheaded the Jasmine Revolution. Youth unemployment is a huge problem in the Arab world - for example, Saudi Arabia. But will they revolt? There's a strong tradition of top-down authoritarianism that dominates the thinking of many young Saudis, especially the zealots for whom religion is a prime motivator. The reason is not Islam - contrary to popular (Western) opinion, it's very pro-democratic - nor Arab culture - no Pharaohs in that tradition either. Rather, it's the Wahhabi tendency to micromanage people's lives that created a culture of behavioral policing that in turn lends to totalitarian policies and practices. This itself makes a Saudi revolution implausible, as a micromanaged crowd cannot rise up in a focused, forceful way.

Syria's and Jordan's leaders managed to give off a bungling, human, reasonable vibe that makes them not so easy to universally despise. Masses need to unite with rage. And a human face on the leader diminishes that rage in many. As for Libya's Gaddafi, in spite of his people's contempt for him, he manages to appear less self-indulgent and authoritarian than just a wild and crazy guy. So we're left with Egypt and Algeria as the most likely countries to smell the coffee.

Egypt is the place where that pungent smell should - and will - resonate most. Mubarak is universally despised. His cronies have proven themselves as positively evil - raping and torturing opponents, humiliating and ignoring huge parts of the population. The gap between rich and poor is both vast and also humiliating. The poor barely survive. Education is a joke. Housing is ad hoc. The government is a bureaucracy of bribes and bribes alone. Nothing is as it seems or as it is officially claimed to be. Government officials cannot live off salaries, but must - no real alternative is there - live off bribes. Corruption is so rampant - for years! - that there is no meaning to the word "government" or in fact most of the words used for public display.

Mubarak himself has no domestic policy whatsoever. He leaves that to a brutal police trained in suppression, oppression, draconian rule, and crowd control methods that would shock the world had they been ussed on, noty animals, but insects. Thye individual Egyptian does not even register on the government's radar as a cypher. He/she is nothing, below nothing, a creature without meaning or value who still poses a potential threat - and therefore is an enemy - to Mubarak and his ruling class - a small elite so deprived of moral values that they would be better replaced by robots who at least may run on logic.

Mubarak's sole interest is foreign policy. By appearing with foreign leaders, he creates the impression of being a leader, doing great things, having a job, not being what he really is: a gigantic, monstrous obstacle to human life, success, hope, faith, survival, health, or any semblance of humanity for millions of people.

It is illegal in Egypt for more than two people to walk together. Mubarak's prime minister, Nazif, claimed repeatedly, including in an interview with Charlie Rose, that the Egyptian people are not ready for democracy. He lied. Only he, and his master's voice, the wizard of Toz (which in Arabic means "so what" or "to hell with it"), Mubarak.

Of all places in the world, Egypt needs to smell the revolution, to wake up, to stop the fear, to rise up as one mass, to forget about death. Is death really worse than this desperation-without-purpose that passes for life? And to stand en masse, as one gigantic, irrepressible, eloquent, unbeatable, recalcitrant, immoveable force forging at last their own will, freedom to be, once again, at least, people, human, not caged and bused and humiliated animals.

It is time to forget the fear of loss, of being attacked. If the force gains enough momentum, police and media will turn against the evil dictator and help that force to force him out - him and his collaborators - in shame. This is a moment to sieze now - not let dissipate. The coffee's in the air. The perfume, the aphrodisiac of liberty wafts far and wide. The quarry quivers, has not yet bolstered his defenses, is afraid. Now is the moment - THE MOMENT - to make Mubarak's fears realized, to bring his worst nightmares to life, as he brought his peoples' worst nightmares to life and extended them to the forseeable future.

Now is the moment to have a future, to give children a future. For life under oppression is not life. Faith under oppression is not faith. Love under oppression is not love. Hope under oppression is not hope.

Do not wait for a plan, a leader, an army. The plan is to rise up, all without exception, and each man, woman, and child is a leader when they join the force of revolution and rebellion against the evil that is Mubarak. The only force that can destroy such uncompromising evil. The smell of revolution will blow and it will either reach people's hearts and minds, or fall to the ground, lost forever. It is a choice. and the wrong choice is an unacceptable disaster.

One cannot do it alone. Neighbors, neighborhoods, whole swaths of people, a whole nation rising up with one voice is a force even a brutal dictator like Mubarak cannot fight. Think of the day after - a day when Mubarak flees with his family and cronies never to return. Can there be any greater, unmitigated joy, shared by millions, than that?

Damning BP Memo Uncovers "3 Pigs" Strategy

2010-06-08T00:30:00.006-06:00

As tar balls wash up on the white Pensacola beach sands, the Pensacola Independent News has uncovered an internal BP memo, obtained by attorney Brent Coon through discovery in his case against BP where he represents victims of the 2005 BP Texas Refinery explosion. The documents show that BP chose, knowingly and deliberately, to house workers in cheap, flimsy trailers next to the isomerization unit where the explosion occurred, rather than in safer, more solid and blast-resistent structures - solely because of their expense. And this same attitude has translated now to their response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Their mascots for arguing the case for trailers, favoring cost-cutting to life-saving? The 3 Little Pigs...

Mr. Coon originally used the "Three Little Pigs" story in court when speaking to the jury to illustrate his civil case against BP.

"We would ask the witnesses during depositions about the trailers. Whenever we used The Three Little Pigs' tale to describe the risks associated with the trailers versus brick and other structures, BP's attorneys objected."

Yet amazingly, BP used this same story themselves, as Coon found through discovery.

"Right there we found a presentation on the decision to buy the trailers that showed BP using The Three Pigs' fairy tale to describe the costs associated with the four options," Coon said. "I thought, You've got to be f_____g kidding me.' They even had drawings of three pigs on the report."

And what was their argument?

After analyzing the cost of four structures in descending order of blast-resistance and safety, in which the trailers were at the bottom, 100 times cheaper than the safer metal blast-resistant buildings, they merely needed a "cover story" to explain the obvious choice of the cheap buildings. So they estimated the cost of what would be predictably lost human lives - next to one of the most dangerous places in the facility - and callously compare "costs" in purely monetary terms.

"BP set the cost of claim for a lost life at $10 million," said Coon, "and determined it would be more cost effective to use the least expensive trailers and possibly lose a few workers than spend more money on the blast resistant structures."

In other words, they looked at the loss of a human life as an acceptable risk in the greater good of cutting costs. And this is the same attitude they show today, and showed leading up to the Deepwater explosion, in handling their responsibilities to the public, to human life, to the ecosystem that supports their workers, and to the earth itself. In leaving the cleanup to BP - especially leaving the determination of how much money will be spent and on what! - the Administration and the leadership of the Gulf Coast states are putting priceless treasure in the hands of a thief, whose only value system is his own private capital gain.

The Pensacola Independent News contacted BP for comment on these documents, and after some hounding, responded that the "culture" of BP has "fundamentally changed" and they have heavily invested in safety and raised their standards. They did not, interestingly, refer to the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Coon's and other victims' lawsuits in the Texas Refinery explosion, which killed 15 and injured 170, resulted in $1.6 billion in settlements. Apparently their original calculations were off.

Now it looks they are still off in the Gulf. First, they decided NOT to buy a $500,000 acoustic valve trigger that would have shut down the well in case the blowout protector didn't work. Straw house didn't work so well there, either. And now they want to cut corners, for the same obviously failed financial reasons, in the cleanup operation.

Their plan is PR and cut. It's taking too long for Pres. Obama to figure this out. Maybe this memo will wake him up. He should listen to folks on the ground in the Gulf.

On May 24, Pensacola Councilman Larry Johnson grilled BP Civic Affairs Director Liz Castro about why her company didn't use Super Tankers to assist with oil recovery.

They had been successfully used off of Saudi Arabia in the '90's. Johnson's assessment was that BP felt they were too expensive, and didn't want to even entertain the idea. They'd rather throw "junk shots" and "top hats" at the spill, and leave containment to the booms. Good luck with that.

The Florida Congressional delegation has repeatedly asked BP to place $1 billion in an escrow account to reimburse states and counties for their cleanup costs. Instead, the states initially received $25 million in block grants. Later, an additional $70 million was forked over to help with advertising campaigns.

Why don't they try telling BP, and getting some legal clout here? Asking, begging, suggesting doesn't work. Where is the rule of law, now that we desperately need it? BP has no conscience. Now they need to pay the consequences - instead of our great-great grandchildren paying, in lives and loss of resources, for their unspeakable crimes.

It's my greatest hope that publicizing this memo will put on display BP's attitude towards human life - and everything else we hold dear - and convince all who have power (the President, the courts, the Governors of affected states) to exert extraordinary pressure on BP to not only pay for the "cleanup", not merely make "promises", but use every and all effective means, no matter how expensive, to clean up this catastrophic continuous oil disaster in the Gulf.

War as City-State: We Force-feed it, We Pay

2010-04-06T23:22:00.004-06:00

This great post from Tomdispatch offers some mind-boggling numbers for materiel involved in the War in Iraq whose "drawdown" is described thusly:

the American drawdown will be the "equivalent, in personnel terms alone, of relocating the entire population of Buffalo, New York."

Now there's a thought. It's as if the whole war were a city-state in itself, complete with food, shelter, weapons, infrastructure - and of course, a nice big population.

Whether it’s 3.1 million items of equipment, or 3 million, 2.8 million, or 1.5 million, whether 341 “facilities” (not including perhaps ten mega-bases which will still be operating in 2011 with tens of thousands of American soldiers, civilians, and private contractors working and living on them), or more than 350 forward operating facilities, or 290 bases are to be shut down, the numbers from Iraq are simply out of this world.

The conduct of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is unprecented, and yet Americans are mostly oblivious, unaware that we are creating little islands in about the least compatible environments imaginable. What does this mean to the Iraqis and Afghans, to see not only war, but an entire set of city-states forcibly planted in their own beautiful and unrelated culture, shocking them without their participation in it.

In this way, our troops carry not just packs on their backs, but a total, transplantable society right down to the PXs, massage parlors, food courts, and miniature golf courses. At Kandahar Air Base in Afghanistan, there was until recently a “boardwalk” that typically included a “Burger King, a Subway sandwich shop, three cafes, several general stores, a Cold Mountain Creamery, [and an] Oakley sunglasses outlet.”

And of course, there's the staggering cost. The cost in lives, American, but far more Iraqis and Afghanis, is something we'll have to live down. And our children will have to live down. And our future generations, if we have any, will have to live down.

This is the second bubble, courtesy of Republican war strategy. "Down with Government, Up with War". As if war was waged by individuals, not a government. As if war led to freedom. As if war liberated people, instead of enslaving them to its consequences. The aftermath, the bloody, destructive aftermath of war is always littered with lies, claims of victory, claims of power, claims of valor.

But as the second bubble, the bubble of war, is already bursting, its inevitable failure becoming clearer even to a propaganda-numbed, not-very-free-minded (Texas schoolbooks, anyone?) American public, as this becomes then another collapse like the economic collapse, the collapse of the war machine will likewise have worldwide implications. That's because it's ultimately another economic collapse.

It's one thing to wage war. Bad enough. But to conduct war by imposing little city-states within sovereign nations is like forcing a rejected transplant without medication. It's unsustainable. Let's hope this drawdown is for real, and that we seriously draw down on ALL fronts, without leaving our unsustainable "islands" behind.

And by the way, thanks to a load of idiots on both the right and left, there's not much chance of that. Look for Collapse II. Doubt it'll be pretty.

War on Terror: An Israeli Fund-Raising Scheme?

2010-03-18T12:43:00.006-06:00

Len Hart's great post on the Terror Racket is exactly what we need to hear, what I've been saying all along.

The whole War on Terror is an invention. Even the use of the word "terrorist" could be called an Israeli invention, a means of villainizing the Palestinian population and hence legitimizing their own oppression, disenfranchisement, and displacement of them. The latter has been systematic, and financed essentially by the IRS - the same folks who come after honest working U.S. citizens, who tax self-employed entrepreneurs at 15.3% even if they only make $401 a year and don't hire anybody. That money then goes - one could say forcibly - into the pot which, among many other things, is then "donated" to Israel, "one of the richest countries in the world", to finance their long-standing takeover of Palestinian lands, crops, cities, homes.

Now forward to the "War on Terror". Who are the "terrorists"?? This is not about the Red Army, the Basque Separatists, or South American groups. This is about - exclusively - Islamic terrorists. And Israel knows very well that they are the one galvanizing issue uniting all Muslims, regardless to whether they are Arabs, Pakistanis, East Indians, even Americans. It is the obvious oppression of a group of fellow Muslims, the ramrodding of this oppression and its financing by the ostensible Superpower, that galls Muslims. They don't really have an issue with Jews per se. Often anger at Israel flares into anti-Semitism, but this is something Israel will have to deal with - by positing themselves as the "Jewish State", an essentially racist concept, all denials notwithstanding, they open up this Pandora's box on themselves... After all, what's wrong with Palestinians, except being non-Jewish? It's their DNA, supposedly, their culture, not any criminal activity, that is being used to destroy them, to deprive them, to disenfranchise them.

The so-called "terrorists", then, however horrific their actions, are basically a small, international, ragtag group that could much more effectively have been handled by simply revving up already existing law enforcement agencies/structures. Instead, the U.S. created a gigantic, unweildy Department with its own budget, presumably much of it black, and uses it as a means of oppression of all sorts of non-terrorism-related sectors of the population - citizens who disagree with the government, liberals, populists, migrants. And it has been a monumental failure and a showpiece of extravagance and waste.

A little stat from Harper's Index:

Average number of arrests made each year since 2001 by all 4,000 Federal Marshals combined: 4. - Federal spending this represents per arrest: $200,000,000.

And this is a very small segment of the monolith called Homeland Security. Which makes the following even more alarming:

Former Secretary of State Shultz 'credited' Netanyahu for 'effecting a change in American policies on terrorism'. That's 'political speak' for 'Israel extorted billions of dollars in aid by raising the specter of 'terrorism'. Fear of 'terrorism' is responsible for the transfer of billions of dollars to Israel because the U.S. tax payer is brainwashed, literally trained to fear anyone with a tan wearing a turban. Terrorism is how the moneys 'given' to Israel are officially justified. What is 'terrorism' but the practice by the U.S. and its client state, Israel, to extort billions from U.S. taxpayers?

So who's idea was the War on Terrorism in the first place? Israel's? And what does that say about the autonomy of the U.S. government, when it is so powerfully influenced by a small, rather distant, ostensibly foreign nation. A nation that has no problem committing assassinations for political purposes in the name of security, as the Dubai incident shows.

And what do we have to show for all our "largesse" toward this Utopian "Dream State" called Israel, this Holy of Holies? As this Canadian post so succinctly states:

The set of deliberately misleading and discredited assumptions followed by the proponents of the War on Terror must be repudiated. The government is wasting 10s of billions of dollars, propping up this sham, in the wake of the enforced fearmongering that has crept in since 9/11. In return for the tax dollars that pay for blooding our hands, we had habeas corpus struck down, arbitrary “no-fly lists” are implemented, our government is perpetrating terror hoaxes on the people, and over 100 Canadian soldiers have died fighting what Stephen Harper admits is an unwinnable war.

With the economy in the shambles it is, and with economic and even survival conseque4nces for the whole world, I think it is time for the whole world to take a good, hard look at the U.S.-Israeli cozy relationship. Is this the way we want our money spent? It's not just an "Islamic" issue, or a U.S. issue, any more. And if the U.S. is indeed The Superpower. what does it say about the balance of power on this planet, and the future of its inhabitants, that the Biggest Bro on the Block is run by the special interests of a small, well-to-do elite nation whose citizenship is based on DNA, and hence, excludes the vast majority of earthlings? Is this the future?

At least for the foreseeable future in the U.S., even blatant building of new settlements on Palestinian lands - a direct rebuff to anything called "peace process" - is not cause for reviewing the massive "aid" the U.S. bestows on Israel, no questions asked. The truth is that not assassinations, not settlements, not bombing an unarmed civilian population - in the Gaza, in Lebanon (an independent nation, or so we're told), or wherever else they seest that they need - no atrocity is too bad to say "no" to Israel.

This is how the United States lost their conscience, and are actively working to prevent its return. Doubletalk, hypocrisy, and meaningless posturing are, and will always be, the order of the day.

So if you like your planet back, maybe you'll need to review some history of Haiti - where a population of slaves literally overthrew their masters, including the armies of France and England. Even though subsequent economic slavery brought them to the horrific situation they are now in, the lesson remains: people can get things done by never giving up.

So why should voices of reason remain silent? Are we really voiceless, helpless in America? Those who see current U.S. rubber-stamp policy with Israel where they can do no wrong, we will corrupt all our ideals to make them happy, and be happily bled by a racist client state, as anathema, as unconscionable, should finally speak up. And who will fight to the death for my right to say this???

Drone War on Pakistan Parallels Nixon's Bombing of Cambodia

2010-02-07T23:09:00.002-06:00

This article should give pause on the latest strategy in the so-called War on Terror, Pakistan Front, involving the use of drones as a military tactic - in a country, Pakistan, against which we have not declared war:

Like President Obama today, Nixon had come to power promising stability in an age of unrest and with a vague plan to bringing peace to a nation at war. On the day he was sworn in, he read from the Biblical book of Isaiah: "They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks." He also spoke of transforming Washington’s bitter partisan politics into a new age of unity: "We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another, until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.

Sound familiar? The description of Nixon's bombing of Cambodia, ostensibly to "target" the "headquarters" of enemies bent on "harming Americans" sounds just like Obama's drone war in Pakistan - both, notably, targeted areas inhabited by civilians, both were against a nation against whom we were not at war in order to target a supposed leadership of a supposed group against whom we were at war...

In the late 1960s, Cambodia was ruled by a “neutralist” king, Norodom Sihanouk, leading a weak government that had little relevance to its poor and barely educated citizens. In its borderlands, largely beyond its control, the North Vietnamese and Vietcong found “sanctuaries.”

But it gets worse, if the comparison is taking to its ultimate conclusion.

In the meantime, sheltered by local villagers in distant areas of rural Cambodia was a small insurgent group, little-known communist fundamentalists who called themselves the Khmer Rouge. (Think of them as the 1970s equivalent of the Pakistani Taliban who have settled into the wild borderlands of that country largely beyond the control of the Pakistani government.) They were then weak and incapable of challenging Sihanouk -- until, that is, those secret bombing raids by American B-52s began. As these intensified in the summer of 1969, areas of the country began to destabilize (helped on in 1970 by a U.S.-encouraged military coup in the capital Phnom Penh), and the Khmer Rouge began to gain strength.

Ahhh, the drone war, if this analogy works, could lead to a Taliban strengthening, perhaps a win, or a new killing field...

Just to get the idea, think about how the invasion of Iraq became a motivating tool for Al-Qaeda in Iraq (not to mention elsewhere). Think about how the American drone attacks on civilians in Afghanistan alienated those civilians. And think about how drone attacks on civilians in Pakistan could alienate Pakistani civilians, living under a weak ruler in an unstable political environment, where things are going not-so-good. Then look at history:

Like the Taliban of today, many of the Khmer Rouge were, in fact, teenaged villagers who had responded, under the pressure of war and disruption, to the distant call of an inspirational ideology and joined the resistance in the jungles.

If you ask me why I joined the Khmer Rouge, the main reason is because of the American invasion," Hun Sen, the current prime minister of Cambodia, has said. "If there was no invasion, by now, I would be a pilot or a professor."

What's worse was of course the Khmer Rouge's genocide of its own population, starting with enemy number one, those who are educated. It's a sort of war of resentment. And who do you think the Taliban would want to eliminate first? Then ask, does the war in Pakistan, conducted, like Nixon's "Operation Breakfast", at arm's length in the cold, dispassionate, calculating distance of the gamer (referred to commonly as strategist) where human lives don't bleed in your face...is that drone-safe war really a war on terror? Or a seed? Is it, in reality, the instigator, the generator of terror?

Are we really fighting a war on terror? Or are we just playing with guns, posturing for political - international and domestic - power, and in the process victimizing all the soldiers involved in one big, testesterone-fueled, destructive, destabilizing, demoralizing, planet-threatening, hope-and-change-eliminating, peace-blasting runaway train to hell?

Activism Works: IMF Changes Haiti Loan to a Grant

2010-01-28T12:52:00.003-06:00

As reported in my last post, the IMF was offering a loan to Haiti with strings attached, including such downers as raising the cost of electricity for Haitians. Now due to much international pressure, IMF is changing this to a grant. According to Naomi Klein's post:

In response to the wave of criticism, the IMF has just issued a statement saying that they will try to turn the $100-million loan to Haiti into a grant. This is unprecedented in my experience and shows that public pressure in moments of disaster can seriously subvert shock doctrine tactics. They are also now saying that they will not put conditions on the emergency loan--another popular victory, since this is not what they were saying last week. Of course people have to keep up the pressure to make sure Haiti's debts really are cancelled as the IMF is now predicting they will be. Something to hold them to!

Haiti: The West-made Tragedy before the Earthquake

2010-01-21T14:25:00.005-06:00

Before the catastrophic earthquake struck Haiti on January 12, 2010, Haiti was already a disaster area, home to the world's worst poverty, thanks not to Voodoo rites, as some would say, but to the heavy-handed West.

Haiti's vulnerability to natural disasters, its food shortages, poverty, deforestation and lack of infrastructure, are not accidental. To say that it is the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere is to miss the point; Haiti was made poor--by France, the United States, Great Britain, other Western powers and by the IMF and the World Bank.

Aside from the reasons for this, after the devastating earthquake, Haiti has become the locus for this gigantic media blitz:

Soon after almost every disaster the crimes begin: ruthless, selfish, indifferent to human suffering, and generating far more suffering. The perpetrators go unpunished and live to commit further crimes against humanity. They care less for human life than for property. They act without regard for consequences.

I’m talking, of course, about those members of the mass media whose misrepresentation of what goes on in disaster often abets and justifies a second wave of disaster. I’m talking about the treatment of sufferers as criminals, both on the ground and in the news, and the endorsement of a shift of resources from rescue to property patrol. They still have blood on their hands from Hurricane Katrina, and they are staining themselves anew in Haiti.

The issue referred to here is the media's use of the word "looter" and the juxtaposition of Western (U.S./Australian/Euro,etc) "angels" helping pull survivors out in various "miracles" to the Haitians' crimes, gangs and absence of "effective government". This sort of reporting only serves to reinforce preconceived notions about the people of Haiti, whose survival and help for each other is the most amazing and underreported story here, as well as the massive loss of life as it overwhelms the rare survival story.

At the same time, Western financial powers are back at business-as-usual when it comes to Haiti:

To great fanfare, the IMF announced a new $100 million loan to Haiti on Thursday. In one crucial way, the loan is a good thing; Haiti is in dire straits and needs a massive cash infusion. But the new loan was made through the IMF's extended credit facility, to which Haiti already has $165 million in debt. Debt relief activists tell me that these loans came with conditions, including raising prices for electricity, refusing pay increases to all public employees except those making minimum wage and keeping inflation low. They say that the new loans would impose these same conditions. In other words, in the face of this latest tragedy, the IMF is still using crisis and debt as leverage to compel neoliberal reforms.

Creating and perpetuating debt in Haiti to "Western" powers and financial organizations takes power from Haitians to govern themselves, make a living, provide services and infrastructure, and form a coherent, functioning society. Instead of that, they become essentially slaves to their creditors. Now to property-obsessed Westerners, it may seem unfair to let Haiti "get away with" unpaid loans. But in the real world, where human beings actually live, Haitians originally owned the land and it was basically usurped by the French and others, who also stole free labor from the Haitians by enslaving them. That's much worse than an unpaid loan.

And now in the aftermath of the earthquake, the West again puts property over human values. Even in media reporting, as Rebecca Solnit so eloquently discusses, the use of the word "looting" should be banned, because it criminalizes what any rational person under the circumstances would do to survive. Not to mention that the emphasis on "security" takes resources away from the very people they are supposed to help, by presuming "chaos", "panic" and "looting" are a huge threat, a threat to property, while the many stories of Haitians cooperating and showing great altruism go largely unreported.

They also deploy the word panic wrongly. Panic among ordinary people in crisis is profoundly uncommon. The media will call a crowd of people running from certain death a panicking mob, even though running is the only sensible thing to do. In Haiti, they continue to report that food is being withheld from distribution for fear of “stampedes.” Do they think Haitians are cattle?

The belief that people in disaster (particularly poor and nonwhite people) are cattle or animals or just crazy and untrustworthy regularly justifies spending far too much energy and far too many resources on control -- the American military calls it “security” -- rather than relief. A British-accented voiceover on CNN calls people sprinting to where supplies are being dumped from a helicopter a "stampede" and adds that this delivery “risks sparking chaos.” The chaos already exists, and you can’t blame it on these people desperate for food and water. Or you can, and in doing so help convince your audience that they’re unworthy and untrustworthy.

To know how the West really adds insult to injury, one must understand something about how debt and slavery produced the disaster area that is Haiti today. After the French enslaved them, Haitians fought back and won their liberty - no small feat. But due to economic conditions imposed by the West (France & the US among them), the Haitians in 1825 agreed to pay 150 million francs to the French in reparations for having been freed! To do this, they borrowed heavily from France, the U.S. & Germany. The debt was finally repaid...in 1947 - 122 years later! Imagine the interest the West collected on that. But that's not called "looting", is it?
Ah, but then...

In 2003, then-President Aristide called on France to pay restitution for this sum--valued in 2003 dollars at over $21 billion. A few months later, he was ousted in a coup d'etat; he claims he left the country under armed pressure from the US.

Nothing like a little political strong-arming to get those nasty backwater states off your financial back, eh? Right. If France - and actually due to their complicity, the U.S. too, and maybe Germany too - owe Haiti over 21 billion dollars in reparations, now that would really help Haiti out. So why not pay now?

No, they only fork over another 100 million bucks as a loan - to keep them down, where they want 'em. So who's looting whom?? And how precious, how kindly, the West is to help poor little ol' Haiti, who can't even get their act together... or can they??

Bush Team Torture Crony Charged with Wife-Strangulation

2010-01-09T00:49:00.004-06:00

John Farren, former "W" White House Counsel, may not be a torture-legalizing headliner like John Yoo, but he had his hands in the jerry-rigging of White House legal policies to override such impediments to Cheney's torture agenda (aka "robust interrogation") as the Geneva Convention and the U.S. Army field manual. Now he's been arrested for the strangling and attempted murder of his wife Mary Farren - while his own children were in the home. Could it be that there's a link between draconian legal opinion and a propensity to cross the line oneself? Whether or not that's the case, it certainly is another black smudge on the already discredited Bush legal team.

And this was no run-of-the-mill wife-beating, where one hopes at some point the husband realizes what he's doing and leaves her bruised and battered. This was full-scale attempted murder, although it's not yet being charged exactly that way. Some details:

Farren tackled her in a bedroom at their New Canaan, Connecticut home and ripped out a clump of her hair. Then he beat her with a metal flashlight until Mary lost consciousness. When she woke up, he was still pounding away.

Mary Farren was beaten and strangled by her husband in front of their children at their Connecticut home
He began to strangle her as she was again losing consciousness. Despite barely being able to see, she managed to trigger the home's alarm system.

Farren started beating her again and threatened to slit his wrists. He grabbed a large knife and went to the bathroom, coaxing his wife to follow. But Mary instead ran to her daughter's bedroom yelling "Daddy's trying to kill me!" according to a police report.

Mary managed to escape with her 7-year-old daughter and the couple's baby. She fled in a BMW before stopping at a home to call police.

Mary Farren also reported that she greatly feared her husband's violent anger, that her filing for divorce triggered this latest outburst, and that this was not the first incident in which he beat her. And to think he was writing policy for the President of the United States. So much for Republican family values...

Miracle in Turkey: How the Road to Peace Can Be Islamic

2010-01-01T22:59:00.007-06:00

Turkey has long been seen as something of a "bridge" between The West and The Islamic World, even as those 2 cultural worlds have undergone major changes and political transformations. But none of those transformations can rival that of Turkey.

Before Prime Minister Erdogan's AK Party came to power, Turkey was almost manically secular, thanks to the tradition began by Kamal Ataturk, who sought to erase what he believed to be the "backwardness" of religion, including Islamic culture. Of course, "cultural revolution" sounds rather like many of the socialist movements, including China's, that became government tyrannies under the guise of enforcing social justice. With this same style of heavy hand, Turkey also became rabidly nationalistic, and embarked on a long and brutal cultural and political suppression of ethnic Kurds and others. The AK party, branded "Islamic" (ooooh, danger! orange!) by the West, has undertaken a total rejection of such oppressive and wasteful policies. One rarely hears in the press about how the Islamic-leaning AK party has turned from war and suppression to diplomacy and reconciliation in their dealings with the Kurds as well as their neighbors. There are no calls for antagonizing or attacking those of non-Muslim or other religious persuasions, not to mention nationalities. Note that this is in stark contrast to the stereotype of Muslims as being always on the jihad warpath against enemies - religious, ethnic, or those who diverge from some dogma du jour.

Under the old nationalist government much-adored-but-not-befriended by the West, the Turkish lire was famous for being almost worthless. Twenty years ago, you could go into Istanbul, for example, and need cash for bribes just to get around, meet lots of destitute and unhappy-looking people, see run-down buildings beside crumbling historical sites, wonder how people managed to live, and generally notice a sense of general desperation, corruption, over which the human spirit of the people had to struggle to rise.

Now it is as if Turkey has awakened from a bad dream. Landfills have been transformed into gardens with recreational areas for children and sports facilities for others. Bridges, tunnels, sewers, new roads, tram lines have been built. Hospitals, schools, libraries, training facilities, sports facilities, playgrounds, clinics, elderly care facilities and more have been established and are functioning not only in Istanbul and Ankara, but cities around the country. The government has invested $22.6 billion in five years for civil services such as health care and infrastructure in Istanbul alone. At the same time, crime and punishment have been revamped to provide equal enforcement of the law and to make public officials just as accountable as private citizens, and to strengthen and enforce anti-bribery laws. Corruption has died down while political life has been encouraged in many ways, including the establishment of centers where people can discuss political issues.

Both the government and Turkish charities have revived efforts to help the poor, including subsidized bread, access to health care, and money for immediate needs. Local councils have been established to which people can address their needs.

Importantly, money that would have been spent on the military and on skirmishes with neighbors is being spent on the needs of Turkish society. Taking after this same attitude, a more balanced approach in terms of religious freedom is worth looking at.
The previous nationalist government tried to use religion against freedom in an inverted way, by making religious expression illegal and socially "anti-Turkish". Erdogan had many problems to overcome in changing the status quo.

The one that caused the most problems for Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was the lifting of the headscarf ban. A relic of the Kemalist era, the ban on headscarves in Universities has deprived millions of female students of the right to education. While espousing values like freedom of choice and expression, the Turkish secular establishment saw nothing contradictory in not allowing students to cover their hair if they wished to. Erdogan’s measure that promoted true secularism was derided as Islamism by his critics. His choice for the President too was condemned as the future First lady preferred to wear a headscarf. Erdogan resigned in the face of such criticism and called for fresh elections to seek a direct mandate from the people. He returned to power with the greatest margin ever in Turkey. This only served to infuriate the opposition who almost succeeded in having his party disbanded by the Constitutional Court.

Which Turkey would serve as a better role model for the Muslim World?? A nationalist and oppressive regime which emphasizes military aggression and almost fanatic secularism? Or a government that favors Islamic principles of democracy and justice and fairness without making dogma and military enforcement of such the centerpiece of their power? A government that prefers cooperation and peaceful development over military might should be a role model not just for the Muslim World, but for the West, and in fact, for the planet and all its political players, east or west.

Pres. Obama promised to make domestic development superceded the international adventurism of Republican nationalism and cultural evangelism. Those same "forces" have influenced his hand in Afghanistan and driven him from the hope of a promised change of agenda. Maybe he should take a good look at Turkey.

Israel's Future Is Gaza's Shadow

2009-12-28T22:49:00.004-06:00

Israel is a nation that likes to think of itself as being founded on a dream. It likes to think of itself as a righter of wrongs, a homeland of justice for Jews after their horrific suffering under the Nazi extermination and torture program, the Holocaust. But they do not like to look at facts on the ground today, and try to balance this dream - which now looks more like propaganda than inspiration - with the nightmare of what Israel is actually doing to human beings in a little space of earth called "Gaza" in which fellow humans are routinely, collectively starved to death or near-death, or forced to suffer in unconscionable ways, family by family, child by child, home by home. This is Gaza's shadow, and it will soon completely overcast Israel's dream and Israel's future. It is not just the demographic threat so frequently mentioned as The Threat - it is the moral ground irreparably lost by a nation supposedly founded on nothing less than... its moral ground.

In this reference, Heathlander's post "The Betrayal of Gaza", is required reading.

Next week will mark the one year anniversary of ‘Operation Cast Lead‘, the three week orgy of killing and destruction that left more than 1,400 Palestinians dead, the vast majority of them civilians, including hundreds of children.

Beside the civilian casualties - were they all really a threat to Israel's existence? who, outside of Pat Robertson and other deluded liars, believes that? - Gaza's ability to function as an abode for human life was decimated.

During the massacre Gaza’s civilian infrastructure was systematically targeted. Entire residential areas were “almost completely flattened”, dozens of hospitals and clinics were severely damaged, hundreds of schools were destroyed or damaged and 700 private businesses were either partially or totally destroyed. In total a full third of all public buildings [.pdf] and perhaps 14% of all buildings [.pdf] in Gaza were affected.

And since then, Israel blocks the flow of supplies both for rebuilding what was destroyed and for feedling those who survived, down to below the level of a trickle.
Almost 80% of Gazans must rely on foreign aid to survive in the most basic sense. Think of it. They would be far better off in a jungle, or some wilderness. This even beyond collective punishment. It is mass, national imprisonment. Is there a word for mass incarceration? It's a form of slavery.

But there will be repercussions. Not in the form of terrorism, bombs, or the usual suspects. If "what goes around, comes around" has any meaning or truth, this kind of mass crime cannot go without consequences. This is the very moral ground on which Israel claims to have been founded! And now Israel will have to deal with the karma their own actions have brought upon them. There is no justice, no balance, no peace, no human value, no morals, no consideration coming from the policies that led to this overkill in Gaza. What peace were they looking to find - and what has happened to the dream of "never again" genocide, when the people of that dream themselves have perpetrated their own taboo?????

The Surge to the Sinkhole

2009-12-23T14:06:00.008-06:00

It's as if the American public believe that the President's main calling is Commander-in-Chief, to wage wars, and wage 'em real good. Why else would the number one quick fix for sagging popularity for any U.S. President be the Macho Maneuver: start or "rev up" a war? Of course, as Bushes I & II can attest, this pumped-up poll surge generally gives a fast, short-lived high, followed by a much-longer depressed state - unless the war is itself short-lived, euphoric, & sanitizable - e.g., Grenada. Afghanistan, Obama's albatross, is none of the above.

Granted, he gave fair warning during the campaign, stating that we oughta get out of Iraq and concentrate on Afghanistan where, as the story goes, the "real war on Terror" is fought. But Obama also promised to use diplomacy when at all possible instead of blanket military solutions; to listen to "folks on the ground", meaning seeing beyond the perhaps ego-laden views of top commanders; to use his considerable intelligence to weigh events as they occur in real time, and not apply old solutions inappropriately to new problems. In all of these more serious promises, Obama has been a huge let-down.

There is the omnipresent refrain, "if we leave Afghanistan, it will become a haven for terrorists." Same was said about Iraq. Same was said about Vietnam, inserting "communists" - the enemy du hour - for "terrorists." The truth on the ground is that an invasion is an invasion. You can never reconstruct it as a "liberation". Semantics don't feed the hungry, lay down arms, or grow crops. Those words are obvious lies and propaganda.

People in Afghanistan must have been thinking, "What are the Americans doing?" The answer seemed to be (from their viewpoint), killing people and enforcing a corrupt central government. The Taliban - unpopular during the invasion - has started to look like a People's Movement, albeit with nasty tactics. The "unaligned" middle ground of Afghanistan, which includes various tribal leaders, city-dwellers, and large numbers of people who just want their children to survive, may not see the wisdom of drones "surgically striking" homes where "insurgents" live with their wives & kids.

These are essentially foreign troops fighting people whose homeland is Afghanistan. It's very hard to change that fact to "win the hearts and minds" of those unaligned masses. Military action is the least effective way to do it - as it inevitably must disrupt civilian life in the most traumatic ways.

And as to the "terrorist haven" argument: such havens are created not by lack of well-trained foreign troops to target guys in the mountains - but rather by an overwhelming sense of oppression felt to be caused somehow by the West or the U.S. Military action only exacerbates this. They say people will always remember how you made them feel...

The real reason for the "surge" is not "liberation" or Afghan security or the war on terror. The terrorist threat from Afghanistan is no greater than the terrorist threat from, say, Pakistan, Indonesia, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, or Egypt. Why don't we fight all six at once?? Of course, that is suicidal or, at best, absurd. But so is the war on the Taliban. And no, it doesn't work as an "example" for all the other potential "havens" on the possibly-ever-expanding list. After Iraq, I'm sure they've noticed the U.S. is a sucker for overkill. The terrorists' tactic is the most basic of martial arts - get the "bully" or attacker to charge with all his weight - then get out of the way and watch him fall all over himself, collapsing in defeat. Use his weight against him. And the U.S. typically, is biting the bait. Obama, don't you remember LBJ and Vietnam? Happy replay.

The significant parallels between Vietnam and Afghanistan are starkly presented in Thomas Johnson's incisive article in Foreign Policy magazine, notably the point where we, the Big Guys, don't get the nature of the war we're supposedly fighting:

In Afghanistan, the United States still insists on fighting a secular counterinsurgency, while the enemy is fighting a jihad. The intersection of how insurgencies end and how jihads end is nil. It's hard to defeat an enemy you don't understand, and in Afghanistan, as in Vietnam, this fight is being played out in a different war.

A refusal to learn from Vietnam and to understand the nature of the war has to have its reasons. Especially considering the supposed goal of "nation-building" and "helping the Afghani people", you'd think by now someone in power would've figured out that military action is NOT the way to do it. As Johnson points out, just as in Vietnam's stated goals of "helping" and "liberating" the Vietnamese:

Almost exactly the same percentage of personnel in Afghanistan has rural reconstruction as its primary mission (the Provincial Reconstruction Teams) as had "pacification" (today's "nation-building") as their primary mission in Vietnam, about 4 percent. The other 96 percent is engaged in chasing illiterate teenage boys with guns around the countryside, exactly what the enemy wants us to do.

And as in Vietnam, our "puppet" government in Kabul looks, tastes, and smells like Saigon, as Johnson describes:

Contemporary descriptions of the various Saigon governments read almost exactly like descriptions of the Karzai government today. Notwithstanding all the fanfare over this week's presidential voting in Afghanistan, the Kabul government will never be legitimate either, because democracy is not a source of legitimacy of governance in Afghanistan and it never has been. Legitimacy in Afghanistan over the last thousand years has come exclusively from dynastic and religious sources. The fatal blunder of the United States in eliminating a ceremonial Afghan monarchy was Afghanistan's Diem Coup: afterwards, there was little possibility of establishing a legitimate, secular national government.

We can't "democratize" people against their will, nor can we "free" them against their will because this is an oxymoron or worse - the very meaning of freedom and democracy holds that people are allowed their own free will to be enacted. And that means it can't be "our way" or our terms. So this cannot justify the surge.

No, the real reason for the Surge is pride. Military pride: "We can't be defeated! We're No. 1!" - Collective, patriotic pride: "America is The Superpower! USA! USA" - Political: who votes for a loser? or a yellow-bellied coward who backs down from a fight? - Simplistic: "To hell with the consequences! We gotta win!" - and Personal: "I'm not gonna go down as the Commander-in-Chief who backed down, who blinked." A chorus of Republican nasties are taunting already in the bleachers: "Are ya gonna GIVE UP? Are ya gonna LET ALL THOSE DEATHS OF PATRIOTS BE IN VAIN? Isn't America worth anything to you? WE wouldn't back down - we'd die with our boots on."
Etc., etc...

And pride is the downfall of nations, when it gets in the way of reason, logic, sense, or...principle. When it causes armies to invade other countries and call it liberation, in order to take revenge against a rag-tag group who are not in fact citizens of either of the two invaded countries. When it ignores or denies the fact that this invasion will cause the deaths of many innocent civilians, including women and children, not to mention thousands of men who were never involved in the original "triggering" crime - that pride has become conceit. When it causes a nation to use the methods of torture it banned and condemned, that pride has become conceit. When it causes the use of military might to take sides in other nations' civil internal strife or domestic issues, even claiming that this (invasion) will resolve economic and social problems - this is no longer pride, but at best, raw conceit. These are lies in action, and lies in action cannot create peace, prosperity, or the common good.

Conceit is false pride, pride taken to the level where it betrays its own principles. And America has reached that point. Maybe quite awhile ago.

We elected Obama to swallow that pride and lead us on a path of reason, principle, and inspiration. The road to Afghanistan takes him and us in the diametrically opposite direction.

An Better Mideast Strategy: Independent Democracies, Sans Israel

2009-10-23T23:31:00.018-06:00

The Muslim World faces a dilemma, a forced choice between two alternatives, each worse than the other, and none freely determined by Muslims themselves in anything approaching "normal circumstances". In the so-called "War on Terror", they are called upon to "choose" between "Islamist" extremists, aka "terrorists" (the quote doesn't mean I dispute that there is terror here, just that it's loosely applied to a whole scope of movements), and brutal dictatorships sponsored largely by the West and/or Israeli interests represented by the governments of developed nations.

Are you "with us" - i.e., supportive of your repressive, non-democratic, dictatorial, brutal, economy-busting regimes - or "against us" - i.e., supportive of "terrorists", who are the only guys out there standing up to the West/Israel's overwhelming power plays??? And the "West" claims that it is "fighting for freedom" and "pro-democracy". So which group looks more democratic - the ragtag fighters who consider themselves to be, in Afghanistan for example (Battlefield I, you could say), fighting for their country, their families, and their right to self-govern and protect themselves from invaders? Or, say, Hosny Mubarak, the U.S.'s client in Egypt, whose brutality does not exclude rape, political prisoners en masse, police terror, torture and other crimes against basic rights??

Everyone knows that Mubarak's election is a sham. He plainly embarrasses his U.S. supporters. They are not happy with him, because his obvious corruption and totally failed government shines a bad light on anyone who supports him. But he does do one thing. And that is appear as a nominal "Arab" and (for all Muslims, now's the time for pepto-bismol) "Muslim" in so-called "peace negotiations" regarding the Palestinian issue. He is the supreme lackey in international politics. He will do whatever it takes to maintain the charade of a "peace process" without actually making Israel in the least uncomfortable. And what else does the U.S. really want than a lackey who provides pillows for Israel's every nervous breakdown?

Does the U.S. want peace in the Middle East?? Sort of. It sure would be nice. Intellectually, we want it! Rhetorically, we want it! All we ask for is that beautiful thing called "parity". First, Israel must be fully armed, including nuclear arms, no questions asked. Second, whatever they want, arms, money, aid, they must get because they are our "friends" - which means taxpayer-supported womb-dwellers. Peace would mean delivery. They would have to be actually born. They would no longer be a dream. Anathema! Real countries compromise. Real countries can't be racially exclusive. Real countries have to accept real circumstances of real people, not some imagined religious dream that, in application, means applying the ideals of the Third Reich, only with Jews substituting for Germans. No, the U.S. doesn't want Israel to get real, because Israel won't let the U.S. want that. And Peace means Getting Real. So the U.S. doesn't want real actual REAL peace in the Mideast. No.

No, the U.S. sets up and supports client dictators in almost all Muslim countries. Except for the Hated Mr. Ahmedinejad of that nasty country, Iran, which unfortunately for the "democracy-loving West", is a democracy, albeit with a theocratic backdrop. Many, especially conservatives, in America pine for the days of the Shah - who executed and tortured innocent women and political prisoners. We don't see any hatefests here denouncing Hosny Mubarak, let alone the Saudi regime (would the petroleum industry seriously stand for that??). Nobody was particularly upset about Sukarno when he ruled Indonesia. The Gulf principalities/emirates are go-to guys for U.S. interests. And money keeps their low-population-density citizens happy. Hamid Karzai isn't looking too good either, with his tainted election. Gee, we just can't seem to pick the right rulers for the countries whose resources we want to control, or whose proximity to Israel we need to rein in. As for Syria's Assad dynasty - well, it seems Muslims have a problem of their own in working toward a democracy.

Which should be puzzling, considering Islam, the religion. Its original principles are highly democratic. In the early days of the Prophet Mohammad, all Muslims had a vote (all men, that is - remember women's suffrage is only a 20th C thing in the US), elections were held, wealth was shared by law (not in a communist-type model, but with a tax whose proceeds are dedicated to the poor), usury was prohibited, free trade was encouraged, "jihad" meant self-control and self-defense (and offense if it is determined to be necessary for defense - ask any military strategist), there was religious freedom (it was illegal to force anyone to adopt any religion, including Islam), freedom of speech, standards of ethics and common decency, and measures for the elimination of slavery which was viewed as wrong, but given time to change. But as certain families were given more power than others, and wealth built up as well as power within Muslim society, corruption and schisms also appeared, until a more autocratic-style government gradually became the norm. It is not Islamic. The so-called dream of a "caliphate" is not in itself Islamic. What should be the "dream" would be a resurgence of the highest values, mentioned in part above - but that, at the moment, seems impossible.

The "terrorists", seen against the backdrop of corrupt and brutal regimes, look much more democratic. Anyone is welcome to join, regardless of race or national origin. (Women are welcome, too, but in a different, "traditional" role as support people.) They come off as a people's movement, challenging the West, the moneybags of their oppressors - or, of late, the Invaders of their Homeland. What the West calls "Extremists" come off in the Muslim world as a movement against corruption and oppression, pro-family values, pro-religion, patriotic. Because the West has consistently aligned itself with dictators for their own profit at the expense of the citizen-victims, they cannot expect sympathy from the Muslim population in general.

In fact, the "West" has consistently fought AGAINST democratic movements in the Middle East. In the case of Saudi Arabia, a budding, and passionate democratic movement by a Dr. Faqih, residing in the UK, had to put up with his assets being frozen and even personal arrests and attacks by UK authorities at Saudi behest. His crime? Speaking out against Saudi abuses. Oil interests absolutely trump human rights and democracy. "Freedom-loving"? Hardly. Some attempts to provide another party (the Tomorrow party) in Egypt were met with Mr. Mubarak's infamous bulldozer-n-bury government machine. The U.S.'s choice, on his own without any support except ethereal cheerleading, has entered the Land of the Disappeared. Even the Muslim Brotherhood, very popular in Egypt, would at least be far better than what is going on now. Is it not better to have an actual government that works than anarchy controlled by a police state? No - because anything with the name "Islam" tacked onto it is - and this Republican paradigm is still dogma and doctrine - flash some red lights, please - "Terrorism" with a cap T.

But there is something more insidious here. Why is Ahmedinejad constantly demonized but not Mubarak? Because Mubarak doesn't badmouth the Holocaust or say nasty things about Israel. Because Mubarak does not openly support the Palestinians in any meaningful way. Because Mubarak openly supports Israel in principle. And Israel plays a bigger role in international politics than people here generally think. In fact, US Mideast policy is a virtual extension of Israeli security, an obvious fact not lost on most Mideast nations. And Israeli security is seen, by Israel itself, as being so dire that it requires all Arab and/or Islamic nations be weak, or under Western control/influence as much as possible. To this end, dictatorships can be useful insofar as they are amenable to Israeli interests, as is the case with Mubarak, the Saudi regime, the Gulf states, Jordan, and in some weird inverse way, Syria. After all, it was none other than Syrian dictator Hafez el-Asad who slaughtered 20,890 Muslims who were considered Muslim Brotherhood sympathizers and nationalists who wanted to fight for the re-patriation of the Golan Heights. With help like that, why play the Bad Guy? Israel can just stand and watch the Arabs slaughter each other.

Except for those nasties, those terrorists - ah, that wonderful word, "terrorist"! - the Palestinian nationalists, now cornered as Hamas, and their Lebanese sympathizers (as well as Lebanese nationalists), Hezbollah. And their sole supporters in the Middle East, Iran. There you have it. Satan's legions are the anti-Israeli, democracy-seeking, freedom-seeking, independence-seeking, evil Palestinian & Lebanese nationalists who won't kowtow to Israel's "security" policies, and their one powerful ally, democratic, free-speech-daring Iran. Speak against Israel? Dare to speak against Israel? That's not free speech, we say. That's genocide.

But to slaughter women, children, old, young, and helplessly disarmed, deliberately starved people in Gaza over a couple of ineffectual rocket attacks - however unnerving they may be - is not genocide. It's not even overkill. It's self-defense.

Meanwhile, what is Israel? Israel is a race-based state. It is a Jewish homeland. It is not homeland to Palestinians who are the land's indigenous people, Jews having been imported from various locales around the world. Palestinians are 2nd class citizens, barely tolerated in Israel. The nation was founded for one race, and one race only - the Jews. Sound like a Third Reich with the roles reversed? Strange coincidence, isn't it? And who dares to say such a horrible thing? Only the reviled devil, Ahmedinejad, apparently. And what if the Palestinians procreate faster than the Jews? It's a real problem, it's happening now, and everyone knows it.

Right now, Palestinians are living in an open-air prison, supervised by Israeli Jews. The so-called "territories" are in fact a gulag archipelago overseen by cruel armed guards who often shoot to kill. Palestinians are called "terrorists", and viewed by Israelis as inferior, evil, enemies, threatening. Is that neighborly behavior, I ask you? Am I saying Palestinians are angels? What idiot insists that if someone is not a devil, he must then be an angel? We're asking for human/human relations to rise above this degenerate level of race-based politics. And if anti-semitism is a form of racism, then so is Zionism, if Zionism means setting up an exclusively Jewish nation. The concept of exclusivity to one race in one nation is no longer a viable idea. One would have hoped that Nazi Germany was that idea's last stand.

But with Israel fighting for its ideological survival, apparently to the death, to the tune of how many Palestinians and others, it seems that idea is still gasping for breath.

In fact, the so-called War on Terror is an Israeli construct, an Israeli idea. Yes, you can bring out 9-11, al-Qaeda, and all that. But these are a rag-tag troupe of right-wing extremists left over from the U.S.'s failed strategy to get the USSR/Russia out of Afghanistan when it was their war. The U.S. created the force called the Taliban and their nationalistic jihadi bent to counter Russia. Now Russia is out - and the U.S. is in - fighting those very same warriors. And so what's Israel got to do with it? Israel is playing this card for all it's worth, to make the word "terrorist" a household word, to make anti-Islamic sentiment a knee-jerk Western posture (and especially an American posture), and to paint Arabs and Muslims generally as untrustworthy enemies, uncivilized, and hence, in need of Western control and suppression. In contrast, Israel will thereby appear as the Knight in Shining Anti-Terrorist Armor, out to Save Us From Evil.

This is nothing new. The Iran-Iraq War was one of their ideas, to wear down the two countries Israel feared most in a deadly fight with one another. But when U.S. help to Iraq in that war bolstered Saddam's regime, and Saddam began to bluster and bray anti-Israeli rhetoric, that was it for him. The Gulf War was another manufactured war, created by lies ("The Rape of Kuwait"), intrigue (luring Saddam to invade Kuwait), and Israeli urging. Bush Sr's son just finished the job in the Iraq War, which has ended dismally as a total failure, even by Israeli standards. In fact, all facets of the War on Terror can be linked to Israeli security policy, and its insistence on being in a continuous state of war with Muslims and/or Arabs. And the U.S. never, never fails to totally comply with this in every respect possible, both in funds and blood. Excuses and rhetoric vary, but the facts are obvious.

On the other hand, the American public have a romanticized notion of Israel and the Holocaust. There is no logical basis to presume that the slaughter of millions of victims necessarily must be redressed by the removal of another population from some spot of land, and the importation of those ethnically related to the original victims to replace the indigenous population. In other words, as Ahmedinejad often repeats, what do the Palestinians have to do with the Holocaust? Why must they pay the price for the crimes of the Nazis? They are and were not Nazis. It is not their crime. Why, then, must they be removed?

It is true that the British share great responsibility in this injustice. It is true that "well, now, it's happened, and what can we do now? We can't turn back time." Yes, but we can stop oppression and redress wrongs. We can admit what wrongs were made. We can start to act as if justice has a place in international relations. But we absolutely will not. The U.S. has no stomach for justice in matters relating to Israel. Why? Well, it's in too deep...

And so look at who Israel is today. What is Israel now? It is the country that slaughered people in Gaza whom it first starved to near-death, who have no means to make a living or even obtain basic supplies, who are not armed to be mentioned. It is the country with nuclear weapons, armed to the teeth. Genocide is not abhorrent to them, as long as they are not the victims. In fact, they have no problem killing Palestinians with no just cause, in a manner that is abominable. World opinion means nothing to them. Obviously, the Israelis are the first to forget the Holocaust. And who is America to remind them? Who are the Israelis to cause all these wars, all this death and destruction, this outrageous expense, even to Americans? You shall know them by their fruits.

And so what is the Muslim world supposed to do, support radical extremists - and risk having a destabilized country run by possible autocrats posing as Islamic populists, not to mention being unable to come up with a legitimate government - or support pro-Western dictators who make life impossibly miserable and oppressive? This is not a choice at all. And yet many in the West, particularly Republicans and their ilk, bombastically blame Islam and Muslims for some alleged instrinsic disability and disinclination for democracy. If what the West, as imposed by Israeli security policy, offers is limited to these choices, then to hell with them.

Democracy is universal, after all. Those who fight against it cannot lead in the fight for it. If the U.S. cannot stand on its own ideological two feet, then the Muslim world needs to reject them completely and stand for themselves. After all, the Qur'an has a better definition of democracy than the Bible: "The Rule of Law is determined by mutual agreement between you (all)." It's time to mutually agree that dictatorship has gotta go, and extremism is not the only way out. And that democracy does not require recognition of or sympathy with Israel to be viable, free, and independently worthy of recognition.

What if Israel were to become a nation like any other nation, even a refuge preferring Jews but not excluding Palestinians? Israel would not then be a separate issue - it is now the West that has overtly presented the Islamic world with two untenable choices: stand with the West, which often appears to mean standing against one's country, one's survival, one's honor, and one's religion or ethnic identity - especially in the case of the Palestinians - or join the terrorists, the "Islamists", in a desperate last-ditch battle for God and country and honor and all that good stuff - but in the most horrific, thoughtless way that may - or may not - end up destroying all one is fighting for.

On the one hand, we have West-aligned dictatorships that are doing nothing but terrorizing their civilian population, or at best, decimating their economy and lives. On the other hand, we have extremists who defy the Qur'an and the Prophet by bombing fellow Muslims and destroying mosques and basically decimating the people's economy and lives. A good decision requires some objectivity, some careful consideration of the two sides or, hopefully, a better way than either of them. When the knife is at your children's throats, who, I ask, has time or guts for that?

The West, permeated by hypocrisy, lies, and false promises and platitudes, will never come out the winner if they pursue the same demands and same false dichotomy. Israel cannot survive under its current demanding, petulant modus operandi. Islamic countries cannot be viable if they are not free to make their own decisions, both as people and as governments. The human race, civilization, and all that we hold dear - whoever we are - is at stake. Is it not far past time to work toward better choices?

Israel Needs Moral Compass - And This Is a Tough Sell?

2009-08-22T12:20:00.004-06:00

First post in what seems like a century. Have changed my priorities and am blogging less, if at all. But some important things still keep popping up. Like Israel's inhumanity. And look at where U.K. weapons go:

UK weapons are still being used against civilian populations.

Ministers confirmed to the MPs that British-built components were almost certainly used as part of Israeli weapons systems against the Palestinians in Gaza.

What about U.S. weapons? Goes without saying. And what is Israel defending? Children, perhaps? Read this post:

Former Israeli military commander Efran Efrati recently testified to the BBC that Palestinian children are ‘routinely ill-treated’ by Israeli soldiers:

“You take the kid, you blindfold him, you handcuff him, he’s really shaking… Sometimes you cuff his legs too. Sometimes it cuts off the circulation.

“He doesn’t understand a word of what’s going on around him. He doesn’t know what you’re going to do with him. He just knows we are soldiers with guns. That we kill people. Maybe they think we’re going to kill him.

“A lot of the time they’re peeing their pants, just sit there peeing their pants, crying. But usually they’re very quiet…

“When the kid is sitting there in the base, I didn’t do it, but nobody is thinking of him as a kid, you know – if there is someone blindfolded and handcuffed, he’s probably done something really bad. It’s OK to slap him, it’s OK to spit on him, it’s OK to kick him sometimes. It doesn’t really matter.”

When will the lessons of the Holocaust ever be learned? When will people ever learn anything? I guess power is a very addictive drug, and it kills the conscience.

Iran: The Crushing Significance of Little Things

2009-06-22T11:28:00.004-06:00

That what was once, just before the election, a sign of hope, of genuine discussion and democracy, of exchange between two sides, the pro-Ahmedinijad side and the pro-Moussavi side, as reported by Joe Klein in Time, now has degenerated into a violent confrontation that threatens to undermine the very legitimacy of Iran's system of government - this is a study in the crushing significance of little things.

The Iranians weren't asking all that much: both sides simply want free and fair elections. The bugaboo here is not America's favorite whipping boy, Ahmedinejad, so much as it is the Ayatollah Khamanei, whose Friday speech changed the tone from possibly resolvable to totally insoluble conflict between two sides, framed by obvious lies about Iranian unity. By choosing the lie and forced violation of basic human rights, which is always a violation of a nation's sense of security, in this one speech, those few words, this apparently "small" moment of time has transformed a budding democracy into a totalitarian nightmare acting under the veneer of what had been its democracy. I do not believe this is the aim of Ahmedinejad, who has played the Robin Hood of Iran's underclasses whose more "fundamental" and fatalistic view of religion was a riveting political force and remains so. He actually accomplished some "democratizing" things during his mixed-record tenure. But it is the crackdown and the grip on power evidenced by Khamanei that has unleashed the Basij and other paramilitary/police forces as arms of brutal totalitarian acts of violence and suppression that has brought the world's condemnation and horror at what has happened to Iran.

This is particularly weird when viewed in the light of who the opposition is: Moussavi was a trusted aide of the late Ayatollah Khomeini, father of the Islamic Republic. Khamanei appears to have reached the egotistical point of seeing anyone who appears to threaten his perceived "divine" grip on power as Enemy, and hence he has become more than what his title has previously entailed. He has become, as Supreme Leader, Iran's de facto dictator, with Ahmedinejad as his politically savvy enabler/front man. I hope this situation will change, but it appears to be getting worse.

Jihad: Another Right-Wing Tactic?

2009-03-27T23:01:00.003-06:00

Abukar Arman's insightful article, "Jihad Against the Abuse of Jihad" spotlights problems on both sides of the "jihad" issue, and how this concept is abused by both Muslims on the extreme "right-wing" (my term) and their right-wing counterparts, sworn enemies in the West.

In light of the rampant extremism and militarism around the world, nothing proves more dangerous than the manipulation of truth for political ends. This tactic facilitates the demonization process that blurs ideologies and beliefs in both the West and the Islamic world. And, no concept is more abused by both sides than the concept of Jihad.

To Muslim extremists and their cronies, Jihad is a narrowly defined license to fight their perceived enemies (including Muslims, as is the case in Somalia) even if that leads to atrocities against civilians. And to Western extremists and their cronies, Jihad is a religiously sanctioned, perpetual holy war led by militant non-state actors sworn to destroy Western values and civilization.

As Robin Wright wrote in Newsweek, a "soft Islamic revolution" is afoot among Muslim masses, seeking a more centrist (?), socially modern way to both be Muslim and a reasonable participant in the world and its trade, views, education, science, etc. That means being true to one's principles, but otherwise, neither Western nor extremist.

So in describing the meaning of the word "jihad", Mr. Arman goes for the heart of the issue:

While the concept carries different relevance for different people, the Arabic word means to strive or struggle toward achieving a higher aim, which includes the "struggle in the way of God." It can also mean to defend oneself, or to strive against injustices. Finally, Jihad means the attainment of the ultimate goal of Tazkiyatul Nafs, or purification of the soul - morally, spiritually and ethically. Indeed, it is this latter aspect, the Jihad with oneself as one resists temptations and strives against his/her evil tendencies, which Prophet Muhammad referred to as "the Greater Jihad." The purification of the soul, or simply self-purification, is an around-the-clock process of deep introspection.

Despite great achievements in the fields of science and technology; in the compilation and standardization of knowledge; and, yes, in the art of its dissemination, humanity still remains in an embryonic, if not an imbecilic, stage when it comes to morality and ethics.

As for that last point, witness the GOP...

And their creation of The Perfect Enemy out of the Muslim world would be Exhibit A for total imbecility.

In the past eight years of global political discontent, one persistent warning has been systematically ignored: When militant politics takes over the stage, reason makes a run for the exit. This was a period when people were generally herded toward one side of the argument or the other. Two nihilistic manifestos dominated the political discourse and brought the world closer to a self-fulfilling prophecy known as the "clash of civilizations": the global war on terror and the global Jihad.

The former was based on an erroneous premise that "political Islam" in all its manifestations is anti-democratic and anti-Western, and, as such, should never be afforded a space in the marketplace of ideas. Proponents of this view insisted that such movements were dangerous fronts for Muslim militants with sinister "Jihadist ambition," intent on destroying the West because of its freedom and economic success. Therefore, they were to be met at their incubation place: with "preemptive" force if they were based in foreign lands and by draconian policies if they were stationed in the West.

And Muslims didn't do any better, falling for the same sort of right-wing lies:

The concept of "global Jihad," on the other hand, was based on an opposite yet equally erroneous premise - that the West is collectively bent on destroying Islam by occupying the Islamic world: exploiting its natural resources, oppressing its peoples and Westernizing Islamic values. And as such Jihad against them is not only right, but the moral thing to do.

The proponents of this manifesto, such as Al Qaeda, selectively use the confrontational rhetoric often used by their counterparts in the West - secularist and evangelical Zionists - to lend credence to their claim. And they, too, work hard to conceal two particular realities: that Muslims are afforded more rights in the West than in most of the so-called Islamic countries when it comes to practicing their religion freely and establishing Islamic institutions; and that the Obama administration is adamant about its desire to improve relations with the Muslim world.

Note that both sides are male-dominated drives to simplify all life to a fight-to-the-death struggle against ideological Enemies. Maybe it's time for women to not only take more of the helm, but to show men that, well...

Real Men talk before they shoot. And if they do poetry, so much the better. At some point, don't men prefer to live with women and children, too? It's time to change what "jihad" means on all sides of all fences.

Is Obama Repackaging Bush's War on Terror?

2009-03-20T11:42:00.003-06:00

Andy Worthington's done it again. This time, asking if Obama is really just repackaging Bush's war on terror.

Changing the names of things was a ploy that was used by the Bush administration in an attempt to justify some of its least palatable activities. In response to the 9/11 attacks, for instance, the nation was not involved in a limited pursuit of a group of criminals responsible for the attacks, but instead embarked on an open-ended “War on Terror.” In keeping with this “new paradigm,” prisoners seized in this “war” were referred to as “detainees,” and held neither as criminal suspects nor as prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions, but as “enemy combatants,” without any rights whatsoever. Later, when the administration sought new ways in which to interrogate some of these men, the techniques it endorsed were not referred to as torture -- even though many of them clearly were -- but were instead described as “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Why "Invisible" Geno-Rape in Africa Is Everyone's Disaster

2009-03-04T01:02:00.009-06:00

Now that the world is mostly connected by internet, satellite, air travel and more - now that the economy's meltdown means the global economy's meltdown - now that drought in, say, China, is a concern to people in, say, Kansas - and party affiliation is irrelevant - now when doing what's "good" for America has to also be somehow "good" for the rest of the planet - now we look at the "Invisible War", the unreported war, the conflict in the Congo where mass atrocities are a way of life, in a manner so unspeakable that it defies language.

The object of these atrocities are women. Women on a scale of sheer totality. The Democratic Republic of Congo's roving militias have essentially declared war against the Female in her totality. Any and all women are fair game. There appears to be no rhyme or reason to it, except unabashed, drug-fueled, abuse and poverty-driven, depravity and cruelty. In Bob Herbert's NYT op-ed, he describes some of these horrors:

This sustained campaign of mind-bending atrocities, mostly in the eastern part of the country, has been one of the strategic tools in a wider war that has continued, with varying degrees of intensity, since the 1990s. Millions have been killed.

Women and girls of all ages, from old women to very young children, have been gang-raped, and in many cases their sexual organs have been mutilated. The victims number in the hundreds of thousands. But the world, for the most part, has remained indifferent to their suffering.

How much coverage has this gotten in the media? How much outrage? A few articles last January, overwhelmed by economic and election news, not to mention the ugly Israeli massacre of Gazan civilians. These women have no spokespeople, no connections to us. When you read a title displaying the word "Congo" or "Congolese", do you seriously jump on the link, or, riveted, read the article? It's on the planet, but not particularly significant to most people's worlds. It's time for that to change. This is not just a war. It's a holocaust.

The war itself, between many groups, is over control of the country's wealth, and has been going on since the '90's. It is also directly linked to the famously genocidal war in Rwanda. In fact, news surfaced awhile back of its child soldiers, and at this moment war trials are being held in the Hague over previously reported atrocities. But the extent to which the war has brutalized women and families has just been released in a report by two humanitarians.

The report, "Women's Rights Violations During the Conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo," was written by Lisette Banza Mbombo and Christian Hemedi Bayolo of the Association for the Rebirth of Human Rights in Congo, based in Kinshasa, the capital. It might have gone unnoticed outside the country had it not come to the attention of the International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development in Montreal, an independent body created by the Canadian Parliament.

Women almost never get redress for rapes, and the devastating effect on children and families cannot be quantified, let alone remedied, avenged, or somehow alleviated.

The Congo report describes graphically the horrific abuses of a war fought out of sight, where the number of international peacekeepers is impossibly small. Mass rapes, often to demoralize enemies, seem to take place everywhere, the authors found. In the eastern region of South Kivu, the report said, a Congolese rebel army allied to Rwanda had buried women alive after ramming sticks into their vaginas, to terrorize the local population.

International organizations estimate that 2 million people may have died in the Congo war; this report speculates that women account for many of the victims.

The goal of the perpetrators was to humiliate and torture their victims, but also, apparently, to annihilate their humanity. And in that sense, their humanity's annihilation is ours - if we ignore it. The brutalizers cannot be left to gain power or get away with such atrocities. This goes beyond what most people think of as criminal behavior. It is the unspeakable - about which we should, in all conscience, be compelled to speak. Or as Bob Herbert reported,

“These women are raped in front of their husbands, in front of their children, in front of their parents, in front of their neighbors,” said Dr. Denis Mukwege, a gynecologist who runs a hospital in Bukavu that treats only the women who have sustained the most severe injuries.

In some cases, the rapists have violated their victims with loaded guns and pulled the triggers. Other women have had their organs deliberately destroyed by knives or other weapons. Sons have been forced at gunpoint to rape their mothers. Many women and girls have been abducted and sexually enslaved.

It is as if, in these particular instances, some window to what we think of as our common humanity had been closed.

It not only destroys the women's sense of their own humanity or worth as beings, but it does the same for everyone around them.

“The second consequence is that the whole family and the entire neighborhood is traumatized by what they have seen. The ordinary sense of family and community is lost after a man has been forced to watch his wife being raped, or parents are forced to watch the rape of their daughters, or children see their mothers raped.

“Neighbors are witnesses to this. Many flee. Families are dislocated. Social relationships are lost. There is no more social network, village network. Not only the victims have been destroyed; the whole village is destroyed.”

As we read this report, we too become witnesses to an unspeakable crime, about which we must speak. Our very humanity, our bond with eachother and with the earth, has been hainously violated. It must not pass without consequence to the guilty.

All this horror for wealth and power? Is this not the "profit motive" gone awry? Is this not the anarchy at the end of extreme anti-government ideology? With the world's resources vanishing under a prolifirating horde of humanity, we need to get honest about values, what is sacred and what is ridiculous. Or we too, may be fighting a war against ourselves, our families, against women, against children, against anything that has real meaning or purpose.

This is your world without "liberal" compassion, without functioning government, all guns, guts, and "glory".... all dysfunctional holocaust.

Thinkbridge Is Back - Let's Hope Torture Is Not

2009-02-23T14:06:00.005-06:00

It's been over 10 days, the news is excreting at a rate that is positively diarrheal, and here is this blogger, stuck in a constipated time warp. There's the wonderful news that Obama signed a ban on torture and a return to the Army Field Manual. Add to that his order to close Gitmo. Tempered by that nasty court case indicated that the reversal won't be so clear-cut.

But Slumdog Millionaire's rise to the top of the Oscars is seen in the slums of Mumbai as a victory for them. Let's hope the same happens for the rights of the criminally accused, war on terror or otherwise. There's no such thing as an untouchable, and there's no such thing as an "unconventional" human being. An accusation is just that. An accusation. It's not a conviction. There's always the possibility that the accused could be innocent. Yet GW Bush was hell-bent on torturing - I repeat, torturing - the accused, even though the U.S. has always maintained that such torture doesn't produce a real, admissible confession.

"Unconventional". That was the Republicans' excuse for torturing the accused and throwing away the presumption of innocence. These were not human beings. These were unconventional human beings. I suppose it goes with the appellation of "aliens" as applied to migrants. Words are important. So when a man is called a "terrorist", regardless of whether he actually committed or contributed to any acts of terrorism,
it whets the appetite for revenge, hence torture.

Torture is not reasonable. It's an emotional "punishment". It is not a technique. It's a way of dehumanizing another human being, when their humanity is disturbing, when it gets in the way, when it threatens the severity of one's rage, one's ego, one's quest for superiority and control over others. And Bush, more than Cheney, was ruled by emotions. He was no thinker. He ruled from the gut. Cheney did not "rule" him, as many think. He brought out that "gut" into the realm of ruthless application.

Let's hope the vestiges of that horrific legacy are truly gone forever, and Obama will really abolish them, and not let the spectre of "national security" (remember the Nazis!) allow dehumanizing humans back into th e realm of social acceptibility.

Bush-Grown Prisons Need Profit-bringing Detainees

2009-02-12T21:07:00.009-06:00

National Public Radio gives us this report on local resistence to and protests against the intrusion of excessive detention centers - prisons - into their communities. Immigration Detention Centers.

Here's the deal. First, Bushco builds prisons-for-profit creating a "New Industry".
Then, to complete the capitalist circle, "customers" have to be "created" for the New Industry. And who are these "customers"? Well, we can't create more actual criminals than already exist. But we can create new laws and legal snafus that "snare" customers into these awaiting "detention centers". Presumably, if they continue on their current path, they will one day be called "Border Recovery & Retention Processing Facilities." The keyword "border" clueing in the cognoscenti that this is an immigration issue. Ah yes! That's the perfect "customer base" - non-citizens!

According to NPR:

The immigration crackdown of recent years has been possible, in part, because the Bush administration has greatly expanded its detention space. This is set to continue in next year's budget, with new centers planned in several states. But some are meeting local resistance.

So in these economically recessed times, the prison business is booming! Or is it a bubble?? Is there too much space? Note that immigration has slowed down, due to draconian border-control techniques and that clincher, the criminalization of migration. Yes, that human tendency that brought Asians to the Americas, and Africans to Europe, and basically assisted homo sapiens' survivability by mixing up the gene pool - migration - is now a criminal act in the United States. Unless one has "proper documentation".

Since the latter is a bureaucratic nightmare involving lots of money, migrants are easy targets. So those empty prisons CAN be filled - with massive arrests of "illegal aliens" - and what a great title that is! Problem is - it begs the issue of human rights. Something Republicans hate.

It's a typical Republican industry really. It's xenophobic: they're not Americans! It's corporate-friendly: the prison business is Big Business. It's abusive of human rights: no bleeding hearts! It's heavy-handed security: lock 'em up now! It's all about greed: let them make money out of punishment! It's anti-government: let's privatize justice! And above all, it's useless, fantasy-based: we don't really need these prisons.
And the sad part is, it's still going on. When are we going to stop being pushovers to losers?

Torture Evidence Withheld from Obama: Who's in Charge?

2009-02-11T22:26:00.007-06:00

In this great diary, Valtin exposes a situation where the Pentagon has blacked-out an entire two pages of material showing evidence of torture in the case of Binyam Mohamed. We're talking "medieval-type" torture. Without even knowing if the guy was really guilty. He's a citizen of Ethiopia. Why are they hiding this from their own Commander in Chief? What will his reaction be?

In a shocking revelation just posted at UK Guardian, Binyam Mohamed's attorney Clive Stafford Smith, who is also director of the legal charity Reprieve, reports that "substantial parts" of a memo, attached to a letter to Barack Obama, documenting evidence of Mohamed's torture at the hands of CIA agents and their extraordinary rendition proxies, were blanked out so the president could not read them. Who did that?

US defence officials are preventing Barack Obama from seeing evidence that a former British resident held in Guantánamo Bay has been tortured, the prisoner's lawyer said last night, as campaigners and the Foreign Office prepared for the man's release in as little as a week....

Stafford Smith tells Obama he should be aware of the "bizarre reality" of the situation. "You, as commander in chief, are being denied access to material that would help prove that crimes have been committed by US personnel. This decision is being made by the very people who you command."

Valtin quotes Smith's letter to Obama:

Dear President Obama:

I am writing with great urgency concerning the rendition and torture of a Guantanamo Bay prisoner represented by our charity. His name is Binyam Mohamed, and he is a British resident.

You will doubtless have been informed about Mr. Mohamed's torture -- he was abused in truly medieval ways over a period of more than two years in Pakistan (at the behest of the US), then again in Morocco (where he had been rendered by the CIA), and then in the Dark Prison in Kabul.

There has been a firestorm in the media of our closest ally, the United Kingdom because, according to two British judges, the Bush Administration "threatened" to withdraw national security cooperation with the UK if the judges ordered the release of materials concerning the torture of Mr. Mohamed in US custody.

The British judges bowed to this 'threat'-- but suggested at the end of their judgment that your administration might reconsider the position taken by your predecessors....

Since we, at Reprieve, are US lawyers with appropriate security clearances, we have access to this classified material. We have therefore assembled a memorandum that collates the evidence of torture in question. It is attached.

... for now, to deal with the British judges' request, we are submitting this information to you with no reference to any agent's name, or even the location of the abuse. Thus, as the British judges suggested, there is nothing in the memo that divulges material that should be considered classified.

We are submitting this letter and attachment to the Privilege Review Team established by the Department of Defense to deal with these issues....

If the DOD is unwilling to forward this material to you, then we will send you only what we are allowed to send you -- which will be a copy of this letter and a redacted version of the memo illustrating the extent to which it has been censored.

And here's a copy of the letter, all blacked-out except for the header. What does this mean? Who's censoring the President? Why?

And if this doesn't get you angry, how about this description of how Mohammad was tortured from Scott Horton at Harper's:

Binyam Mohamed is a 30-year-old Ethiopian who was granted political asylum in Britain in 1994. In 2002, he was seized by Pakistani authorities and turned over to American intelligence officials in connection with the Bush Administration’s extraordinary renditions program. He was shuttled between CIA-operated facilities in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Morocco. During this period of American-sponsored detention, according to court papers, Binyam Mohamed was "routinely beaten, suffering broken bones and, on occasion, loss of consciousness. His clothes were cut off with a scalpel and the same scalpel was then used to make incisions on his body, including his penis. A hot stinging liquid was then poured into open wounds on his penis where he had been cut. He was frequently threatened with rape, electrocution, and death." He is now reported to be close to death in a prison cell in Guantánamo.

Note that Mohamed was not even convicted yet! What purpose does a presumption of guilt, followed by torture, without due process, serve? It serves the salacious thirst for revenge on the part of the lowest level of unthinking dehumanized bestiality. Is that why we elected Barack Obama? Or was his campaign, and indeed his first days and weeks in office, marked by fulfilment of his campaign promise to reverse the dehumanizing process started by the Republican Bush-Cheney administration by closing Guantanamo Bay and stopping torture? That certainly was right up there with Job One.

So what does it mean that some operatives at the Pentagon are censoring Obama's mail? To protect him politically? Or to keep him in the lap of Cheney's evil web of criminal atrocities, by putting blinders on him?

Are we going to let atrocities committed in the name of the United States continue? Or go unpunished? What the hell is the difference between this atrocity and anyone else's atrocity? Hypocrisy. We claim to be better. And so we are far worse. Obama was elected to get rid of this kind of hypocrisy and cruelty in the name of fear and security. Is someone trying to prevent him to do just that? And if so, can't the Commander-in-Chief fire these low-life torture-mongering fear-groveling go-to Cheney-lovin' guys?

President Obama, it's time to take America back. Insubordination to the president elected by the people, for the people, is insubordination to democracy itself. No, torture is never justified by any ends. It defines the very principles by which one lives and organizes society. Its presence means no democracy, no respect for human rights exists. Its absence is the beginning of hope and change. Remember? The majority voted for hope and change, not coverups for torture and other abuses - but transparency.

Transparency begins with the President and what information he receives. This is no small matter. Our very future and moral standing depend on this point.

Female Suicide Bombers Raped Into Submission

2009-02-06T18:52:00.004-06:00

A middle-aged female suicide bomber recruiter in Iraq, according to this report,

In a prison interview with the Associated Press -- with interrogators nearby -- she said that she helped to organize the rapes of young women and then stepped in to persuade the victims to become suicide bombers as their only escape from the shame.

This interview occurred after her arrest, of course.

A middle-aged woman suspected of recruiting more than 80 female suicide bombers has been arrested in Iraq, a senior officer said today.

Samira Ahmed Jassim, 51, confessed to sending 28 of the women to carry out attacks, Major-General Qassim al-Moussawi, a Baghdad security spokesman, said. She was captured at an undisclosed location a fortnight ago.

She was a member of Ansar al-Sunna, a Sunni Arab militant group. Apparently, most of these recruits were coerced somehow.

She had to talk to one elderly woman several times before persuading her to blow herself up at a bus station, she added.

She spent a fortnight recruiting another woman, a teacher, and had problems with the woman's husband and his family, according to the confession. This woman also went on to blow herself up.

They called her "mother of the faithful", but that faith could not be Islam. Coercion is as far as you could get from Islam. And as for the end justifying the means, in Islam, the means gets you your end - in this case, she should be very afraid of the consequences. The ideology of this is abominable. And rape? What the hell is she fighting for?

Torture Is Cool: Legacy of Bush/Cheney Propaganda

2009-02-06T03:42:00.004-06:00

"Torture Chic", subtitled " Why Is the Media Glorifying Inhumane, Sadistic Behavior?", a thought-provoking article by Maura Moynihan, really struck a chord with me. This is not exactly new, but it reminds one of the last days of Rome when throwing people to the lions (and other wild animals) was a spectator sport - entertainment for the Romans, and not just a elite class. Not so long ago, an LA Times editorial remarked (and the blogosphere expanded) that Americans were "blase about torture."

From such banal offerings as "Wrestling Entertainment" and its obsession with "bad guys" to the pro-military, get-the-Islamic-jerks propaganda spewed from all manner of sources, there has been a growing popular macho movement towards acceptability of torture, cruelty and sadistic behavior.

In their zeal to legalize torture and trounce the Bill of Rights, the Bush team crafted a media campaign to sell the "War on Terror" as a righteous quest retribution for 9/11, inciting fear of future carnage to justify violating the Geneva protocols and the U.S. Army Field Manual. While the Bush torture policy made stunning progress through the courts and the legislature, with the Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act of 2006, there followed an increase in the normalization of torture images in popular culture, a growing acceptance of violence as effective, routine.

When photographs of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib appeared in 2004, Bush's approval ratings sank, yet torture themes multiplied in film and TV. From 2002 through 2005, the Parents Television Council counted 624 torture scenes in prime time, a six-fold increase. UCLA's Television Violence Monitoring Project reports "torture on TV shows is significantly higher than it was five years ago and the characters who torture have changed. It used to be that only villains on television tortured. Today, "good guy" and heroic American characters torture -- and this torture is depicted as necessary, effective and even patriotic".

So are these the "new American values"? And if so, what distinguishes us from, say, Al-Qaeda? How long before Americans could use techniques such as rape to coerce other Americans to do things they otherwise would not - in the Machiavellian "end-justifies-means" philosophy espoused by prominent neocons? Where is their moral high ground over al-Qaeda?

Human Rights First has just released a short film entitled "Primetime Torture" that examines how torture and interrogation scenes are portrayed in television programming. A retired military leader interviewed for the film says, "The portrayal of torture in popular culture is having a significant impact on how interrogations are conducted in the field. U.S. soldiers are imitating the techniques they have seen on television -- because they think such tactics work."

Lately it seems that three out of five offerings at the local Cineplex are tales of clever and nimble torturers and serial killers. This mass marketing of the murderer, sadist and child molester endows the deviant with a fictitious intelligence, the pretense of a rich and complex "inner life", a particularly annoying Hollywood buzzword. Such characters aren't presented as perverts, rather, they're complex geniuses, creative and tormented, ever misunderstood. It must come from the suits, who study box office returns for the "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" franchise. Whereas actresses frequently complain that the only roles available are for killers or tarts, actors bemoan the dearth of "serious" movies amid piles of scripts about guys shooting off guns. They'll play the killer if they have to, it's work.

There is lots of evidence that so-called pop culture has a very heady influence on people's mindsets in general, especially people without a strong "counter-influence" such as family or cultural values that override these influences. And in the military, the military culture itself overrides, or can easily override, one's previous cultural values.

I know of several people in the military who have emerged deeply changed and affected by their experience, and not in good ways. They returned alienated from friends and family, introverted, depressed, moody, unstable, uncommunicative, obsessed with security or weapons, or even prone to addictions. Opening the door to torture added to the stress of fighting a confusing and unclear war in culturally alien territory where any value system seems not to apply... all this can lead to abuse. It's the absolute wrong way to go.

In the Bush years torture images migrated from Hollywood to fashion and advertising. ...In 2007 a fashion blog proclaimed; "Torture is the New Black", when John Galliano's 2007 runway show male models wore hoods, nooses, handcuffs, and had their bodies painted with gashes, cuts and cigarette burns. Then Italian Vogue ran 30 pages of color photographs by Steven Meisel, depicting models elegantly clad in Dolce & Gabbana, Prada and more, being interrogated and beaten by policemen with clubs, knives, guns and attack dogs. Many fashion writers embraced "Torture Chic". Joanna Bourke, a professor at Birkbeck College, observed that the images served "the interests of the politics of torture and abuse. There is a vicarious satisfaction in viewing these depictions of cruelty in the interests of national security.'

Interests of national security?? Vicarious satisfaction? What security is that, exactly? And what about when the tables are turned? Did anyone ever tell these people that the tables always are turned, sooner or later?

According to Human Rights First:

U.S. interrogators say that not only is torture illegal and immoral, it is also ineffective as an interrogation tactic – because it is unreliable. Moreover, evidence gained through torture is inadmissible in court – and therefore unusable for prosecuting alleged terrorists or criminals.

Torture, as it is performed by American characters on television, regularly produces reliable information – and quite quickly. When writing about interrogation, writers might consider creating scenes that more accurately mirror reality: showing that torture often incapacitates suspects (or kills them); that innocent people are often mistakenly tortured; or that victims of torture provide false information. On television today, torture has few consequences for the torturer and the tortured ... it would be difficult, if not impossible, for those who torture or are tortured to resume normal life quickly as they do on television.

So torture is not helpful to security, not helpful to law enforcement, achieves nothing militarily, does not do anything except destroy the image of America in the greater public around the world. It makes America look like the villain, the cruel taskmaster, the bad guy. And in effect, by engaging in torture, that may actually be the case. America is acting as a rogue nation in defying the Geneva Conventions it originally espoused.

Obama is absolutely right in opposing torture and undoing the unimaginable damage done by Bush and the Republican neocon right by allowing and encouraging it. Let's hope that popular culture will catch up with Obama in standing tall for reason, compassion, human rights, science, the Constitution, taking action to deal with challenges, and being upfront and direct to the American public, as well as working with diplomacy before guns.

GOP: The Party of Fear, Loathing, and Mongering

2009-02-04T20:12:00.003-06:00

For a few magnificent moments, America seemed awash in good vibes, sunlit vistas, brotherly-sisterly love, dreams being fulfilledk ancient rivalries turning to handshakes, other cheeks being turned, kisses and hugs being given, earth looking forward to peace and change, and peace on a well-balanced albeit agonizingly slow fall towards earth. It was the Obama Moment. The greatest ushering-in of any Presidential Era in living, maybe even historical, memory. But now...

They're back. The Republicans, that is. And with them, fear, fear-mongering, loathing, loathing-mongering, orneriness, orneriness-mongering, backtracking and backtrack-mongering. They stand as one, united, to be something, anything, as long as it represents the Opposers, The Id, Defiance, Rebellion, The Contrarian, and in this case, just saying "NO!" to bailing out an economy they and their cohorts, Bushies all, trashed. They trashed the economy with their voodoo Reaganomics on megalying speed, and now that it's tanking, they say, to the last man and woman, "No Safety Net!"

Why? Because the Republicans have adopted the oxymoronic slogan "Country First, Government Last." Reagan succeeded to instill the Republican Collective Consciousness with this idea that Government=Evil, aka Big Government=Big Evil. Which makes one wonder why Republicans would ever elect one of their own to such a cabal as "Government" in order to actually run it? If it is evil, what does that say about Reagan? He was a part of what? A fishing expedition?

Ah, no, good Republicans enter government in order to supposedly "minimize" it or get rid of it. At least that's the line. The reality is the diametrical opposite. Under Republican leadership, the government has grown so big neither we, nor the combined wealth of the planet, can afford it. Of course, we're not talking about social programs. We're talking about that giant sitting Holy Bear called the Pentagon. And don't forget Homeland Security. IN other words, government has been slowly replaced by military and police functions, which are invading every aspect of life - under Republican leadership, of course. So bailing out an economy that tanked over lies and wars and more lies and more wars and more Ponzi schemes and more lies to coverup the Ponzi schemes that benefit the rich and trash the non-rich --- correcting their mistakes and rehabilitating America from the robbery, waste and con job pulled by Republican leadership and Republican government, that's not on their job description.

In short, Republicans don't do repairs. They only do destruction. So there they are, saying "no" to Obama's gigantic stimulus plan at a time when everyone who knows anything says we must take action fast, and quibbling about minutiae while ignoring their own man-eating Pentagon Bear that we can no longer afford to feed but he's devouring everything in sight anyway. There they are, representing their constituents by guaranteeing they won't find jobs any time soon in the civilian sector. There they are, counting on the Pentagon to do some hiring. Problem is, the Pentagon requires one thing they don't like to talk about - GARGANTUAN, HUGE GOVERNMENT SPENDING. And another thing: WAR. Without war, what's the point? So they want wars to get government spending to keep jobs to do what? What economy?

It seems the whole purpose of the Republican Party is to make government collapse so the people can have what they really want, a choice between anarchy (Individual Choice!) and a police state (Keep America Safe!). They do this by undercutting and deriding the whole purpose of government and the Constitution they are supposedly sworn on Bibles to uphold.

Their modus operandi is twofold:

1. Convince the public that they must be always afraid and "vigilant".

2. Show real or imagined enemies that we've got balls by acting as kickass mean and nasty as possible. At least by refusing things. Especially things that sound good. Things that sound compassionate (bleeding heart! ick!) should be refused. Things that sound peaceful (surrender!) should be refused. Things that sound helpful (liberal wimps!) should be refused. Things that relate to education or health care (socialism!) should be refused.

The GOP is the party of refusal. Why should anyone expect anything else? Let's just hope there's a post-mortem on this. Maybe some real Conservatives will come out of the GOP's well-deserved demise and do something to actually conserve things - like fiscal conservatives trying to rein in the excesses of the rich, like environmental conservatives trying to rein in excesses of the polluters, or even pro-life conservatives trying to rein in excesses of the killing machines let loose by neocons. Now that's a conservatism we can work with. Together, for a long time, and a genuine future. But where is it? Where are the conservatives? Locked up in the lies and betrayals of the GOP.

Time to say to the GOP, RIP.

How Immigration Stimulates Economy: Case In Point

2009-02-04T03:09:00.003-06:00

This article gives a case where immigrants literally saved a town in Maine - by stimulating their economy. How?

Barely a decade ago, Lewiston, Maine, was dying. The once bustling mill town's population had been shrinking since the 1970s; most jobs had vanished long before, and residents (those who hadn't already fled) called the decaying center of town "the combat zone." That was before a family of Somali refugees discovered Lewiston in 2001 and began spreading the word to immigrant friends and relatives that housing was cheap and it looked like a good place to build new lives and raise children in peace. Since then, the place has been transformed. Per capita income has soared, and crime rates have dropped. In 2004, Inc. magazine named Lewiston one of the best places to do business in America, and in 2007, it was named an "All-America City" by the National Civic League, the first time any town in Maine had received that honor in roughly 40 years. "No one could have dreamed this," says Chip Morrison, the local Chamber of Commerce president. "Not even me, and I'm an optimist."

It's not just that Maine has a low birth rate. Why does it have a low birth rate? Lack of diversity. So it's not just people, but people of diverse backgrounds, that stimulates the economy. Think Obama. Think immigration, too.

Commerce isn't all the Somalis are reshaping. Maine has America's highest median age and the lowest percentage of residents under 18. Throughout the 1990s, the state's population of 20- to 30-year-olds fell an average of 3,000 a year. Demographers predict that by 2030, the state will have only two workers for each retiree. "In many small Maine towns they're looking at having to close schools for lack of schoolchildren," says State Economist Catherine Reilly. "It will snowball. Right now we're seeing the difficulty of keeping some schools open; in 10 or 15 years that's going to be the difficulty of businesses finding workers." The same ominous trend is seen in other states with similarly homogenous demographics and low numbers of foreign-born residents—states like Montana, North Dakota and West Virginia. Reilly adds: "If you told a demographer just our racial composition, they would be able to guess that we're an old state with a low birthrate."

Want to do something really patriotic, good for America? Encourage immigration.

Take that, Lou Dobbs!

Taxpayers Alert: Meet the Madoff Pentagon, A Money-Burning Machine

2009-02-02T19:32:00.003-06:00

Think of the Pentagon, and you think of security, right? Think again. The Pentagon may just be the U.S. taxpayers' Bernie Madoff. It's the biggest drag on the economy, and the reason is not because we need what it burns money on. The reason is not that the "world is a dangerous place" and we need "protection", and protection costs what it costs. We need what the Pentagon is paying our lifeblood and treasure on less than we need a huge Ponzi scheme to keep our economy from totally tanking. Chalmers Johnson at Tomdispatch really turned the world inside-out on this one.

Worried about pork-barrel spending? Maybe you should worry about the defense budget.

Given our economic crisis, the estimated trillion dollars we spend each year on the military and its weaponry is simply unsustainable. Even if present fiscal constraints no longer existed, we would still have misspent too much of our tax revenues on too few, overly expensive, overly complex weapons systems that leave us ill-prepared to defend the country in a real military emergency. We face a double crisis at the Pentagon: we can no longer afford the pretense of being the Earth's sole superpower, and we cannot afford to perpetuate a system in which the military-industrial complex makes its fortune off inferior, poorly designed weapons.

A trillion a year? On what? Oh, those wonderful, wonderful wars and their flying machines.

It is hard to imagine any sector of the American economy more driven by ideology, delusion, and propaganda than the armed services. Many people believe that our military is the largest, best equipped, and most invincible among the world's armed forces. None of these things is true, but our military is, without a doubt, the most expensive to maintain. Each year, we Americans account for nearly half of all global military spending, an amount larger than the next 45 nations together spend on their militaries annually.

Equally striking, the military seems increasingly ill-adapted to the types of wars that Pentagon strategists agree the United States is most likely to fight in the future, and is, in fact, already fighting in Afghanistan -- insurgencies led by non-state actors. While the Department of Defense produces weaponry meant for such wars, it is also squandering staggering levels of defense appropriations on aircraft, ships, and futuristic weapons systems that fascinate generals and admirals, and are beloved by military contractors mainly because their complexity runs up their cost to astronomical levels.

That most of these will actually prove irrelevant to the world in which we live matters not a whit to their makers or purchasers. Thought of another way, the stressed out American taxpayer, already supporting two disastrous wars and the weapons systems that go with them, is also paying good money for weapons that are meant for fantasy wars, for wars that will only be fought in the battlescapes and war-gaming imaginations of Defense Department "planners."

So we've got an economy about to go over a cliff, and yet we spend billions on weapons systems that we will never use, to satisfy the fantasies of admirals and generals and other military-related beneficiaries? Well...yes.

So when we talk about "stimulating" the economy, maybe we should talk about cutting spending and cutting pork. Not birth control-type nickel-&-dime pork. Big, lousy, wasteful, useless, dead-weight, sink-the-national-treasury Pentagon pork.

It has nothing to do with security, but everything to do with procurement and the good ol' boy system. Oh, and PR. Lots of lies and PR. Is that really "conservative"? Sounds very very liberal to me - as in "use liberally".

What do people struggling to make ends meet need with a 6.2-billion dollar aircraft carrier designed to fight the Cold War? It was probably commissioned, like the one named in 2009 for Bush I, to pat some old political hack/warrior on the back with his outdated dream. And we put people in prison for not paying a few thousand in self-employment taxes (which are required for anyone with over $400 in income - like he can afford to pay taxes on $400! - talk about preference for the big corporation!).

It's time to think twice about those "guaranteed" Pentagon budgets, to think twice when you think that paying for anything labeled "military" means you'll be more secure. The opposite is true. By paying for way overpriced, outdated equipment, we are sinking the whole country ... and none of those fancy flying machines, etc., will be able to lift one square mile of us out of that sinkhole.

Taxpayers, unite! Screw the Pentagon, and tell your Congresspeople they'll have to think before they spend.

Army Judge Defies Obama, Won't Stop Gitmo Court

2009-01-30T16:17:00.005-06:00

Just when you thought all's well, Gitmo's gonna be closed, we'll stop the insanity that Bush started with extralegal terror trials, torture, and "sexy" terrorist executions-to-be, and habeus corpus and the Army Field Manual will rule the rust, we hit a decidedly unexecutive bump in the road.

Obama issued, after all, an executive order freezing all Gitmo trials until next month, in order to review all the Geneva Convention-bashing stuff that may/may not have been going down. But now, an Army judge has defied those orders. Point blank. Just like that: "I'm not gonna do it, dude."

The chief judge of the Guantánamo war court Thursday spurned a presidential request to freeze the military commissions, and said he would go forward with next month's hearing for an alleged USS Cole bomber in a capital terror case.

Abd el Rahim al Nashiri, a Saudi Arabian, faces a Feb. 9 arraignment on terror charges he helped orchestrate the October 2000 al Qaeda suicide bombing that killed 17 U.S. sailors off the coast of Yemen.

Nashiri is now held at the remote U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba after years of CIA detention in which the agency has confirmed it waterboarded him in secret custody.

Yeah. and to make matters worse, this particular suspect has been tortured. Waterboarded. They're up front about it. So how did the judge justify defying a Presidential directive?

"On its face, the request to delay the arraignment is not reasonable," the judge, Army Col. James Pohl, wrote in his three-page ruling denying a prosecution request to delay Nashiri's first court appearance.

Wait! I thought President Obama was, like, the Commander-in-Chief. And this Army judge is, like, in the military, and under, like, his command.

And, oh, the judge added this remark:

"The public interest in a speedy trial will be harmed by the delay in the arraignment," Pohl also wrote.

So, let's get this straight. A directive from the Commander-in-Chief can be disobeyed because (a) a judge thinks it's "not reasonable", and (b) the judge thinks it will "harm" the "public interest". So the judge is making decisions to override the President. I wonder what this judge would say had someone done the same in defiance of, say, a Bush directive? Sounds very, very political to me...

And I'm not the only one surprised.

The decision stunned officials at the Department of Defense and White House, which had just begun to grapple with Obama's order to freeze the war court and empty the prison camps within a year.

"The Department of Defense is currently reviewing Judge Pohl's ruling," said Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon. ``We will be in compliance with the president's orders regarding Guantánamo."

It seems that the best way to comply with the freeze order is to dismiss the charges.

In other cases, the prosecutor has withdrawn the charges, without prejudice, meaning a new case could be brought at a later date.

Dismissing charges in a capital terror case may be hard to stomach for those dedicated to the GWOT. But judges are supposed to be "impartial."

Thursday, ACLU executive director Anthony Romero called the judge's order the work of Bush administration "hangers on" at the Defense Department who he accused of seeking to ``undercut President Obama's unequivocal statement to shut Guantánamo and halt the military commissions."

Pohl's order, he said, 'raises serious questions about whether Secretary of Defense (Robert) Gates is the `New Gates' or is the same old Gates under a new president. Gates certainly has the power to put a halt to these proceedings, and his lack of action demonstrates that we may have more of the same - rather than the change we were promised."

Retired U.S. Navy Cmdr. Kurt Lippold, who was commander of the Cole at the time of the attack, countered that the judge's ruling was ``a victory for the 17 families of the sailors who lost their lives on the USS Cole over eight years ago."

So it is really about politics. But it's also about avenging the Cole. Obama should make clear, publicly, that the freeze does not mean these guys will not face trial, just under new, unchallengeable, conditions. As it stands, what with the accused having been coerced under torture, it might be a more successful prosecution, hence also revenge for those who desire it, to be done the right way, as ordered by... the Commander-in-Chief.

Ah, the rule of law... those Bushies just can't let go...

Am I Not Human? Gazans ask Israel

2009-01-29T04:02:00.003-06:00

After the invasion of Gaza, this question again points to Israel. If Gazans are human, why do you starve them to death? Why attack the nearly defenseless?
Here is a poem relevant to that.

Gaza

Their faces rise only after slaughter
as your gaunt faces rose accusingly
in the windows of German officers
still-drunk with power, their wives
haunted by the skins of the departed
who shall never depart.

Their faces haunt behind your curtains
drawn inside, further, further,
and you call them terrorists
but what terrifies are not the rockets,
but the same gaunt faces,
that incessant mirror-image insanely
proclaiming they are human,
Human, they are you.

by
Omyma C. Hu

Are Big Media Corp's Trying to Block Blogging?

2009-01-27T00:10:00.004-06:00

In this report, major media/communications corporations are making moves that could threaten to bring down the blogosphere:

If the cable and phone companies that transmit Internet data are allowed to charge higher rates to some producers for faster service the result will be “a ten pin strike against political freedom,” a prominent legal authority warns.

That’s because the change will enable the wealthy to “quickly take over the high speed transmissions (for their trash commercial content) just as they completely monopolize radio and TV, and just as their incredibly greedy profit-seeking has had a very deleterious effect on print journalism,” writes Lawrence Velvel, dean of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover.

Velvel’s plea for “internet neutrality” comes in his new book “An Enemy of The People,” subtitled “The Unending Battle Against Conventional Wisdom(Doukathsan).” Essentially, he writes, the proposed change is an “attempt by the wealthy to make the internet into yet another repository of their power…”

Under the new scheme sought by transmission firms, Velvel writes, “large companies would pay more, no doubt a lot more, in order to have their messages, videos, audios, and any other content transmitted rapidly. The rest of us peasants, who could not afford to have our content move fast, would pay less and have it move more slowly.”

“One can be sure that the average guy with something he wants to say will be relegated to lower speed transmissions,” Velvel writes. “Blogdom, and the use of the internet by average people for political purposes, will likely be as good as dead.”

According to Save The Internet.com(STI), “The nation’s largest telephone and cable companies ---including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner---want to be Internet gatekeepers, deciding which Web sites go fast or slow and which won’t load at all.”

And all this started with, who else?, Bush:

Others besides Velvel have also commented on efforts to destroy net neutrality. As a consequence of a 2005 decision by the Bush Federal Communications Commission, Internet Neutrality, “the foundation of the free and open internet---was put in jeopardy,” STI says. “Now cable and phone company lobbyists are pushing to block legislation that would reinstate Net Neutrality.”

“Without Net Neutrality, startups and entrepreneurs will be muscled out of the marketplace by big corporations that pay for a top spot on the Web,” STI says.

“If Congress turns the Internet over to the telephone and cable giants, everyone who uses the Internet will be affected,” STI continues. “Connecting to your office could take longer if you don’t purchase your carrier’s preferred applications. Sending family photos and videos could slow to a crawl. Web pages you always use for online banking, access to health care information, planning a trip, or communicating with friends and family could fall victim to pay-for-speed schemes.”

Let's hope Obama's centrism won't compromise his promise of freedom in something as important to democracy, freedom, and the people's power over corporate power as the internet. I have great faith that it won't.

Obama Gives First Interview to Al-Arabiya

2009-01-27T00:04:00.003-06:00

In what is being touted as a "significant" and "symbolic" move, President Obama has given his first TV interview to Al-Arabiya, a station with a large Arab and Muslim audience (Saudi-sponsored, previously criticized by Rumsfeld as "anti-American").

With his characteristic balance, Obama drew a distinction between terrorists and the Muslim world that the previous administration failed to do. He also advocated a diplomatic and, at the same time, "listening" approach.

Among his quotables,

"I think that you're making a very important point. And that is that the language we use matters," he said, according to a transcript provided by the White House. "We cannot paint with a broad brush a faith as a consequence of the violence that is done in that faith's name. I cannot respect terrorist organizations that would kill innocent civilians and we will hunt them down. But to the broader Muslim world what we are going to be offering is a hand of friendship."

Is Our World a Giant Hologram? (Projected by Whom?...)

2009-01-26T01:50:00.004-06:00

Several years ago, I read something about this in Scientific American (go ahead, get your own link), but finally it's shown up at New Scientist,

DRIVING through the countryside south of Hanover, it would be easy to miss the GEO600 experiment. From the outside, it doesn't look much: in the corner of a field stands an assortment of boxy temporary buildings, from which two long trenches emerge, at a right angle to each other, covered with corrugated iron. Underneath the metal sheets, however, lies a detector that stretches for 600 metres.

For the past seven years, this German set-up has been looking for gravitational waves - ripples in space-time thrown off by super-dense astronomical objects such as neutron stars and black holes. GEO600 has not detected any gravitational waves so far, but it might inadvertently have made the most important discovery in physics for half a century.

For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time - the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into "grains", just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. "It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time," says Hogan.

If this doesn't blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab's Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: "If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram."

Which begs the question, projected by Whom?

Were African Women First Mathematicians?

2009-01-25T00:15:00.004-06:00

This seems at first an odd assertion, that, according to John Kellermeier's investigation, "How Menstruation Created Mathematics", women and their periods inspired and jump-started the development of mathematics by humans.

It began with "ethnomathematics", as defined by M. Borba (For the Learning of Mathematics, 10(1), 39-43) and D'Ambrosio (Impact of Science on Society, 40(4) 369-78) (both in 1990), who "define mathematics as the quantitative techniques that humans develop in response to the problems, struggles, and endeavors of human survival."

Apparently, the first driving survival issue was reproduction, hence the focus on women. Evidence of lunar calendars (timing of the menses) and objects indicating worship of fertility goddesses, etc. are found in ancient artifacts such as the Ishango Bone, also known as the second oldest mathematical object, possibly containing the oldest table of prime numbers.

You can read here to decide if the menstruation-inspiration idea is really on track.

At any rate, it seems mathematics may have originated with the group least associated with it today, sadly... African women. Hopefully, we can renew that creative, inspirational claim to science fame.

Iraqis Good Riddance to Bush

2009-01-24T16:20:00.005-06:00

Unsurprisingly, Iraqis say good riddance to Bush with much bitterness.

"I hope Obama will correct the negative results Bush made. Iraq should be a country as wealthy as Gulf countries because we have oil, agriculture and splendid civilization," said Abass Majeed, a 38-year-old taxi driver from Sadr City in Baghdad.

But Iman Khalil, a 52-year-old widow, does not agree with him. "We will see no basic change between Bush and Obama. All U.S. presidents are the same: To protect Israel and plunder Iraq's oil reserves," she said emotionally.

Bush gets the boot from Iraq, where he falsely claimed he wanted to bring democracy. Right. By force. As if freedom comes by force. What did he expect? Love isn't by force either.

UK Jewish MP: Israelis Acting Like Nazis in Gaza

2009-01-24T02:57:00.002-06:00

Yes, it is true, and finally someone has the courage to say it: Israelis are doing to Gazans what Nazis did to them, albeit on a smaller scale. They rounded them up, starved them nearly to death, and then proceeded to slaughter the defenseless people. And the reasons are the same, too. It is first, and publicly, for security. It is second, and less publicly, for the benefit of the Chosen, the Superior ethnic group. In short, it is slaughter based on racism and militaristic security-hype.

Israel Wipes Gaza Villages Off the Map

2009-01-24T02:20:00.003-06:00

Jonathan Miller's report exposes the massacre:

This is unconscionable. It is horrific. It is a war crime. It is beyond words. And it is sponsored by U.S. weapons, and a long-standing policy of treating Israel like the spoiled, beloved child who can do no wrong. Congratulations! You're the proud sponsor of mass murder in the time-worn tradition of Security Trumps Compassion.

Israel traded its conscience for its view of security - apartheid, a protected Elite within a fortress, against the world. That's not a vision of the future. That's a vision of atrocities followed by doom. Good luck with that screwed world view.

Do Something to End the Occupation of Palestine by Israel

2009-01-24T00:07:00.003-06:00

If you are sick of the slaughter in Gaza, and want to take action, this is your link.

Gaza's Holocaust, Israel's & US's Shame

2009-01-22T20:54:00.012-06:00

This introduction by Tom Engelhardt of Tomdispatch to Tony Karon's article on where do we go from here entitled "Change Gaza Can Believe In" sums up the image of Gaza's holocaust - as close as Israel could come, given the time constraints set by President Obama's impending inauguration to power, to wiping the Palestinians (or those trapped in this slice of Palestinian territory) off the face of the earth. Shockingly, Israel is not satisfied. It wanted to wipe them out more literally, more completely. Any attempt to call it "self-defense", or "battling terrorism" or "preventing rocket attacks" is not simply absurd, illogical or baseless - the attempt to excuse this massacre by such paltry, prissy, spoiled-child reasons is itself another crime. And the U.S., by condoning and supporting such slaughter, is not only complicit, but a partner in crime. When the powerful destroy the weak, the devastatingly weak, and the truly defenseless, only because the weak "bother" them or cause them "discomfort" ... when mass murder is committed for political reasons ... or to appease a population who are so out of touch that they genuinely believe Palestinians are somehow "out to get them" ... it is a real-life horror story.

Yes, we now know the ever grimmer statistics: more than 1,400 dead Gazans (and rising as bodies are dug out of the rubble); 5,500 wounded; hundreds of children killed; 4,000 to 5,000 homes destroyed and 20,000 damaged -- 14% of all buildings in Gaza; 50,000 or more homeless; 400,000 without water; 50 U.N. facilities, 21 medical facilities, 1,500 factories and workshops, and 20 mosques reportedly damaged or destroyed; the smashed schools and university structures; the obliterated government buildings; the estimated almost two billion dollars in damage; all taking place on a blockaded strip of land 25 miles long and 4 to 7.5 miles wide that is home to a staggering 1.4 million people.
On the other side in Israel, there are a number of damaged buildings and 13 dead, including three civilians and three soldiers killed in a friendly-fire incident. But amid this welter of horrific numbers, here was the one that caught my eye -- and a quote went with it: Lieutenant General Gabi Ashkenazi, chief of staff of the Israeli Army, told Parliament on January 12th, "We have achieved a lot in hitting Hamas and its infrastructure, its rule and its armed wing, but there is still work ahead."
Work? The "work" already done evidently included a figure he cited: more than 2,300 air strikes launched by the Israelis with the offensive against Hamas still having days to go. Think about that: in a heavily populated, heavily urbanized, 25-mile-long strip of land, 2,300 air strikes, including an initial surprise attack "in which 88 aircraft simultaneously struck 100 preplanned targets within a record span of 220 seconds." Many of these strikes were delivered by Israel's 226 U.S.-supplied F-16s or its U.S.-made Apache helicopters.
In addition, the Israelis evidently repeatedly used a new U.S. smart bomb, capable of penetrating three feet of steel-reinforced concrete, the bunker-busting 250-pound class GBU-39 Small Diameter Bomb. (The first group of up to 1,000 of these that the U.S. Congress authorized Israel to buy only arrived in early December.) In use as well, the one-ton Mk84 Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) and a 500-pound version of the same. These are major weapons systems. Evidently dropped as well were "Dime (dense inert metal explosive) bombs designed to produce an intense explosion in a small space. The bombs," reported Raymond Whitaker of the British Independent, "are packed with tungsten powder, which has the effect of shrapnel but often dissolves in human tissue, making it difficult to discover the cause of injuries."
Keep in mind that Hamas and other armed Palestinian groups are essentially incapable of threatening Israeli planes and that the Israelis were using their airborne arsenal in heavily populated areas. Though the air war was only one part of a massively destructive assault on Gaza, as a form of warfare, barbaric as it is, it invariably gets a free pass. Yet, if you conduct an air war in cities, it matters little how "smart" your weaponry may be; it will, in effect, be a war against civilians.
Whatever the damage done to Hamas, what happened in Gaza was, simply put, a civilian slaughter.

Tony Karon sees an opportunity for Obama in this destruction to help make peace between Israelis and Palestinians. First, he says:

The Gaza debacle has made one thing perfectly clear: any peace process that seeks to marginalize, not integrate, Hamas is doomed to fail — and with catastrophic consequences.

But I didn't hear Israel calling the result of their slaughter "catastrophic consequences". That description would be on the lips of Palestinians, both in and out of Gaza. Why should Israelis care? For them, the only "consequence" could be bad PR, and they, like other neocon-driven groups, consider bad PR practically a rite of passage. It goes with the territory.

However, the article asks extremely cogent questions and faces Obama, who espoused the unconscionable "standard" US "line" on I/P issues:

Lest President Barack Obama's opportunistic silence when Israel began the Gaza offensive that killed more than 1,400 Palestinians (more than 400 of them children) be misinterpreted, his aides pointed reporters to comments made six months earlier in the Israeli town of Sderot. "If somebody was sending rockets into my house, where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that," Obama had said in reference to the missiles Hamas was firing from Gaza. "I would expect Israelis to do the same thing."

Residents of Gaza might have wondered what Obama would have done had he been unfortunate enough to be a resident of, say, Jabaliya refugee camp. What if, like the vast majority of Gazans, his grandfather had been driven from his home in what is now Israel, and barred by virtue of his ethnicity from ever returning? What if, like the majority of the residents of this refugee ghetto-by-the-sea, he had voted for Hamas, which had vowed to fight for his rights and was not corrupt like the Fatah strongmen with whom the Israelis and Americans liked to deal?

And what if, as a result of that vote, he had found himself under an economic siege, whose explicit purpose was to inflict deprivation in order to force him to reverse his democratic choice? What might a Gazan Obama have made of the statement, soon after that election, by Dov Weissglass, a top aide to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, that Israel's blockade would put him and his family "on [a] diet"?

"The Palestinians will get a lot thinner," Weissglass had chortled, "but [they] won't die."

The Israeli leadership are people who consider others' suffering a joke. They did not see the universality of the Holocaust experience, and how this should have made the Jews deeply compassionate, among the most passionate supporters of universal human rights. And for many, it certainly did just that. But obviously, that is not true of the Israeli leadership. In fact, Israeli politics in general casts a pall on the notion of anyone having "learned" anything from the Holocaust except the desire to imitate their own tormenters, taking victims of their own to torment and "eliminate" for their own "security" and other "higher purposes".

Obviously, Israelis had no pangs of conscious about this:

Even before Israel's recent offensive, the Red Cross had reported that almost half the children under two in Gaza were anemic due to their parents' inability to feed them properly.

And what was the supposed purpose of starving the civilian population of Gaza? The same purpose of the Nazis: national security. Oh, and keeping the national population "pure", of a "chosen" race. Same game, switched players. Palestinians are now playing Jews to the Israelis' National Socialists. And making this extremely obvious comparison is called, petulantly, "anti-semitic".

The call of "anti-semitic" is used, along with "national security", to cover up and excuse every kind of horror, every sickening atrocity. It just didn't go, thank God, to the extremes of the Nazis, but the same idea is in place. Why don't the Israelis see it? What is wrong with this picture? Ah, but that's another post. I believe it has to do with a right-wing human tendency that comes out when there's a perceived threat to a treasured goal. Ethics become skewed in light of the goal, and the end justifies the means.

Ah, but there are Israelis of conscience. And maybe now is their time to rise up, to shine the light of their hearts on a land scorched by violence and war-hawk insanity. Such as this article by Amira Hass in Haaretz referring to her parents who survived the Holocaust(quoted by Karon):

"My parents despised all their everyday activities -- stirring sugar into coffee, washing the dishes, standing at a crosswalk -- when in their mind's eye they saw, based on their personal experience, the terror in the eyes of children, the desperation of mothers who could not protect their young ones, the moment when a huge explosion dropped a house on top of its inhabitants and a smart bomb struck down entire families...

"Because of my parents' history they knew what it meant to close people behind barbed-wire fences in a small area.... How lucky it is that they are not alive to see how these incarcerated people are bombarded with all the glorious military technology of Israel and the United States... My parents' personal history led them to despise the relaxed way the news anchors reported on a curfew. How lucky they are not here and cannot hear the crowd roaring in the coliseum."

The rest of Karon's article is brilliant in every respect, and well-worth reading. There is a process towards peace to be had, but not via the idiotic present course. You don't pave the road to peace with the bodies of your "negotiating partners".

And, like it or not, Hamas is definitely Israel's "negotiating partner". Fatah has been thoroughly discredited. The only people "against" Hamas are Israelis, the US government, and those who follow along like sheep in their path. Hamas won an election.

For the new Obama administration reinforcing and, as they say in Washington, incentivizing the pragmatic track in Hamas is the key to reviving the region's prospects for peace.

Hamas has demonstrated beyond doubt that it speaks for at least half of the Palestinian electorate. Many observers believe that, were new elections to be held tomorrow, the Islamists would probably not only win Gaza again, but take the West Bank as well. Demanding what Hamas would deem a symbolic surrender before any diplomatic conversation even begins is not an approach that will yield positive results. Renouncing violence was never a precondition for talks between South Africa and Nelson Mandela's ANC, or Britain and the Irish Republican Army. Indeed, Israel's talks with the PLO began long before it had publicly renounced violence.

And people are not hearing the truth about Hamas over stateside.

Hamas made clear that it was committed to good governance and consensus, and recognized Abbas as president, which also meant explicitly recognizing his right to continue negotiating with the Israelis.

Hamas agreed to abide by any accord approved by the Palestinians in a democratic referendum. By 2007, key leaders of the organization had even begun talking of accepting a Palestinian state based on a return to 1967 borders in a swap for a generational truce with Israel.

Hamas's move onto the electoral track had, in fact, presented a great opportunity for any American administration inclined towards grown-up diplomacy, rather than the infantile fantasy of reengineering the region's politics in favor of chosen "moderates."

The US and Israel are pushing the absurd notion that Egypt's dictator, Mubarak, somehow represents moderacy. Mubarak is a tyrant, pure and simple. He is a dictator, hated like hell in his own country. Everyone there prays for his death - hopefully under "enhanced interrogation" circumstances. Hamas is more "moderate" in reality than Mubarak. And yet Mubarak is put in a role of "peacemaker" on the basis of sharing a mutual agenda with Israel - getting rid of Hamas, which is the cousin of the Muslim Brotherhood in, Egypt which is Mubarak's grim reaper-to-be...or shall we say, in waiting?

The world is getting sick of the slaughter, as per this WaPo op-ed. Whole villages have been totally wiped out. It is absolutely, undoubtedly, and ILLEGALLY, genocide. Israel's leaders should be prosecuted for genocide, most certainly. Just as certainly as they never will. Where there's no will...is there a way?

Is President Obama ready to meet this disaster head on? Does he have the courage to defend the defenseless, breaking with long-standing tradition? Does he have the guts to say "No" to AIPAC and the powerful Israel-first commitment? Can he call a slaughter a slaughter? Or will he resort to claiming, like Bushco, that Israel was merely defending itself when it committed these atrocities?

It is in America's interest, and Israel's, and the Palestinians' that Obama intervene quickly in the Middle East, but that he do so on a dramatically different basis than that of his two immediate predecessors.

Peace is made between the combatants of any conflict; "peace" with only chosen "moderates" is an exercise in redundancy and pointlessness. The challenge in the region is to promote moderation and pragmatism among the political forces that speak for all sides, especially the representative radicals.

And speaking of radicals and extremists, there's palpable denial, bordering on amnesia, when it comes to Israel's rejectionists. Ariel Sharon explicitly rejected the Oslo peace process, declaring it null and void shortly after assuming power. Instead, he negotiated only with Washington over unilateral Israeli moves.

Ever since, Israeli politics has been moving steadily rightward, with the winner in next month's elections expected to be the hawkish Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu. If so, he will govern in a coalition with far-right rejectionists and advocates of "ethnic cleansing." Netanyahu even rejected Ariel Sharon's 2005 Gaza pullout plan, and he has made it abundantly clear that he has no interest in sustaining the illusion of talks over a "final status" agreement, even with Washington's chosen "moderates."

Anything like what has been done before - in every case, giving Israel the veto power over everything, a free hand to do as it pleases, and absolutely NOTHING in terms of negotiating cloud to the Palestinians - we will be back to the unacceptable. Not square one, but mutually assured self-destruction. I don't think even Israel likes that option. They cannot survive on slaughter and inertia. There has to be something higher.

And all eyes are on Obama...

HISTORY! Obama Becomes President: "A New Birth of Freedom"

2009-01-20T12:45:00.008-06:00

A new era. Much more than simply a new President. The first African-American president, and all that means. The most eloquent, intelligent, balanced president in a long time. Yes, other Presidents were good, each in their way. But there's something different about Barack Hussein Obama. And everyone can feel it.

Almost two million people watching. In total joy. Two miles of people, seen from space.

The moment so immense almost everyone is at a loss for words. And I am no exception. But President Obama is not at a loss for words, coming through with power and eloquence, righting the wrongs with conviction and truth. At this critical moment, he inspires all the right things. Let's hope and pray this hope and promise fulfills continuously...

Why Brand Obama Is Good for America: Top 10 Reasons

2009-01-19T00:17:00.011-06:00

Barack Hussein Obama may be the first president who is actually a brand. So it's rather amazing that he is also one of the most popular brands on the planet. It's spilling over into every aspect of life - and, contrary to the sense of the word "brand" as an advertising gimmick, a commercialization of what should have "deeper" value, it's making things better wherever it goes.

On a business trip to Miami and Orlando, I noticed in the hotel lobby a large group of - maybe Lithuanians? - people, dressed like businesspeople, who spoke some Germano-Russian-sounding language, who were all smiling, enthusiastic, and chanting. Yes, chanting "Obama! Obama! Obama! Obama!..."

What was this all about? Or the news article out of Orlando about Obama being a "hit" throughout the Caribbean Islands:

Radio stations across the Caribbean are tuning into U.S. politics, broadcasting rapper and reggae songs celebrating Barack Obama's victory. "Black Man Redemption" by Rapper Tony Rebel, "Yes We Can" by Reggae singer Cocoa Tea and "The Obama Song" by rapper Tyrical are dominating the airwaves in Jamaica. Trinidadians, meanwhile, are enchanted by "Barack the Magnificent," a creation of Calypso legend Mighty Sparrow.Antiguans are singing along with "Barack We Love You," by native calypso singer King Short Shirt.

Followed by a page of letters from local elementary students asking questions directed to the President-Elect. And meanwhile, back in Columbia, the people are "looking forward" to Obama's presidency.

Of course, we know already how excited Africans are for their "native son". Not to mention his unprecedentedly enthusiastic and massive reception in Berlin. But what about China? Hands down - he's an "overwhelming hit" there where last October,

an online poll conducted on China Daily's website by the US embassy, shows Obama enjoys the support of 75 percent among the Chinese.

We know that the name "Obama" tastefully included in any product name is, to borrow a Blogojovitchism, "golden" - spikes sales exponentially. It's just a superlative brand that connotes all that's good about humanity.

What better representation for the United States after years of eroded-to-zilch public image? It's gotten so bad that friends of mine pretend not to be American when at cafes in, say, the Netherlands, so as not to receive dirty looks and bad prices. Even more, the Obama brand incites people to almost-lunatic enthusiasm, joy, hope, action.... good stuff, that.

So, the Top Ten Reasons Why:

1. When you're on the precipice, you need balance. President-elect Obama has balance. Lots of it. Nobody else comes close. And that inspires more balance in others. Weigh the two sides, find a fair solution, be willing to compromise, talk about it, balance your emotions with your mind... Pretty transformative, that! Helps when you're hanging on the edge of an economic, ecological, and otherwise...cliff.

2. Nothing combats depression like inspiration. Obama just walks into a room, and people get inspired. But it's not merely charisma, or oratory. He represents overcoming impossible odds, challenges, achieving the Impossible Dream by hard work and incremental success. He also represents overcoming oppression, a locked-in-steel status quo, a power structure that seems insurmountable, a nasty social attitude in the air, a neocon warmongering mania that nobody can seem to get rid of...and everything you need to get back on your feet in a crisis. Nobody else means "Yes We Can" quite like Obama.

3. He's one of us. He has this amazing ability to identify with Everyman, Everywoman, in Everycountry, while maintaining his American identity. People have this feeling that he understands them, personally. That he cares about them, about what happens to them. He succeeded to have a mass personal relationship with not all, but many on the planet. Maybe it's just lack of pretense, and being down to earth. And something else... je n'sais quoi.

4. When the world is in turmoil, we need someone with an even keel. It's that incredible, unflappable temperament, that pulled Obama through the election process, and that we all hope will pull us through the critical, dangerous days ahead.

5. A brilliant mind: that human gift, and responsibility. Obama has a great mind, and better yet, he actually uses it responsibly. When the challenges get tough, it's not enough to just "get going", as we have seen. It needs a great mind to intelligently work our way through complex issues. No sycophant will do any more. So for Obama to represent the best of the mind does us a world of good. Smart is cool again. Finally.

6. Flexibility, willingness to cooperate. This is essential to building goodwill in world affairs, as well as domestic ones. We've suffered too long through ill will, divisiveness, and "us" vs. "them". The results have been catastrophic. Democracy without cooperation is not democracy. It's a failed state.

7. Obama is a multicultural success story. He blends continents, wildly varying cultures from Kansas to Hawaii to Indonesia, plus of course, Africa, and yet it all somehow works into a very superior "product". He therefore gives us hope that although we are all very different, the common bond is nonetheless intact, and that very diversity contributes toward strength. This is a boon to people against inbreeding, Us v. Them, etc.

8. When we've been sitting on a Ponzi scheme, thinking ourselves rich and powerful, it really helps to find someone with genuine core integrity. Solid ethics. Trustworthiness. Honesty. The high ground. Making good on promises - not just for PR, but just because it's right. Wow, now that's downright refreshing! Barack Obama, from his loving domestic relations with his wife and daughters and other relations, to his making good on promises, to his clean and democratically-run campaign, to his thoughtful, honest relationships with others in government as well as campaigners and those in "Main Street", is the absolute epitome of One Good Man. Not some idealized idol, just a regular guy who works very hard to do things right, and has very high standards.

The net result? Obama made being righteous very, very cool. Bring it on! Which brings us to

9. Pres-elect Obama is just, simply very, very cool. This is an intangible. It's God-given. It's something you either have, or don't have. It may be the "aura" of all of the above. But it's also because he's always working to stay in touch with what's going on around him. He knows technology and uses it. He knows the language, the songs, the music, the culture of everyday Americans. He may not know bowling and country music. But that's OK, because he's cool with what he knows. He goes above and beyond a specific culture, by virtue of his multicultural background added to his being "one of us", added to his cooperative stance, taken to another level by his intelligence. It's everything rolled together in a way that simply ... works.

We're dog tired of things that don't work. And people who make them not work.

10. And at last, Obama resurrects the work ethic. Hard work is part of his success story, and it's not only something that's true, that people can relate to, but it's also very good for the economy. After all, work is how economies are ultimately built - not merely by investing money, that essentially fake/representative thing, but investing actual work. Instead of encouraging people to spend, we find ourselves inspired to sweat. It's very basic, and being enthusiastic about it makes it far more likely to succeed. After all, what's work without a motive? The profit motive just won't cut it any more.

As we watch the incredible scene of President-elect Barack Obama taking the oath of office, and all that goes with it, no one can help but be amazed at how it all got put together, and how one man came to symbolize so much in one unimaginably critical moment. This is a "brand" that will go down in history in more ways than ten. And that can't help but be good for America, and I hope, the world.

Obama Prayer Leader "Linked" to Hamas; So Is Jimmy Carter, I Presume

2009-01-18T13:29:00.004-06:00

Fox News and other right-wingers are now playing gotcha with what they see as a vulnerability in an otherwise almost invulnerable celebration/inauguration - drawing a "connection" between someone on Obama's lineup of religious leaders, hence his "side", and .... lots of ooohs and ahhhs and looks of fear and loathing, please ... TERRORISM.

Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America, is one of many religious leaders scheduled to speak at the prayer service at Washington's National Cathedral.

Mattson has been the guest of honor at State Department dinners and has met with senior Pentagon officials during the Bush administration. She also spoke at a prayer service at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. Mattson, who was elected president of the society in 2006, is a professor of Islamic studies at Hartford Seminary in Hartford, Conn.

But in 2007 and as recently as last July, federal prosecutors in Dallas filed court documents linking the Plainfield, Ind.-based Islamic society to the group Hamas, which the U.S. considers a terrorist organization.

Neither Mattson nor her organization have been charged. But prosecutors wrote in July that they had "a wide array of testimonial and documentary evidence expressly linking" the group to Hamas and other radical groups.

Note that it says "federal prosecutors" were the sources for this alleged affiliation. Then note that Hamas, named as a "terrorist organization" by the United States, also happens to have been the political party that was voted into power by the Palestinians in a "free and fair election" that was overseen by none other than former U.S. President Jimmy Carter. Yes, Jimmy Carter, the right-wing's favorite whipping boy, who also happened to have overseen a number of other foreign elections, to the approval of the United States, or at least, certainly not to his condemnation.

Yet clearly, by this, and by his inflammatory book entitled - wouldn't he be booted off dailykos for this? - "Peace, Not Apartheid" - Jimmy Carter is obviously linked to Hamas and linked to terrorism. How dare he make such inflammatory statements against Israel as accusing them of apartheid? How dare he criticize Israel? Israel is our friend, right or wrong. Wasn't the invasion of Lebanon "conducted" with impunity? Never mind that Lebanon is a sovereign nation. Flying in the face of national sovereignty is a Neocon Calling Card, or should I say right of passage. And Israel's government is the quintessential neocon's dream. Security always trumps compassion, or even cooperation. Compassion is always there basically, or so it appears, for PR.

In fact, Jimmy Carter's links to Hamas and terrorism are stronger than those of Ingrid Mattson, that - do we shudder at the word? - Muslim. She wears a terrorist hijab, in solidarity with terrorism and Islam, which are of course, one and the same. But she never wrote a book entitled Peace Not Apartheid. She did not oversee the election that put Hamas in power. And the allegations are against her organization, not her personally. Never mind that her organization is widely considered to be the most moderate mainstream organization for Muslims in America.

And Jimmy Carter's association with Hamas was not just the allegations of a prosecutor. And nobody even knows the "basis" on which those allegations were made. Jimmy Carter actually wants Palestinians' rights to be considered in negotiations regarding middle east peace in the region. Now that's a tie to terrorism, since Palestinians' rights are right there on Hamas' charter, along with the destruction of Israel. So by these "ties", Jimmy Carter is clearly asking for the destruction of Israel.

And of course, Obama, by having a Muslim give a prayer, is giving in to terrorism. And since any Muslim can probably be linked to terrorism with the flick of a switch, sort of at will, he should have known. But you know, maybe we can forgive him.

After all, Ingrid Mattson also has "ties" to anti-terror efforts.

Law enforcement agencies have used the organization's annual convention as part of its outreach to the Muslim community. The group has provided religious training to the FBI, according to court documents. Karen Hughes, a former Bush confidant and under secretary of state, called Mattson "a wonderful leader and role model for many, many people."

And to Jewish groups. And to the U.S. government.

Mark Pelavin, director of inter-religious affairs for the Union for Reform Judaism, another organization participating in the prayer service, called Mattson "a really important voice denouncing terrorism."

"Clearly, Dr. Mattson has been welcome throughout the government," he said. "I haven't found anyone anywhere who's found anything Dr. Mattson has said that's anything other than clearly denouncing terrorism in quite explicit Islamic terms."

Pelavin's group has a partnership with the Islamic Society to encourage members of mosques and synagogues to build ties nationwide.

Attorneys for Mattson's group wrote in court documents that it is not a subject or target of the Holy Land investigation. The group has worked with the Bush administration's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, according to court documents.

Wait! Isn't that what neocons and other Islamophobes are always taunting Muslims to do? Denounce terrorism? Then when someone actually does, some prosecutor is dragged out to create a damning "link" to terrorism, thus undercutting the efforts of the terrorism-denouncer and harming their credibility. How can you expect Muslims to come out and denounce terrorism when that in itself could create a "keyword" that would be picked up by "echelon" or some other spying "entity" and would brand that already-under-suspicion Muslim as a "terrorist"? If someone like Ingrid Mattson, who has been praised for her efforts by people from all sides of the equation, can be "linked" to terrorism, what about the rest of us?

This heavy-handedness only makes the situation worse and keeps moderates in hiding while extremists have lots of fuel for the fire. Extremists have nothing to lose, basically. Moderates have everything to lose.

As to the prosecutor "source", that may be about to disappear:

According to e-mails filed in the court case, one of the prosecutors seemed willing to ask the judge to remove the group from the list.

If this is some sort of tactic to dampen down the Obama inauguration's high ground and excitement, it's also typical of the previous 8 years' path toward destruction that wants to use smear tactics and lies to prevent goodwill and cooperation.

The whole world needs more goodwill and cooperation, and Ingrid Mattson, a woman convert to Islam and Islamic scholar - talk about breaking down barriers! - is the kind of leader we need more of. Obama and his team should be proud, not wary, of their choice. It's not like he's the first one to recognize Mattson's importance and beneficial, outspoken stance.

Palestinians Eat Grass in Gaza: For Israel, the Ultimate Holocaust Denial

2009-01-18T00:51:00.002-06:00

This incredible blog post is all the more powerful for the comments. Meanwhile, the Times reported that:

AS a convoy of blue-and-white United Nations trucks loaded with food waited last night for Israeli permission to enter Gaza, Jindiya Abu Amra and her 12-year-old daughter went scrounging for the wild grass their family now lives on.

“We had one meal today - khobbeizeh,” said Abu Amra, 43, showing the leaves of a plant that grows along the streets of Gaza. “Every day, I wake up and start looking for wood and plastic to burn for fuel and I beg. When I find nothing, we eat this grass.”

Abu Amra and her unemployed husband have seven daughters and a son. Their tiny breeze-block house has had no furniture since they burnt the last cupboard for heat.

“I can’t remember seeing a fruit,” said Rabab, 12, who goes with her mother most mornings to scavenge. She is dressed in a tracksuit top and holed jeans, and her feet are bare.

Israel forgot their own experience from the Holocaust, as described by commenter Sonja:

“I used to get …very hungry,” Blum said. “And then something came to me. I said, ‘The cows eat grass to live. How come I can’t do that?’ So I started hunting for grass. But you couldn’t find grass too many places. You find the roots. I used to clean the grass off the roots and chew on the roots, too. But then I discovered an area behind the kitchen. It was a restricted area. Nobody was allowed to go in, and the grass was growing nice. And I used to smuggle myself inside somehow… I ran in, took a handful [of grass] and ran out.”
By Rosa Blum, holocaust survivor, Romania

Holocaust in Romania, by Matatias Carp (6. Life and Death in Transnistria)
June 10, 1942
The buildings on the right housed deportees who had managed to save some
of their money, or because of their good connections were able to receive
aid in Moghilev. On the left side, however, hunger reigned. A number of
those interned had no choice but to eat grass from the meadows and leaves
from trees.

Yom HaShoah: The Train to Belzac
By Eva Galler (holocaust survivor)
It was cold. In one corner there was a little iron stove but no fuel. We were not given enough to eat. The children looked through the garbage for food. There was not enough water to drink. There was one well in the backyard, but it would not produce enough water for everybody. To be sure to get water you had to get up in the middle of the night. Once I had a little water to wash myself, and my sister later washed herself in the same water.
Some people started to eat grass. They would swell up and die. Because of the unsanitary conditions people got lice and typhus. My brother Pinchas got night blindness from lack of vitamins. Every day a lot of people died.

Holocaust survivors remember Lodz ghetto
Reuters - August 29, 2004
LODZ, Poland - Sam Weinreich remembers the last time he came to Radegast train station in Poland’s second-largest city - the day in 1944 he was forced into a cattle car and sent to Nazi Germany’s Auschwitz death camp.
“They promised us bread, so we came here … when you’re hungry, you’ll eat grass. People in the ghetto became like animals,” said Weinreich, one of some 400 survivors who on Sunday commemorated the liquidation of the Lodz ghetto 60 years ago.

Story of Survival - Holocaust experience remembered
by Johnell Lytle-Davis
“Why do they hate us?” Meisel said she asked her mother. “Because we are Jews,” her mother replied. “At least we are alive.”
Meisel revealed that she survived on about 300 calories in a day. “I would eat grass I was so hungry,” she said.

Thank you, Sonja, for this incredible collection of relevant stories.

It seems Israel has no intention of respecting or remembering, let alone learning from, the Holocaust.

Instead, they are trying to create, on perhaps a smaller scale - but in terms of human tragedy, is the death of children ever small for the conscience? - their own little Holocaust, inflicted on someone else.

And the reason is always the same. Security. For the Fatherland.

Palestinian Dr's Daughters Killed While Interviewed on Israeli TV

2009-01-18T00:36:00.004-06:00

There seems to be no limits to the Israeli government's love of atrocity. I haven't been able to keep up with it all. The atrocity that is Israel's invasion of Gaza is beyond description, beyond words. It is totally unconscionable.

Just one case in point: frequently interviewed on Israeli TV, Dr. Ezz-El-Din Abu El-Eish, a Palestinian and resident of Gaza who works at works at Israel’s largest hospital, Tel Hashomer near Tel Aviv, was interviewed by cell phone while his daughters were killed by Israelis as described in this heartwrenching report:

This impressive and peaceful man has been stranded at home during the war. Israel’s Channel 10 TV has regularly interviewed him by phone about the situation. On one occasion, a tank gun aimed at his home - and Israeli media intervention saved him…

What we see in the clip [above] is Israeli anchor Shlomi Eldar holding a cellphone with Dr. Abu El-Eish on the other side, howling with misery. A tank shell has just hit his home and immediately killed three of his children (apparently they cut off the first seconds when the shell actually hit).”

And here's a part of the transcript:

“Eldar: …we have on the line Dr. Abu El-Eish, we have been talking with him over the past period… he [his home] was just shelled, his family is wounded, maybe I can replay…

Dr. Abu El-Eish: No one can get to us… (unclear)… Ya Rabi, Ya Rabi (my god).. [he continues to cry throughout while Eldar talks to the audience]

Eldar: They killed his family, over the past few days we have been… I think I’m a bit overwhelmed too because,… (tearing up) Dr. Abu El-Eish is a Tel Hashomer physician, [to the doctor] Abu El-Eish we are now in the studio, [back to the audience] and he kept fearing his family would get hurt, once this week he went on air to Gabi Gazit [another anchor], because this was the only way [apparently referring to the previous near-miss incident]…. In short, he was now hit, who was hurt Abu El-Eish?

Dr. Abu El-Eish: My girls, Ya Allah, Ya Allah

[around 1:00 into clip]

Eldar: He has eight children whom he has protected throughout the war, at his home in Beit Lahiya, maybe the only thing we can do is to ask someone who can, maybe in the IDF, Abu El-Eish can you tell me where your house is, maybe they will enable ambulances to get there

Dr. Abu El-Eish: (unclear) …to save them, to save them, but they are dead already they were hit in the head, it was in their heads [died] on the spot, on the spot, Shlomi, Ya Allah, … what have we done, what have we done [repeatedly]… they killed the family… [more screams in the background]“

It's an atrocity. The entire invasion of Gaza is a horrific slaughter and a tragedy. And to think this is being done to get votes from Israelis? Do they want the world to think the Israeli public is bloodthirsty, or what? If not, what the hell happened to their brains?

Apparently, their brains went the way of their hearts.

Demand a Stance from Your Wimpy Congressperson on Gaza

2009-01-14T21:18:00.002-06:00

Olmert Plays Pawns Bush, Rice: Israel Dictating US Foreign Policy

2009-01-14T20:41:00.004-06:00

For years, many have said that U.S. foreign policy, especially in the middle east, is basically run by Israel. Under Bush II, this rumor has been engraved in granite. In fact, W has seen fit to let Israel basically run wild with whatever right-wing schemes it could come up with. And these schemes tend to run to the bloody, overkill side. But now Olmert is up front and center about it. Or should I say, he's bragging about how he called Bush up in the middle of the night, told him to get Condi to last-minute reneg on her planned support for a cease-fire agreement on the Gaza massacre, so, of course, ol' George cain't say no, and made poor Condi back out in an embarrassing breach of promise.

But then, there is no such thing as a promise from the US to anyone other than Israel, or so it seems. In his own bravado:

Olmert: "It transpired all of a sudden that a vote would be held in 10 minutes' time. I tried to find President Bush, and I was told he was attending an event in Philadelphia. I know that if somebody tried to find me on the phone right now, it would have to be something unusual and extraordinary for them to say: Leave it all and go to some room to talk to me. In this case, I said: I don't care, I have to talk to him right now. He was taken off the podium and brought to a side room.

I spoke with him; I told him: You can't vote for this proposal. He said: Listen, I don't know, I didn't see, don't know what it says. I told him: I know, and you can't vote for it! He then instructed the secretary of state, and she did not vote for it.
It was a proposal she had put together, one she formulated, one she organized, one she maneuvered. It left her rather embarrassed, abstaining in the vote on a proposal she herself had put together. That was why the French and the Brits said she had pulled a fast one on them, she having been the one to spur them to submit the proposals."

The NYT indicates Rice & the State Dept deny any such influence, stating this was their plan all along.

After the vote, Ms. Rice said the United States “fully supports” the resolution, which called for “an immediate, durable and fully respected cease-fire leading to the full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza,” but opted to abstain to see the outcome of an Egyptian-French peace initiative.

Well, WAS the call in the middle of a speaking engagement by Bush made by Olmert the reason Rice backtracked on the cease-fire plan she allegedly drafted herself? And was she really embarrassed?

About "embarrassed", I have my doubts. It didn't embarass her when Israel destroyed Lebanon's airport and infrastructure and many civilians were slaughtered because of two kidnapped Israeli soldiers. It didn't embarrass her when Israel invaded Gaza, a civilian population with none but the most rudimentary self-defense. Why would this embarrass her? Ah, according to Olmert, it's her ego that was wounded.

So Olmert's getting bored with killing civilians and destroying lives of millions for political gain. So now he wants to mess with superpower egos.

Let's hope this whole thing backfires. Do tyrants and criminals ever pay a price? After 8 years of Bush and right-wing Israelis, one sincerely wonders. Now Obama's coming, so maybe Israeli neocons are having their bloodthirsty last stand. But will there be a similar sea change inside the borders of Israel itself, a shift to the left?

When the slaughter of innocents becomes how you impress an Israeli citizenry, it seems the opposite is true. Will Obama join the legacy of Bush and others to applaud massacres by standing on the sidelines blaming Hamas? Or will there be hope for the future? We are waiting...and hoping...and hoping...

Naomi Klein: Want Mideast Peace? Boycott Israel

2009-01-09T13:12:00.003-06:00

This heartening post by the ever-honest, ever-justice-loving Naomi Klein entitled "Want to End the Violence in Gaza? Boycott Israel" outlines the only path to Mideast Peace. Israel has never faced, and plans that it never will face, any consequences of a serious nature to its actions. It bombed Lebanon's airport to near-extinction, destroyed much of the country's infrastructure, and killed many children, women, and oh, don't forget, men - most of whom had nothing to do with the border skirmish in which two Israeli military men were kidnapped. Kidnap two soldiers of ours? We'll put you back to the stone age.

But Gaza was already hitting the stone age with a blockade that targeted mainly women, children, the sick and elderly. It has nothing to do with war. Israel's actions in the mideast are unconscionable. And then.... they invade. Invade a basically defenseless civilian population. Don't tell me this garbage about Hamas. Hamas was a legitimately elected government, supervised by Jimmy Carter. The U.S. in its infinite contortions of injustice metes out "justice" by labelling various groups of choice "terrorist", a title that means "fair game for invasion, attack, torture, whatever you can come up with."

It's been Bush's policy to say to Israel, "Sic 'em!" and then lean back and watch the sick show of slaughter, in Lebanon in '06 and now in Gaza. Always there's a "good reason": it's because of Hamas. They're terrorists! But Israel? They're defending themselves. Against homemade rockets. With cluster bombs, bombs of other descriptions dropped from supersonic jet fighters. It's a little "unbalanced"? But not terror?

From Naomi Klein:

It's time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa.

In July 2005 a huge coalition of Palestinian groups laid out plans to do just that. They called on "people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era." The campaign Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions -- BDS for short -- was born.

Every day that Israel pounds Gaza brings more converts to the BDS cause, and talk of cease-fires is doing little to slow the momentum. Support is even emerging among Israeli Jews. In the midst of the assault roughly 500 Israelis, dozens of them well-known artists and scholars, sent a letter to foreign ambassadors stationed in Israel. It calls for "the adoption of immediate restrictive measures and sanctions" and draws a clear parallel with the antiapartheid struggle. "The boycott on South Africa was effective, but Israel is handled with kid gloves.… This international backing must stop."

Yet even in the face of these clear calls, many of us still can't go there. The reasons are complex, emotional and understandable. And they simply aren't good enough. Economic sanctions are the most effective tools in the nonviolent arsenal. Surrendering them verges on active complicity. Here are the top four objections to the BDS strategy, followed by counterarguments.

1. Punitive measures will alienate rather than persuade Israelis. The world has tried what used to be called "constructive engagement." It has failed utterly. Since 2006 Israel has been steadily escalating its criminality: expanding settlements, launching an outrageous war against Lebanon and imposing collective punishment on Gaza through the brutal blockade. Despite this escalation, Israel has not faced punitive measures -- quite the opposite. The weapons and $3 billion in annual aid that the US sends to Israel is only the beginning. Throughout this key period, Israel has enjoyed a dramatic improvement in its diplomatic, cultural and trade relations with a variety of other allies. For instance, in 2007 Israel became the first non–Latin American country to sign a free-trade deal with Mercosur. In the first nine months of 2008, Israeli exports to Canada went up 45 percent. A new trade deal with the European Union is set to double Israel's exports of processed food. And on December 8, European ministers "upgraded" the EU-Israel Association Agreement, a reward long sought by Jerusalem.

It is in this context that Israeli leaders started their latest war: confident they would face no meaningful costs. It is remarkable that over seven days of wartime trading, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange's flagship index actually went up 10.7 percent. When carrots don't work, sticks are needed.

2. Israel is not South Africa. Of course it isn't. The relevance of the South African model is that it proves that BDS tactics can be effective when weaker measures (protests, petitions, back-room lobbying) have failed. And there are indeed deeply distressing echoes of South African apartheid in the occupied territories: the color-coded IDs and travel permits, the bulldozed homes and forced displacement, the settler-only roads. Ronnie Kasrils, a prominent South African politician, said that the architecture of segregation that he saw in the West Bank and Gaza was "infinitely worse than apartheid." That was in 2007, before Israel began its full-scale war against the open-air prison that is Gaza.

3. Why single out Israel when the United States, Britain and other Western countries do the same things in Iraq and Afghanistan? Boycott is not a dogma; it is a tactic. The reason the BDS strategy should be tried against Israel is practical: in a country so small and trade-dependent, it could actually work.

4. Boycotts sever communication; we need more dialogue, not less. This one I'll answer with a personal story. For eight years, my books have been published in Israel by a commercial house called Babel. But when I published The Shock Doctrine, I wanted to respect the boycott. On the advice of BDS activists, including the wonderful writer John Berger, I contacted a small publisher called Andalus. Andalus is an activist press, deeply involved in the anti-occupation movement and the only Israeli publisher devoted exclusively to translating Arabic writing into Hebrew. We drafted a contract that guarantees that all proceeds go to Andalus's work, and none to me. In other words, I am boycotting the Israeli economy but not Israelis.

Coming up with our modest publishing plan required dozens of phone calls, e-mails and instant messages, stretching from Tel Aviv to Ramallah to Paris to Toronto to Gaza City. My point is this: as soon as you start implementing a boycott strategy, dialogue increases dramatically. And why wouldn't it? Building a movement requires endless communicating, as many in the antiapartheid struggle well recall. The argument that supporting boycotts will cut us off from one another is particularly specious given the array of cheap information technologies at our fingertips. We are drowning in ways to rant at one another across national boundaries. No boycott can stop us.

Just about now, many a proud Zionist is gearing up for major point-scoring: don't I know that many of those very high-tech toys come from Israeli research parks, world leaders in infotech? True enough, but not all of them. Several days into Israel's Gaza assault, Richard Ramsey, the managing director of a British telecom specializing in voice-over-internet services, sent an email to the Israeli tech firm MobileMax. "As a result of the Israeli government action in the last few days we will no longer be in a position to consider doing business with yourself or any other Israeli company."

Ramsey says that his decision wasn't political; he just didn't want to lose customers. "We can't afford to lose any of our clients," he explains, "so it was purely commercially defensive."

It was this kind of cold business calculation that led many companies to pull out of South Africa two decades ago. And it's precisely the kind of calculation that is our most realistic hope of bringing justice, so long denied, to Palestine.

Thank you, Naomi. Finally, someone speaks out. Let's hope others will hear your voice.

Israel Uses Unconventional Weapons Against Gazans

2009-01-06T13:19:00.005-06:00

OUTRAGE! As if it's not enough to massacre hundreds of civilians in a show of overwhelming force by Goliath Israel against the prepped-by-starvation population of Gaza, now we learn from Mads Gilbert, a brave Norwegian doctor working in Gaza, that Israel is using unconventional weapons in their war on Palestine aka "War On Hamas". According to Dr. Gilbert:

"The Israelis are using a new type of very high explosive weapons which are called Dense Inert Metal Explosive (DIME) and are made out of a tungsten alloy. These weapons have an enormous power to explode."

"All that is happening in Gaza here now is against international law, it is against humanity."

"Almost all of the patients we have received have these severe amputations. They seem to have been affected by this kind of weapon. Of course, we have many fragment injuries and burns but those who have got their limbs cut off, constitutes quite a large proportion.

You know we have a lot to do. Palestinian doctors, nurses and paramedics do an incredibly heroic job to save their people. Doctor Eric and I are just a small drip in the ocean, but we learn from them."

IN an interview, Dr. Gilbert addresses allegations that Israel is using depleted Uranium and is deliberately targeting civilians.

Doctor Mads Gilbert is a member of a Norwegian triage medical team present in the besieged Gaza Strip. The team has exposed that Israel has used depleted uranium weapons in its war on the impoverished territory which is home to 1.5 million Palestinians. He described the conditions inside Gaza in an exclusive Press TV interview.

Press TV: What can you tell about the uranium findings?

Dr. Mads Gilbert:The findings about the uranium I cannot tell you much about, but I can tell you that we have clear evidence that the Israelis are using a new type of very high explosive weapons which are called Dense Inert Metal Explosive (DIME) and are made out of a tungsten alloy.
These weapons have an enormous power to explode.

The power of the explosion dissipates very quickly and the strength does not travel long, maybe 10 meters, but those humans who are hit by this explosion, this pressure wave are cut in pieces.

This was first used in Lebanon in 2006, it was used here in Gaza in 2006 and the injuries that we see in Shifa [Hospital] now, many many of them I suspect and we all suspect are the effect of DIME weapons used by the Israelis.

On the long term, these weapons will have a cancer effect on those who survive. They will develop cancer we suspect. There has been very little research on this but some research has been among other places in the United States, which show that these weapons have a high tendency to develop cancer. So they kill and those who survive risk having cancer.

If true, it appears to be a mass campaign of terror aimed and demoralizing the Palestinian people into capitulating into accepting a gulag archipelago as a so-called "homeland", which will be overseen and administrated by their captors, the Israelis, and in which their actual autonomy will be severely limited by the double-whammy of checkpoints and physical isolation and separation of these prison-islands from one another. Of course, rejection of the right of return means that it will not be a Palestinian "homeland" in the sense that Israel is a Jewish "homeland", but will be more of a pre-fabricated, US-Israeli-dictated residential living zone where basic human needs will be more likely to be allowed than they are in the current situation. Of course, neither the U.S. nor Israel considers "basic human needs" to include freedom of movement, or the ability of people expelled from their homes to return to their families and relatives.

And I have an appeal to the Israeli doctors and nurses. They are my colleagues. We belong to the same international community, the medical community. I wish that the good doctors and nurses in Israel tell their government to stop these atrocities. We cannot continue with this. We may differ in opinions, but you cannot treat the civilian Palestinian population in Gaza in this way.

And who are the majority of the victims? Terrorists?

Half of the population in Palestine are below 15 years and 80 percent of the people in Gaza live below the level of poverty defined by the UN. Now they don't have food, they don't have electricity. It's cold they don't have warmth and in addition to that, they are killed.

And so how many people have been affected by these unconventional weapons?

Dr. Mads Gilbert: Almost all of the patients we have received have these sever amputations. They seem to have been affected by this kind of weapon. Of course, we have many fragment injuries and burns but those who have got their limbs cut off, constitutes quite a large proportion.

It would seem that Israel is indeed using unconventional weapons. But since when did Israel care about conventions of war? Pre-emptive attacks, pre-emptive assassinations, collective punishment against civilians, and the imprisonment of an entire civilian population within its secure walls and guarded fences, the deprivation of liberty and the means of living, all these are against international law. And Israel joins with Dick Cheney, when faced with the condemnation of those who are brave and outrageously daring enough to give a damn about the people of Palestine:

"SO?"

How long will these outrageous acts continue? As long as the world looks on like a giant piece of inert protoplasm. Israel's banking on it.

Bush Legacy: Total Devastation of All He Surveyed

2009-01-05T20:45:00.004-06:00

This is how Tom Engelhardt sums up Bush's Ponzi Presidency:

Perhaps, in the future, historians will call him a Caesar -- of destruction.

Veni, vidi, vastavi... [I came, I saw, I devastated...]

Bush's ravaging of the planet (not discussed in the article, which focuses on military and economic devastation - ah, so much devastation, so little time to account for it all...) was perhaps in part due to his focus on destruction of the people ON the planet and their well-being, in failed, ill-devised, idiotically-administered, compassion-be-damned wars. Oh, and bloating the military into its own iron bubble. Wars, too, can be a Ponzi scheme. Not just the economy anymore.

Mr. Engelhardt's synopsis reminds us that it's not only Bush:

Between 1945 and George W. Bush's second term, the U.S. economy, American corporations, and the dollar have held remarkable sway over much of the rest of the world. New York City has been the planet's financial capital and Washington its war capital. (Moscow, even at the height of the Cold War, always came in a provincial second.)

Which was, of course, due to a strong military focus by the U.S. in trying to "round up the world" by military domination coupled with soft-sell propaganda.

In the wake of the Cold War, its various military commands (including Northcom, set up by the Bush administration in 2002, and Africom, set up in 2007) divided the greater part of the planet into what were essentially military satrapies. And yet, the U.S. military, post-1945, simply could not win the wars that mattered.

Or in other words,

In the major wars (and even some minor actions) the U.S. military fought in those decades, it had been massively destructive but never victorious, nor even particularly successful.

Yet the gung-ho Bush war-neocons wanted full speed ahead:

President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and the various neocons in the administration were fundamentalist idolaters -- and what they worshipped was the staggering power of the U.S. military. They were believers in a church whose first tenet was the efficacy of force above all else. Though few of them had the slightest military experience, they gave real meaning to the word bellicose. They were prejudiced towards war.

This seems to have always been the Republican line: patriotism means pro-war, and what's important is to have a war. The consequences of it are immaterial. The logic, the motivation, the reasons why are all out of question. Republicans want war - ours is not to reason why; ours is but to fight...and die.
And so this analysis of American "victories" show how, in fact, they were anything but:

Yes, it had "won" largely meaningless victories -- in Operation Urgent Fury, the invasion of the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada in 1983; against the toothless Panamanian regime of Manuel Noriega in Operation Just Cause in 1989; in Operation Desert Storm, largely an air campaign against Saddam Hussein's helpless military in 1990 (in a war that settled nothing); in NATO's Operation Deliberate Force, an air war against the essentially defenseless Serbian military in 1995 (while meeting disaster in operations in Iran in 1980 and Somalia in 1993). On the other hand, in Korea in the early 1950s and in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from the 1960s into the early 1970s, it had committed its forces all but atomically, and yet had met nothing but stalemate, disaster, and defeat against enemies who, on paper at least, should not have been able to stand up to American power.

Of course, Mr. Engelhardt's article is about body counts, and how Bush avoided them. Yes, he counts the tally of "victories", but the true cost of devastation is not publicized. And with good reason:

... the military had been counting bodies as well, but as the possibility of victory disappeared into the charnel houses of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon and the president finally gave in. While this did not stoke an antiwar movement, it represented a tacit admission of policy collapse, a kind of surrender. It was as close as an administration which never owned up to error could come to admitting that two more disastrous wars had been added to a string of military failures in the truncated American Century.

That implicit admission, however, took years to arrive, and in the meantime, Iraqis and Afghans -- civilians, insurgents, terrorists, police, and military men -- were dying in prodigious numbers.

And those numbers of casualties, the dead among supposed "enemies" who in some ways come off more as "victims" - the civilians, the children, the families, and in Gitmo, even the accused "enemy combatants", at least the ones arrested as minors... - only served to reveal the human tragedy behind Bush's failures. Thousands of dead, many of them innocents who never would have done anything to U.S. citizens, soldiers or otherwise, had we not invaded, uninvited, and created havoc everywhere we went.

Various groups of scholars and pollsters also took up the task, using sophisticated sampling techniques (including door-to-door interviews under exceedingly dangerous conditions) to arrive at reasonable approximations of the Iraqi dead. They have come up with figures ranging from the hundreds of thousands to a million or more in a country with a prewar population of perhaps 26 million.

United Nations representatives have similarly attempted, under difficult circumstances, to keep a count of Iraqis fleeing into exile -- exile being, after a fashion, a form of living death -- and have estimated that more than 2 million Iraqis fled their country, while another 2.7 million, having fled their homes, remained "internally displaced."

Similar attempts have been made for Afghanistan. Human Rights Watch has, for instance, done its best to tally civilian deaths from air strikes in that country (while even TomDispatch has attempted to keep a modest count of wedding parties obliterated by U.S. air attacks in Afghanistan and Iraq). But, of course, the real body count in either country will never be known.

One thing is certain, however: it is an obscenity of the present moment that Iraq, still a charnel house, still in a state of near total disrepair, still on the edge of a whole host of potential conflicts, should increasingly be portrayed here as a limited Bush administration "surge" success. Only a country -- or a punditry or a military -- incapable of facing the depths of destruction that the Bush administration let loose could reach such a conclusion.

Ever heard of an economic meltdown? And now...the planet, please...

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

2008-12-29T23:34:00.005-06:00

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

2008-12-28T17:00:00.011-06:00

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

2008-12-27T16:28:00.005-06:00

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?

2008-12-20T01:00:00.007-06:00

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

2008-12-18T21:55:00.002-06:00

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

2008-12-18T19:46:00.006-06:00

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

2008-12-17T20:40:00.007-06:00

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

2008-12-17T20:00:00.006-06:00

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?"

2008-12-17T02:19:00.003-06:00

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!

2008-12-13T14:25:00.007-06:00

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

2008-12-12T23:26:00.006-06:00

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

2008-12-12T13:22:00.003-06:00

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

2008-12-09T21:11:00.003-06:00

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

2008-12-09T15:14:00.001-06:00

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.