Balter's Blog

The United States arms most dictatorships

2012-01-28T05:07:00.001-05:00

News Release

The United States arms most dictatorships

27 January 2012 14:48 The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)

The Chinese are about to change Africa. In January, a survey conducted by the Financial Times showed that over the last two years, China has lent more money to developing countries than the World Bank.

Trade between China and Africa has increased dramatically in the last ten years, and in 2009 the Chinese were Africa's largest trading partner. In 1950 the trade volume between the two countries was USD 12 million. In 2010 that figure had ballooned to USD 115 billion.

And while Barack Obama is struggling hard to get the American economy back on track, China's economy is growing strongly. Indra de Soysa, a professor of political science and director of NTNU’s Globalization Programme, predicts that in 20 years, the Chinese economy will be larger than the US economy.

Follow the arms flow

“Journalists, academics and politicians in the West express fear that a dictatorship like China will come to have such a dominant position in the world’s economy. Many think that the Chinese have no morals, and that they do not care about worker protection, human rights and democratic conditions in the country where they trade,” says de Soysa.

To determine if this was true, de Soysa, along with Professor Paul Midford from NTNU, followed the export of weapons from China and the United States to African dictatorships from 1989 to 2006, using figures from the Stockholm Institute for Peace Research.

“If a nation sells or gives away weapons to a country, this is a sign that the countries are looking for a more long-term relationship,” said de Soysa, who has now documented that the US arms far more African dictators than China.

And if that isn’t enough: The figures also show that Americans clearly prefer dictatorships, such as Equatorial Guinea and Djibouti, while the Chinese clearly prefer democratic regimes, as Zambia and Namibia.

Strategy versus profit

“I was very surprised by the findings. There is this international image of China as the enemy, like the big bad wolf that sucks out the resources from its trading partners without worrying about how people feel.

"People think that because China is a dictatorship, the country will try to sell weapons to other dictatorships, and that the US will do the opposite. But the USA looks to promote its strategic interests, even if it means supporting dictatorial regimes, while China is primarily looking to make money,” de Soysa says.

De Soysa thinks that the fear of China's entry into the world economy is partly due to its silencing of political protesters, such as Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo.

China's sale of arms to dictatorial regimes such as Sudan and Zimbabwe, from 1990 to 2008, also sparked anger from Western human rights activists who claimed that China was undermining the development of democratic rights in Africa.

Vaclav Havel and Kim Jong-il

2011-12-19T16:52:00.000-05:00

The deaths of these two leaders--one despised around the world, the other admired--are linked in ways that might not be immediately obvious. Havel argued that the "victims" of authoritarian Communism were, to a large degree, complicit in their own oppression and lack of freedom; they accepted the status quo for decades even though they had the power to change things. The Arab Spring is a latter-day example of how right Havel was about that.

Now pundits and analysts are pondering what will happen in North Korea now that Kim Jong-il is dead. Will his young son have the credibility and support necessary to avoid a possibly bloody battle for leadership? Will the people rise up and say enough is enough? If they don't, and if the transition is smooth and uneventful, North Koreans won't have anyone to blame but themselves. Indeed, as Havel so rightly pointed out, not everyone wants to be free so badly that they are willing to take serious risks for their liberty.

What tips the balance? When does yesterday's complacency give way to today's revolutions? If we understood that better, we might be able to control our destinies instead of letting others control them for us.

Israel has never been so ugly

2011-12-15T09:25:00.000-05:00

Of late the "Jewish state" has been showing a face that many American Jews might not want to recognize: Racist, anti-democratic, and even terrorist. Writing in Haaretz, columnist Ari Shavit sums up the country's current mood, and places the blame squarely on its leaders.

A few excerpts, but please click the link and read the whole thing:

We have never been so ugly. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanayhu seeks to silence the call to prayer over the loudspeakers of the country's mosques, and to shut down Channel 10 television. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman expresses support for the Russian "democtator" who has just rigged elections. Defense Minister Ehud Barak stands by while Jewish settlers victimize Palestinians and ultra-Orthodox religious nationalists victimize female soldiers...

There has never been such a comprehensive attempt to remake the face of Israel and to replace it with something else. Under Netanyahu and Lieberman's leadership, Israel been turned into a country with the values of Newt Gingrich and the look of Vladimir Putin. What's happening here? And why now exactly? Why are anti-democratic forces at work now to run roughshod over human rights and human dignity and freedom? Why are the Jewish nationalists and ultra-Orthodox fanatics, along with Russian statism, bursting forth now all at the same time?

The answer, Shavit says, is Netanyahu. But I'm not sure it's that simple. Israeli voters have been endorsing their nation's right-wing politicians with increasing fervor in recent years, and it's safe to assume at this point that Israel's leadership reflects the increasingly warped viewpoints of the majority of its citizens. This move to the extreme right could not be possible without the complicity of a large number of American Jews, who have long turned blind eyes--innocently or not--to the oppression and human rights violations of the nation that claims to speak for all Jews everywhere. It's time for that to stop. Indeed, there are now plenty of signs that it is stopping, as more and more American Jews join groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

Photo: Torched mosque in Tuba Zangaria/Avihu Shapira

US to Gaza: Round Two

2011-11-02T12:53:00.000-04:00

Act now!!

BOATS SAILING NOW TO GAZA!

SPREAD THE WORD.

Israel and the U.S. outsourced the siege of Gaza to Athens last summer by preventing 8 boats in the Freedom Flotilla 2-Stay Human from sailing from Greek ports to Gaza. Despite this we were able to bring world-wide attention to the blockade of the Gaza Strip. Our efforts in Greece only fueled our determination to challenge the imprisonment of the people of Gaza. We said we would continue to sail and so we are!!!

At this moment, two boats are in international waters in the Mediterranean heading to Gaza. One boat, the Saoirse from Ireland, includes parliamentarians among its passengers. The other, the Tahrir, carries representatives from Canada, the U.S., Australia, and Palestine.  The U.S. Representative on the Tahrir, Kit Kittredge, was a passenger on the U.S. Boat to Gaza, The Audacity of Hope mission in Athens in July.  A journalist from Democracy Now is on the Tahrir also. Civil society organizations in Gaza await their arrival, and look forward to the delivery of letters collected from thousands of U.S. supporters in the To Gaza With Love campaign.

We need your help to make this mission a success. Please take these actions immediately.

1. Check these websites for updates:  U.S. to Gaza, Irish Ship to Gaza and Canadian Boat to Gaza,  watch or listen to Democracy Now for live coverage from the Tahrir. Look for twitter hashtag #Freedomwaves.

2. Spread the word far and wide - send this alert to your contacts.

3. Call the State Department  and the White House- demand that they take immediate action to ensure the safe passage of these boats and to put an end to the siege of Gaza.

Call the State Department:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton 202-647-5291
U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro 011-972-3-519-7575
Office of Israel/Palestinian Affairs Paul Sutphin 202-647-3672
Office of Consular Affairs, Kim Richter 202-647-8308

and the White House: 202-456-1414

email President Obama at http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact

Here are some talking points or suggested messaging:

Gaza has been under siege since mid-2006, depriving 1.6 million people of their liberty and basic human rights. Although the siege has been condemned by the United Nations, the Red Cross, and many national governments, nothing has been done to ease the plight of these civilians. Civil society has had to act where governments would not. Two ships with 27 passengers from 5 countries are sailing to Gaza to confront the Israeli naval blockade, and to bring medical supplies and letters of support.

As Americans we insist that our government (which sends Israel $3 billion in military aid every year), demands that Israel insures the ships' safe passage and ends its illegal blockade of Gaza. There is absolutely no excuse to subject 1.6 million people to collective punishment. Ask your local press to cover this story. Up-to-date information will be available at www.ustogaza.org, www.irishshiptogaza.org and www.tahrir.ca

FORWARD THIS ACTION ALERT TO ALL YOUR CONTACTS, PLEASE INCLUDE THE PRESS RELEASE.

THANKS
FELICE GELMAN, JANE HIRSCHMANN AND ANN WRIGHT
----------------------------------

BREAKING NEWS

For immediate release, November 2, 2011
Contact:
In New York: Felice Gelman, 917-912-2597, 917 679 8343
At sea: phone numbers will be released when you call the above press contact

TWO BOATS WITH PASSENGERS FROM 5 COUNTRIES (INCLUDING THE U.S.) HAVE SET SAIL TO GAZA

Organizers say: "It is time to lift the siege of Gaza which deprives 1.6 million civilians of their rights to travel, work, study, develop their economy and be free."

The Canadian ship Tahrir and the Irish ship Saoirse have successfully reached international waters, initiating the "Freedom Wave to Gaza." The boats have embarked from Turkey and are on the Mediterranean Sea. In all, the 2 boats carry 27 passengers  from  Canada, Ireland, U.S., Palestine, and Australia.

Kit Kittredge on board the Tahrir was previously a passenger on the American ship, The Audacity of Hope, which attempted passage to Gaza last July.  Kittredge says, " The only obstacles in our way are Israel's military and the complicity of the Obama administration but in our sails is the wind of worldwide public opinion which has turned against the illegal blockade."

Ann Wright retired US army Colonel and former US Diplomat says, "We carry inspiration from the Arab Spring and the worldwide "Occupy" movements that are demanding freedom and justice. Where governments fail, civil society must act. As Americans we are fed up with our government's unquestioning support of Israel no matter how violent, illegal and  oppressive its actions.  We will not stand by and watch $30 billion of our tax money committed to buying Israel weaponry used to carry out this illegal occupation of Palestine including the blockade of Gaza."

Jane Hirschmann added, "Our sailing coincides with UN agency UNESCO's recognition of Palestine as a member state, defying US threats to cut off $80 million of US funding in retaliation. This shows the growing strength of opposition by the international community to U.S. and Israeli policies in Palestine. We call on the international community to go further and take effective action to lift the siege of Gaza. Hirschmann was one of the organizers this past summer of the U.S. Boat to Gaza, The Audacity of Hope which is still captive in Greece.

###

GET ON BOARD THE U.S. TO GAZA CAMPAIGN

VISIT WWW.USTOGAZA.ORG

TO ENDORSE AND CONTRIBUTE

Thank you for your support

Please distribute widely

Israel Doesn't Want Peace Nearly as Much as It Wants the West Bank

2011-10-06T08:15:00.001-04:00

This slideshow from Peace Now shows how it's being done. With thanks to Mondoweiss for posting it.

Anatot takeovereng

View more presentations from hagitofran

Ben-Hur and how the Los Angeles Times swallowed revised Jewish/Palestinian history whole

2011-10-01T08:32:00.000-04:00

The excellent blog Mondoweiss describes a particularly interesting (I would say amusing but it's not really funny) example of the way in which Israel lobby groups try to distort the truth about Israel and Palestine. It's also an example of how easily newspapers like the L.A. Times are cowed into submission by such groups, even at the price of accuracy.

Please read it at the link.

Obama and Palestine

2011-09-22T08:35:00.002-04:00

“Peace will not come through statements and resolutions at the U.N."
--Barack Obama in his speech before the United Nations.

Peace would have come a long time ago if U.N. resolutions were actually enforced.

Some of My Best Friends are Zionists

2011-09-14T07:58:00.000-04:00

Initial Development Trailer: Some of My Best Friends Are Zionists from Open Letter Productions on Vimeo.

Israel on the run

2011-09-10T14:52:00.001-04:00

Greetings from New York, where I will be based until just before Christmas. The blog is always more active when I am here, for no other reason than that I am more active when I am here--especially politically.

The storming of the Israeli embassy in Cairo, Turkey's apparent intention (let's just hope it's true) to escort ships taking aid to Gaza, and a number of recent victories for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, all add up to bad news for Israel's attempts to stall the peace process forever while taking over more and more of the West Bank. The writing is on the wall, and the Israelis have only themselves to blame. Oh, they can also blame the Americans, who have been Israel's worse friends, by indulging their ally in the delusion that injustice and oppression can go on forever without being resisted effectively.

On September 15, thousands will gather at Times Square in New York at 4:30 PM, and then march to the United Nations, in support of Palestinian statehood demands. This march is sponsored by a number of organizations, including Jewish Voice for Peace, of which I am a proud member of the New York chapter. If you are in the vicinity, be sure to show up.

Photo: AP

The blog is coming back, and it's going to be a riot

2011-08-14T07:05:00.002-04:00

Yes, summer is nearly over, and it's time for me to start putting all my festering thoughts into print. The comeback will be slow and erratic at first, as I decamp for another fall teaching stint in New York at the end of this month, but it will happen.

Meanwhile, why does it take an actor and comedian to talk sense about the London riots? Last week in the Guardian, Russell Brand, in a piece entitled "Big Brother Isn't Watching You", took issue with the oft-repeated notion that the riots were "mindless." Of course, we all know that, even the politicians and law-and-order types who think that a little jail time is all it will take to cure the ills of British society--or at least convince the more privileged strata of British society that something meaningful is being done.

There are many eloquent passages in Brand's piece, but let me leave you with this one. Please click the link and read the whole thing. And clear your schedules for regular reading sessions of Balter's Blog.

Why am I surprised that these young people behave destructively, "mindlessly", motivated only by self-interest? How should we describe the actions of the city bankers who brought our economy to its knees in 2010? Altruistic? Mindful? Kind? But then again, they do wear suits, so they deserve to be bailed out, perhaps that's why not one of them has been imprisoned. And they got away with a lot more than a few fucking pairs of trainers.

These young people have no sense of community because they haven't been given one. They have no stake in society because Cameron's mentor Margaret Thatcher told us there's no such thing.

If we don't want our young people to tear apart our communities then don't let people in power tear apart the values that hold our communities together.

Truth and lies (from Netanyahu) about the Rafah border crossing

2011-05-26T08:21:00.001-04:00

The Israeli human rights organization Gisha, which fights for the right of movement of the people of Gaza, has issued a new press release setting the record straight about the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt, which the Egyptians have now reopened (although subject to many restrictions.) In addition to the link above, I am reproducing the text of the release below.

Cartoon by the Brazilian artist Latuff.

Gisha response to Egyptian announcement on opening date of Rafah Crossing: If Israel wants a say in passage via Rafah, it should permit passage between Gaza and the West Bank
	[Print]
Gisha welcomes the announcement that Egypt will expand the ability of Gaza residents to travel abroad via Rafah Crossing, which has become Gaza's gateway to the world, in light of Israel's closure of Gaza's airspace and territorial waters and restrictions on travel via Erez Crossing. Gisha notes the need also to permit passage of people and goods between Gaza and the West Bank, recognized by Israel as a single territorial unit whose integrity is the basis for a two-state solution. Since the capture of an Israeli soldier in June 2006, Israel has vetoed the implementation of the U.S.-brokered 2005 Agreement on Movement and Access which gave Israel security supervision over Rafah Crossing in exchange for a commitment to permit access between Gaza and the West Bank. If Israel wants a say concerning passage via Rafah, it should implement its commitment to allow Palestinians to travel between Gaza and the West Bank. The Egyptian commitment concerning Rafah includes longer operating hours, no numerical limit on passengers, and visa-free travel, except for men aged 18-40. Crossing for Palestinians is expected to continue to be limited to those listed in the Israeli-controlled population registry. The expansion does not appear to include passage of goods, which are restricted to the Israeli-controlled crossings and subject to prohibitions on construction materials and export. Background – Netanyahu Mislead Congress. Since Israel closed Gaza's airspace and territorial waters and all but closed Erez Crossing to Palestinians, Rafah Crossing has become the gateway to the outside world for 1.5 million Palestinian residents of Gaza. Crossing via Erez (on the border between Gaza and Israel) is limited to "extraordinary humanitarian cases, especially urgent medical cases", preventing Palestinians from traveling between Gaza and the West Bank. Rafah Crossing was operated according to the U.S.-brokered Agreement on Movement and Access until June 2006, when Israel announced its suspension following the capture of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's comment before the U.S. Congress that in Rafah, "the European observers evaporated overnight" failed to note that the "evaporation" was ordered by Israel, which refused to allow the EU border mission observers to reach their post and has objected to the implementation of the agreement ever since. The EU observers have been waiting in their hotel in Ashkelon for the last five years, waiting for Israeli permission to return to Rafah. Rafah remained mostly closed from June 2006 to June 2010, when Egypt opened it in the wake of the flotilla incident for limited categories including holders of foreign passports or visas and those seeking medical attention in Egypt. Between June 2010 and January 2011, 19,000 people per month on average crossed Rafah in both directions, 47% of the number of people who crossed monthly in the first half of 2006. Crossing for Palestinians is limited to those listed in the Israeli-controlled population registry. Since the 2005 "disengagement", goods have not been permitted to pass via Rafah, except for humanitarian assistance which Egypt occasionally permits through Rafah.

DSK: Who's the victim here?

2011-05-17T14:40:00.003-04:00

I've just arrived in New York from Paris, with the case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn resonating on both continents. In the eyes of the law, of course, he's innocent until proven guilty. But that hasn't stopped a lot of nonsense from spouting out about the case, especially in France, where I make my home most of the year. First, about half the French seemed convince that this is some sort of a plot, launched by President Nicolas Sarkozy or by one or more of DSK's Socialist Party rivals. Key to these plots are that DSK was somehow "trapped" into attacking the hotel maid, or that she was somehow paid to make up the story; my taxi driver on the way to Charles de Gaulle airport, a Socialist and supporter of Francois Hollande, was full of such theories (yes, all journalists should be ready to pull a taxi driver story out of a hat, I'm no exception.)

Some of Slate's French collaborators dissected this notion is a piece called "Dominique Strauss-Kahn Conspiracy Theorists Are Embarrassing Themselves," which I recommend you read. The authors make the following important point:

The potential crime, as they see it, is all about DSK's weakness rather than his strength and the maid's weakness. Yes, we must respect that DSK is innocent until proven guilty. But to consider the case simply as a conspiracy theory or an "ambush" on a "libertine" is to transform the presumption of innocence into a presumption of guilt on the part of the accusers.

A similar point is made by the French feminist activist Magali de Haas in an interview in the weekly L'Express. The article is in French, but de Haas says that all the attention is being focused on DSK and his tragic downfall, rather than on the victim of the alleged crime. De Haas points out that many French people see this at most as a case of a lady's man going a little too far, instead of the serious crime he is accused of, and tend to think of sexual violence as some sort of joke. De Haas reminds readers that an estimated 75,000 women are victims of sexual assault each each in France, and concludes that DSK is not being accused "of an affair of morals, but a crime."

There does indeed appear to be a victim in this case, a young African immigrant who has all but been identified by name in the news media. Whether she is an agent of Sarkozy or of the Socialists remains to be seen; but I wouldn't bet on it.

Many are the ways...

2011-05-12T10:17:00.000-04:00

... that Israel has sought to cleanse the West Bank of its Palestinians and steal their land.

Yesterday a story in Haaretz by Akiva Eldar detailed how Israel authorities stripped the residency status from 140,000 Palestinians between 1967 and 1994. The details are in a document the newspaper obtained under Israel's Freedom of Information Law; basically their residency permits were cancelled if they stayed abroad for too long, but they were not warned that would happen.

The Guardian also carries the story; should I hold my breath until a major US media outlet covers it also, like the New York Times? Or just let my breath out with a sigh?

Thanks to Mondoweiss for linking to this story. To keep up with what is really going on in Israel and Palestine, be sure to subscribe to their feed, and consider making a donation to these seekers of truth.

Photo: The Allenby Bridge. AFP/Getty Images

Afterthought. All is not bleak, however. CUNY's reversal of its decision to revoke Tony Kushner's honorary degree is a sign that the Israel lobby's power is waning.

Israeli leaders: Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide

2011-05-06T14:18:00.002-04:00

The Israeli narrative has run its course, and it's time for those who believe in justice and an end to the brutal occupation of Palestinian lands to take their turn to speak. The disruption of Israeli ambassador Michael Oren's speech at the University of California, Irvine is in the finest tradition of civil disobedience and speaking truth to power.

Hiding in plain sight? So was The Purloined Letter

2011-05-05T05:22:00.008-04:00

It seems intuitively unlikely, as so many have pointed out, that Osama bin Laden could have been hiding out in a large, obvious compound in a wealthy suburb less than a mile from a military academy without Pakistani authorities--or at least Pakistani intelligence officials--knowing about it.

Many would be more convinced of Pakistani government claims of ignorance if OBL had been hiding in a cave, as some imagined.

But I'm reminded of the great Edgar Allan Poe story "The Purloined Letter," one of his Auguste Dupin detective pieces (the others include the gruesome "The Murders in the Rue Morgue.") You can read "The Purloined Letter" online here. I won't entirely spoil the plot, but basically a letter has been stolen and the bumbling police can't find it despite a careful search of the premises of the main suspect; Dupin shows them that the letter was hiding in plain sight.

So imagine that OBL got tired of living in caves, and that he wanted to be near civilization, live with his family, and have something approaching a normal life (which, given his Islamic fundamentalist asceticism, did not require him to go dancing or to the cinema.) Where better to hide than in plain sight?

I am not saying this is what happened, I am just saying that it could have happened this way, and what seems logical to conventional minds is not always the truth. After all, U.S. intelligence agencies, with all their satellite technology and human assets, took several years to track OBL down. Was it an intelligence failure, or just a failure of the imagination?

Update: Now that I've written this, I Googled to see if anyone else had made this connection. A number of people have, which I find heartening for two reasons: 1) Not everyone follows conventional reasoning, and 2) American literary traditions are still alive.

Photo: William S. Niederkorn, Berg Collection, New York Public Library

Did the Navy Seals shoot an unarmed man who was already dead?

2011-05-04T12:16:00.009-04:00

It's hard to know who is going to get more batty over the killing of OBL, the left or the right. Cindy Sheehan, on her Facebook page, says we are all patsies if we think he is really dead. And some right-wingers say he has been dead for a long time. Then some civil libertarians, like Glenn Greenwald, think his civil rights might have been violated (Greenwald's claim that the mainstream media would continue insisting that OBL was armed proved untrue the second day.)

My own feeling is that making a big deal out of any of this is a loser, especially for the left that I am part of. I think we need to let Obama have this one, let him be an American hero, and it will all blow over soon enough (as soon, that is, as the White House gets its story straight.)

Meanwhile, anyone who thinks OBL's rights were violated can always make a donation to the ACLU. After all, we can't bring OBL back--unless he is already back, working again for the CIA.

Who's sorry now? A former student of mine reminds us of this exchange between McCain and Obama during the second presidential debate. Thanks to JM for this walk down memory lane (or should I say the avenue of forgetting?)

Obama: If we have Osama bin Laden in our sights and the Pakistani government is unable or unwilling to take them out, then I think that we have to act and we will take them out. We will kill bin Laden; we will crush Al Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national security priority.

McCain: He said he wants to announce that he's going to attack Pakistan. Remarkable. You know, if you are a country and you're trying to gain the support of another country, then you want to do everything you can that they would act in a cooperative fashion. When you announce that you're going to launch an attack into another country, it's pretty obvious that you have the effect that it had in Pakistan: It turns public opinion against us.

The man who shot Osama Bin Laden

2011-05-02T05:27:00.002-04:00

I'm sure that many fascinating details about the raid against Bin Laden's compound just north of the Pakistani capital (what did Pakistani intelligence know and when did they know it?) will emerge in the coming days and weeks. Despite its huge symbolic importance, however, it is unclear how much Bin Laden's death will impact Al Qaeda's terrorist operations around the world, as former CIA agents and other talking heads are already pointing out.

What seems more certain is that this momentous event will have a huge effect on domestic politics in the United States. The far right, Tea Party fringe will have a very difficult time from here on out questioning Barack Obama's patriotism, his seriousness about fighting terrorism, and even his religious background (continued claims that he is a closet Muslim will begin to fall increasingly flat.) And the mainstream Republican Party, which has been riding the coat-tails of the far right's thinly disguised racist assault on Obama, is going to be left with having to argue domestic policies on their merits--or at least, increasingly so.

One might also hope that Obama, whose backbone in the face of right-wing criticism has often turned to jelly, will now be able to buck up and get in touch with his inner liberal--especially as his re-election next year would now seem to be all but assured. At the very least, activists and others to Obama's left should be presented with new opportunities to hold this administration to at least some of the promises it made during the last election.

Opening Gaza's prison gate

2011-05-01T08:21:00.005-04:00

Over the past several days Egyptian officials have indicated that they will permanently open the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza, although there seems to be some confusion over it. Israel has of course objected strenuously, but Egyptian officials have pretty much told the "Jewish state" to mind its own business (note that I put Jewish state in quotation marks because its population includes a significant number of non-Jews.)

A press release from the Israeli human rights group Gisha, issued today, shows why we should support the Egyptian decision: Israel is trying to starve the Gazan population into submission, and doesn't want anyone to see the documents that prove it.

Here is the first paragraph of the Gisha statement, but please read the rest:

On Thursday, April 28, 2011, the state appealed the Tel Aviv District Court ruling that the Defense Ministry must provide Gisha with the "red lines" document, in which the Defense Ministry apparently determined the minimal number of calories residents of Gaza should be allowed to consume, as part of the restrictions on the transfer of civilian goods into the Gaza Strip. The district court ruled that the Freedom of Information Act requires disclosure of the document for the sake of public interest in transparency.

The Pope's miracles. It seems that the Vatican has decided to count Sister Marie Simon-Pierre's supposed recovery from Parkinson's disease after praying to Pope John Paul II, despite questions raised earlier about just how miraculous this particular miracle really was. But it will be interesting to see what the Vatican manages to dig up for the second miracle required for beatification. Perhaps if someone recovers from the childhood trauma of the sexual abuse by priests that John Paul II proved to be so complacent about, that might do the trick.

Donald Trump demands proof that Barack Obama actually exists

2011-04-28T04:10:00.002-04:00

The intrepid Donald Trump, having forced Barack Obama to release the long form of his birth certificate, upped the ante yesterday and launched an investigation into how he got into Harvard University with allegedly bad grades.

Breaking news, exclusive to Balter's Blog: Trump will today challenge the White House to prove that Barack Obama is a real living, breathing human being, and not the result of holographic projections and other high-tech tricks by the Democratic Party, designed to create the illusion that a handsome, politically liberal Black man has actually been elected president of the United States when everyone knows that is impossible (or at least extremely unlikely.)

Obama supporters are likely to find this new challenge particularly daunting, especially since "birthers" have already demonstrated conclusively that the long-form birth certificate was an elaborate forgery. Trump and his investigative team have already found witnesses willing to testify that Obama was making campaign appearances at multiple places at the same time during the 2008 election battle; and they suspect that sophisticated electronic equipment in the White House basement, linked to orbiting satellites, might be responsible for this devious illusion.

Of course, Trump et al. say, the liberal news media has long been in on the plot, pretending to interview Obama and Photoshopping photos of the alleged president, coloring them in when they appear a little too transparent against bright backgrounds.

The White House has plans to counter these accusations in the coming days, and is reportedly considering releasing classified documents showing that "Donald Trump" is actually nothing more than a figment of his own demented imagination.

Update: Bad news, as a result of Obama's posting his long-form birth certificate, someone has already stolen his identity. This imposter is pretending to have the courage of his convictions, but wimping out and caving in whenever he is attacked by the Republicans.

Israel's deadly fire

2011-04-27T09:07:00.000-04:00

A few days ago the excellent Israeli newspaper Haaretz published an investigative piece by Shay Fogelman into one of the deadliest massacres of the Operation Cast Lead assault on Gaza in the winter of 2008/9. The "dek" on the story gives a good preview of what is to come:

Four mortar shells fired by the IDF 'at a military target' in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead landed on a busy Al-Fakhoura Street and killed dozens of civilians. An investigation by Haaretz finds that the army's answers are not consistent with its own reports about the day of the shelling and that there are also major contradictions with facts made public here for the first time.

If that's not enough to get you reading the piece, try the first paragraph:

"Looking at the photographs of the children who were killed on Al-Fakhoura Street in the Jabalya refugee camp during Operation Cast Lead just over two years ago, one is particularly struck by the face of Lina Hasan. All the children are innocent in the photos - some smiling, others offering a shy gaze. That's the way children are. But there is something about the look on Lina's face that makes you stop and look hard at the few photos that remain of her life. She was 10 years old when she died."

Most of the world sat by doing little or nothing while Israel launched an assault on Gaza that killed an estimated 1400 people, the overwhelming majority of them civilians. And yet, as David Remnick put it recently in a "Talk of the Town" piece in the New Yorker, "The Palestinian question is not an internal matter for Israel; it is an international matter."

Perhaps it's time that United Nations troops eject the Israeli military from the West Bank, end the siege of Gaza, and insure the security of both Israelis and Palestinians while a Palestinian state is set up? That would be a logical result of the likely declaration this September, by the UN General Assembly, of a Palestinian state on the occupied territories of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. It may be a fantasy, but sometimes dreams come true.

Photo:

Al-Fakhoura Street in the Jabalya refugee camp after the mortars landed.

Photo by: AP

How about an editorial for Bradley Manning?

2011-04-25T23:50:00.004-04:00

The New York Times and other publications have done a great job mining through the documents released by Wikileaks to find stories that readers need to know about. Yesterday, the Times published a trove of documents about the detention of alleged terrorist suspects at Guantanamo under both the Bush and Obama administrations; and in an accompanying editorial, the paper told us why their importance trumps the desire of the government to keep them secret:

They describe the chaos, lawlessness and incompetence in his administration’s system for deciding detainees’ guilt or innocence and assessing whether they would be a threat if released.

Readers' Comments

Share your thoughts.

Post a Comment »

Innocent men were picked up on the basis of scant or nonexistent evidence and subjected to lengthy detention and often to abuse and torture. Some people were released who later acted against the United States. Inmates who committed suicide were regarded only as a public relations problem. There are seriously dangerous prisoners at Guantánamo who cannot be released but may never get a real trial because the evidence is so tainted.

The documents have been made available to the press by Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and his collaborators, and they were allegedly provided to Wikileaks by Bradley Manning. Wouldn't it be nice if the Times ran a series of editorials defending its sources and alleged sources from attempts to prosecute them for performing what is clearly a public service?

Update: Great leftists think alike. Some very similar thoughts from Robert Scheer at Truthdig.

What does IQ really measure?

2011-04-25T23:25:00.000-04:00

That's the subject of my latest online story for ScienceNOW.

Please click the link to read, but here is the first paragraph:

Kids who score higher on IQ tests will, on average, go on to do better in conventional measures of success in life: academic achievement, economic success, even greater health, and longevity. Is that because they are more intelligent? Not necessarily. New research concludes that IQ scores are partly a measure of how motivated a child is to do well on the test. And harnessing that motivation might be as important to later success as so-called native intelligence.

Credit: Psychology Today

PS--Due to a technical glitch comments on this blog have not been posting. That should now be fixed.

Bradley Manning gets to mingle with Fort Leavenworth prisoners

2011-04-20T02:21:00.002-04:00

Let's put things in perspective: Bradley Manning, if he is indeed the person behind the documents released by Wikileaks, is a hero. The revelations have led to hundreds of news and feature stories in major media outlets across the planet, and given us new information and insights into what our "leaders" were doing behind closed doors. He is a hero just as Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers, was a hero to earlier generations.

Questions about his treatment in detention, which some have branded as torture, continue to be raised. Now he is to be moved from Quantico to Ft. Leavenworth. Government officials deny that this is because his conditions of detention at Quantico were criticized, saying that his needs as a prisoner can be better handled in this high-security federal lockup.

But I think there is great reason for concern. This chilling passage in the Washington Post story linked to above is just one example of what I mean:

The new facility, they said, will be more open, have more space, and Manning will have a greater opportunity to eat and interact with other prisoners there.

I don't know about you, but the opportunity to mingle with the other prisoners at Ft. Leavenworth doesn't sound like an improvement in conditions for someone accused of a strictly political crime and who is still innocent in the eyes of the law.

A number of organizations have been active in defending Bradley Manning, and Congressman Dennis Kucinich has been particularly vocal about his case. Here is the latest statement from Kucinich on the move to Ft. Leavenworth. At the very least, the Obama administration knows that we are paying very close attention to how Bradley Manning is treated.

Kucinich Responds to Defense Department Moving Pfc. Bradley Manning to a Maximum Security Prison at Fort Leavenworth

Demands Written Assurances of Protection of Rights and of Person

Washington D.C. (April 19, 2011) - Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) today issued the following statement in response to a report by the Associated Press that the Department of Defense will move Private First Class Bradley Manning from Marine Corp Base Quantico to the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, a maximum security prison.

"Absolutely nothing the Department of Defense has done so far with respect to Pfc. Manning provides any assurance that his basic human and constitutional rights are being protected. The Department of Defense has refused to provide timely answers to even the most basic questions and have thus far refused to allow me to meet with him.

"Any move of Pfc. Manning does not change the underlying fact, which has not been disputed by the Department of Defense, that he has been held under conditions which may in fact constitute 'cruel and unusual punishment' in violation of the 8th amendment.

"I will demand assurances in writing from the highest levels of the Department of Defense that moving Pfc. Manning will ensure his rights are better protected than they were when he was at Marine Corp Base Quantico and he will be kept safe under all circumstances.

"I will continue my demands that the Department of Defense grant my legitimate request to meet with Pfc. Bradley Manning to fulfill my oversight responsibilities as a member of Congress and a member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The American people demand accountability," said Kucinich.

More on why we owe thanks to Bradley Manning. Earlier this week Foreign Policy published a piece by Colum Lynch exposing what it calls the "heavy-handed" attempts by the U.S. to help Israel at the United Nations, mostly behind the scenes of course--including attempts to prevent the Goldstone report from being forwarded to the Hague. The source for the story: Wikileaks cables.

Wave of vandalism hits non-Orthodox synagogues in Israel. So reports Haaretz. Ultra-Orthodox youth apparently responsible. Welcome to the Jewish state, where little Nazis decide who is Jewish.

Mass Killings of Gazelles Marked Rise of Human Civilization

2011-04-19T05:51:00.001-04:00

This has been turning into a science blog lately, but no worries, I will be getting back to politics soon.

Meanwhile my latest online ScienceNOW can be read at this link. As always, the first paragraph:

The mass killing of wildlife by humans is not a modern phenomenon. A new study concludes that around the time the first cities were founded in the Near East, people herded hundreds of gazelles into long stone passageways that ended in circular pits, where they would slaughter every animal. These massive hunts may have been rich with symbolism at the time, yet the authors argue that they have left the gazelles of the Near East a highly endangered species today.

Photos: Death traps. Migrating gazelles were caught and slaughtered in long stone structures called desert kites (upper right.)

Credit: Nigel Cattlin/Alamy; (map insets) Google Earth

20 things to do with Matzah. Brought to you by Michelle Citrin and William Levin.

Language May Have Helped Early Humans Spread Out of Africa

2011-04-17T02:28:00.001-04:00

Here is my latest contribution to science journalism. Click the link to read the whole thing, but here as usual is the first paragraph to get you started:

The story of humanity's prehistoric expansion across the planet is recorded in our genes. And, apparently, the story of the spread of language is hidden in the sounds of our words. That's the finding of a new study, which concludes that both people and languages spread out from an African homeland by a similar process—and that language may have been the cultural innovation that fueled our ancestors' momentous migrations.

Credit: Mark Dingemanse/Wikipedia

Goldstone report accurate say other members of investigating team. The coverage of this in the U.S. media has been very poor, but the UK's Guardian carries an important story regarding the original conclusions.

Early Birds Smelled Good

2011-04-13T03:16:00.000-04:00

I've been very busy lately between trips to South Africa, Nantes, and now Toulouse for a prehistory meeting--so little time to do political comment right now.

But since I make most of my living as a science writer, I can at least share my latest contribution to that literature: A story on the olfactory abilities of early birds, nothing to sniff at!

You can read it at the link, here's the first paragraph to get you started:

About 65 million years ago, most of the dinosaurs and many other animals and plants were wiped off Earth, probably due to an asteroid hitting our planet. Researchers have long debated how and why some species survived the so-called Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction, marked in ancient rocks by a transition called the K-T boundary. A new study suggests that one group of survivors, the birds, may have sniffed their way across by evolving an enhanced sense of smell.

Credit: Courtesy of Witmer Lab/Ohio University

Stripping Bradley Manning naked

2011-03-29T05:21:00.001-04:00

I've been meaning to comment on the moral vacuousness of President Barack Obama's comments on the abusive treatment of Bradley Manning, but Marjorie Cohn, a professor at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego, has said what needs to be said: Manning's treatment amounts to torture.

Cohn's comments, originally posted on the American Constitution Society blog and reposted the other day by Truthdig.org, make reference to Obama's position as follows:

Nevertheless, President Barack Obama defended Manning’s treatment, saying, “I’ve actually asked the Pentagon whether or not the procedures . . . are appropriate. They assured me they are.” Obama’s deference is reminiscent of President George W. Bush, who asked “the most senior legal officers in the U.S. government” to review the interrogation techniques. “They assured me they did not constitute torture,” Bush said.

Is it not amazing that someone like Obama, whose demonstration that he had his own moral compass had so much to do with his election, now defers to the Pentagon for "assurances" that solitary confinement and stripping prisoners naked is A-okay? The man who would pretend to lead us now needs to follow the moral compasses of those who have not stripped themselves bare of all principles--people like former State Department official Phillip J. Crowley, who was forced to resign after he commented publicly on Manning's mistreatment.

By the way, how do we explain this penchant among those supposedly charged with protecting our national security--from Abu Ghraib to Quantico--for rendering prisoners nude on the flimsiest excuse? Perhaps this is a job for the psychologists.

Update: Crowley still has no regrets. So he tells the BBC, as reported by the Guardian.

Juan Cole: An Open Letter to the Left on Libya

2011-03-28T01:55:00.002-04:00

The best and most carefully reasoned statement I have seen so far, from a left perspective, in support of the U.N. intervention in Libya.

The problem with so much left "analysis" these days is that if you apply the same analysis to each and every situation, no matter how different, it is no longer analysis but rote thinking.

Please read Cole's post carefully and all the way through, especially his deconstruction of the notion that the West is just trying to get its hands on Libya's oil (which it already had.) His ending statement is particularly important:

"I would like to urge the Left to learn to chew gum and walk at the same time. It is possible to reason our way through, on a case-by-case basis, to an ethical progressive position that supports the ordinary folk in their travails in places like Libya. If we just don’t care if the people of Benghazi are subjected to murder and repression on a vast scale, we aren’t people of the Left."

Hugo Chavez backs repression in Syria. The nation's president, Bashar Assad, is a "brother" and a "humanist" according to the Venezuelan leader and left icon, who accuses Washington of being behind the unrest in Syria. Fortunately, Chavez's support for Qaddafi has already made many leftists think twice about just how much of a "socialist" he really is.

A nuanced analysis of the Libyan intervention. From Paul Street. Well worth reading, especially if you're a leftist and don't know what to think.

How a Dinosaur Is Like a Vacuum Cleaner

2011-03-23T01:24:00.000-04:00

Yours truly has recently added Science's dino beat to his repertoire of science writing. Here's the first paragraph of my latest contribution to the dino literature. Click the link to read the rest.

The plant-eating sauropod dinosaurs, such as Brachiosaurus and Apatosaurus (formerly called Brontosaurus), were the largest animals ever to walk on Earth, weighing up to 80 metric tons. Many also sported very long necks—though researchers have debated their purpose. Now, using some fancy mathematics and an analogy with vacuum cleaners, two scientists in the United Kingdom may finally have the answer.

Photo: iStockphoto

Libya and the left

2011-03-20T10:17:00.000-04:00

My thoughts on the intervention in Libya are clear: I'm for it 100%. And my friend and colleague Marc Cooper, a journalism prof at the University of Southern California, explains better than anyone else why leftists are wrong to oppose it. So I am going to quote him in full:

This Is Not Iraq

Michael Moore accuses Barack Obama of acting like George w. Bush. Danlel Ellsberg gets himself arrested outside the White House. Others on the left waffle and shuffle and — in my view– abstain on the moral issue underlying the U.S. and allied attack on Gaddafi. (Though it isn’t clear if Ellsberg, whom I generally respect, was protesting only the anniversary of the war in Iraq or was also opposing the action in Libya).

I have no idea what the outcome of this will be. I don’t know what the endgame is, or if Obama and his allies know either. Nor do I know what all the consequences of this action will be.

I do know this much: if every exercise of American military power took place in the context we see today, I would be much less of a general opponent of its use. Notice I said general opponent. That’s different than being an automatic opponent as some apparently are. If one believes the old Maoist claptrap that the “primary contradiction” is between “the people of the world and U.S. imperialism” then you should probably stop reading now.

The world, as it turns out, is a much more complicated place with myriad faces of evil (including Mao’s heirs) and to choose up sides in a dogmatic, knee-jerk fashion is something we can ill afford.
In short, as I said weeks ago, it will give me great pleasure to see Gaddafi’s planes blown from the skies, his tanks burnt to a crisp and his regime smashed to smithereens. Nor would I mind terribly much if a missile hit his compound while he donning one of robes in the shower.

Do I believe that the interventionist forces are selfless humanitarians? Hardly.

Do I think they are hypocrites for intervening in Libya while giving cover to the repressive regimes in Bahrain and Yemen (and Saudi Arabia and Jordan). You bet.

Do I think this intervention is a horrendous blunder and act of aggression as was the invasion of Iraq? NO.

Absolutely not. Double absolutely not. Libya has been the stage for a popular uprising for the last several weeks, the same one sweeping much of North Africa and the Arab world. The western military intervention now taking place against a clearly delusional and butcher dictator comes, effectively, in direct support of the revolutionaries facing down the regime. This action also comes with the full support of the Arab League. It comes with no opposition from any member of the UN Security Council.
Further, this action comes at a time when not only Libyans, but also tens of other millions of Arabs have invested their hopes in regional renaissance. I am proud, I am happy that the U.S. — for once and for whatever calculation– finds itself on the side of those fighting against oppression. In some sense, then, I see this action by the Obama administration to be somewhat redemptive. After decades of supporting one Arab dictatorship after another and, precisely, after watching the Iraqi debacle of the last decade, I feel we sort of OWE the Arab world the surprise of showing up, albeit erratically, on the right side of things.

Let me also add that the success of the Gadaffi regime in smothering the rebellion in blood would be quite a destabilizing force for the very young and unsure Arab revolution which has sprouted in Tunisia and Egypt and which struggles to be born elsewhere. I feel great solidarity with the insurgents in Libya and would aid them any way I could. If the U.S. Navy wants to pitch in, I’m good with that.
So with all of the reservation noted above, of course, I support the military action. My greatest fear, only, is that it won’t be effective enough. But I stand with the Arab League, with the National Council in Benghazi and with the overwhelming majority of Libyans in supporting this action and hoping it will accelerate the fall of Gaddafi, I support this action just as I would have supported a U.S. military strike in favor of the Kurds and Marsh Arab uprising that took place right after the Gulf War. I support this action the same way I would have supported the U.S. opening an air bridge before it was too late in Rwanda.

I am ready to be called a Cruise Missile Leftist or a running-dog imperialist rather than have silently watched Gaddafi carry out his threat of two nights ago to enter Benghazi, show “no mercy” and hunt down his opponents door to door. I will leave that latter task to Hugo Chavez.

Let me also concede, in advance, that there will be civilian casualties involved. This is inevitable in any armed conflict. I supported the Salvadoran revolutionaries in the 1980′s and I saw with my own eyes more civilian casualties than I cared to count. There were piles of civilian casualties during the Spanish Civil War and IF only the West had militarily intervened on the right side it would have saved the Spanish from four decades of Franquismo.

But it is Gaddafi, not the cruise missiles, that has already killed thousands and who rather blithely threatened to kill thousands more. Want to stop the killing of civilians in Libya? So do I. The best way is to overthrow the regime of Muammar Gaddafi.

P.S. Here is the worst sort of mumbo-jumbo from your run-of-the mill “leftist analyst” (whom I have know for years — even back when she was a Maoist and relaundered herself as some sort of reasonable “analyst” an shrouded with the legitimacy of the Institute for Policy Studies). Strip away all the bullshit and her argument seems to boil down to a fearthat the Western powers will actually expand their actions to overthrow Gaddafi — even though she claims she would like to see him go. Huh? My fear is that they won’t!

What she doesn’t say, which is the real point of her piece, is that she plain opposes the use of American military power under any conditions and for any reason–period. She says she wishes, instead, there were some of global anti-intervention force like the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. Another huh? Those brigades were boots on the ground, a step farther than the evil imperialist powers say they are now willing to go. So, apparently, she would support a ground-based armed force to support the Libyans, so long as they were unofficial poorly-trained Communists and not professional Americans or Brits?

A couple of untidy historical reminders. The International Brigades, for better and for worse, were directly supported by the Communist Third International and therefore by a state power, known as the Soviet Union. If the Republican forces had won, they would have a had a real problem mediating the geopolitical interests of the Soviet state which had its direct representatives under arms on Spanish soil. Personally, I think the Brigades fought on the right side and many of their members were great heroes in spite of their Stalinist pedigree. But they lost. Remember? They lost because the Western Powers would not intervene in Spain for the Republicans (as they were mostly sympathetic to the fascists) nor did the Soviets (and anyway they were on the verge of signing the Hitler-Stalin pact). Well, to be more precise, the Soviet army did not intervene on the Republican side but the ComIntern and KGB agents were very much in Spain and helped to royally fuck up things. I would suggest a reading of Orwell’s magisterial Homage To Catalonia to get a good sense out of the less than honorable role played by the Communists in undermining the Spanish Revolution and squandering the sacrifice of many of the individual Brigade fighters.

But back to the point. Bennis’ argument is really gibberish. And it’s sad that the official left employs such pathetic arguments at this point in history. Her solution to the crisis? Issue manifestos and pine for a non-existent brigade of global socialists to intervene. No thanks.

A river runs through it

2011-03-18T16:03:00.000-04:00

Everyone seemed to like my sunrise over the Indian Ocean yesterday, so here is a photo of a river in KwaZulu-Natal. I can't tell you what river, as that might give away what I was doing there, but I can say that I fell in while trying to wade over it.

Sunrise over KwaZulu-Natal

2011-03-17T14:42:00.001-04:00

I'm just back from South Africa, a memorable trip. I will have to tell you later what I was doing there, but in the meantime here is a view of the Indian Ocean in the early morning.

Libya

2011-03-08T22:21:00.000-05:00

I can't really add much to what others are saying on this issue, except perhaps to say that the revolutions sweeping the Arab world once again show the stark contrast between the courage of the people in the streets and the cowardice and dithering of the "international community" and its leaders.

Thomas Friedman, international sage

2011-03-03T02:36:00.003-05:00

There is a devastating parody of Friedman's latest column in the New York Times on the blog Inanities, and I recommend that you read it right away. Friedman listed a number of "not-so-obvious forces" he thinks help explain the Egyptian revolution, including the Obama Factor, Google Earth, and the Beijing Olympics. Be sure to read Friedman's column first, and then Inanities' followup version, which starts as follows:

Future historians will long puzzle over how I was given an international platform to freely pontificate on the Arab people and be remunerated handsomely for it. It is true that I am not the only person in the world who formulates dubious theories based on scant or no evidence which I then harangue people with. Other people do it. They are called taxi drivers. But they are not as rich as me and haven’t been awarded three Pulitizer Prizes.

Since I’ve been here in Egypt I’ve been putting together a list of “the-absolutely-irrelevant forces” that have captured the captive Arab mind and ignited the simmering coals of the instant garden BBQ that is the Middle East. You might ask why, since I am in Egypt, I don’t ask an Egyptian – possibly two Egyptians – about what inspired them to completely ignore my theories on the Arab peoples and take to the streets. The answer is this: I am Thomas Friedman and I write a column in the New York Times.

Photo: Josh Haner, New York Times.

PS--In case you are wondering, Inanities is produced by a journalist in Egypt named Sarah Carr.

TIAA-CREF: Divest from the Israeli occupation

2011-02-23T23:41:00.000-05:00

Are your retirement funds with TIAA-CREF? If so, please sign Jewish Voice for Peace's petition urging this financial services giant to stop investing in companies that profit from the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. And if not, please sign it anyway. More than 19,000 people already have, including yours truly.

You can find all the details you need at this link.

Egypt supports Wisconsin

2011-02-20T01:54:00.001-05:00

U.S. hypocrisy on Israeli settlements

2011-02-19T10:24:00.005-05:00

I have a fantasy. I am fantasizing that the reason the government of Bahrain has withdrawn its troops from Pearl Square in the capital, Manama, is because President Barack Obama called the monarchists who run that country and said the following: You are using our guns and tanks to kill people; stop doing it or we will send in our own troops stationed nearby and take those weapons away from you.

During the protest movements to overthrow President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, I had a similar fantasy. I fantasized that President Barack Obama had called that nation's military leaders and said the following: We give you $1.3 billion in military aid each year, don't use those weapons against the people in Tahrir Square or we will cut you off.

Of course, as some people who know me might say, I sometimes live in a fantasy world. Yet it does seem that the above fantasies might have a grain of truth to them, or at least one can hope so. But for them to be true, it would have been necessary for Barack Obama to muster up a bit of courage. So when the U.S. vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements--making it the only one of 15 countries that voted against the resolution, with no abstentions--it really brought me down to earth. Because it reminded me that Obama does not have the courage to do such things, and that his entire presidency has become one based on fear and loathing in the bowels of the White House.

It is interesting to compare some of the U.S. media news coverage of this travesty. The New York Times account was fairly factual and straightforward, but it only briefly mentioned the position that the European Union had taken in favor of the resolution, and generally played down the attitudes of those 14 other countries. The Times article focused mostly on the arguments of the Palestinians, who had pushed hard for the resolution and--something that may eventually bode well for the "peace process" despite America running interference for the Israel right-wing once again--detailed the contradictory U.S. position, which is essentially that it is against settlements but also against anyone doing anything about it (this is disguised in the absurd position that it is a matter for negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians, when in fact it is a matter of international law.)

In the U.K.'s Guardian, however, we were able to actually read about what other nations, including some of America's closest allies, were saying on the matter. This is worth quoting in some detail:

Washington's controversial move clearly riled other members of the security council. Britain, France and Germany put out a joint statement in which they explained they had voted for the resolution "because our views on settlements, including east Jerusalem, are clear: they are illegal under international law, an obstacle to peace, and constitute a threat to a two-state solution. All settlement activity, including in east Jerusalem, should cease immediately."

William Hague said he understood Israeli concern for security, but said that was precisely why Britain had backed the resolution. "We believe that Israel's security and the realisation of the Palestinians' right to statehood are not opposing goals. On the contrary, they are intimately intertwined objectives." The US has used its veto 10 times since 2000, nine of which involved backing the Israeli side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In other words, it was the judgement of 14 other countries that the U.S. analysis of what was best for the "peace process" was wrong. Under such circumstances, one might expect that the United States would step aside and simply abstain--if, that is, the Obama administration was being honest about its true motives. But of course it wasn't being honest.

Don't we all know that the U.S. voted the way it did because it is afraid of a backlash from Jewish voters, from Republican and Democratic politicians who are also afraid of Jewish voters, afraid of what Sarah Palin would say, what the Tea Party would say, what Rush Limbaugh would say? Indeed, the White House is pretty much running scared these days, consumed with its own fears and turning them into American domestic and foreign policy. This is why, for example, Obama waited until the Egyptian people had already overthrown Mubarak before he came out and said it was a good and historic thing.

So, for now at least, I guess I will just have to live with my fantasies. But, as John Lennon wrote, "I'm not the only one" to have them. And some day, that will make all the difference.

Sunday update: As far as I can tell, the New York Times and other major media carry little or no analysis or followup to the U.S. veto story, despite its far-reaching consequences--consequences that will not be happy for the Obama administration nor for Israel. Nevertheless, Haaretz reports that the Palestinians are considering invoking U.N. rules that would allow it to bring the resolution to the General Assembly within 24 hours. Stay tuned.

Curtis Cost: A danger to the African-American community

2011-02-18T02:00:00.005-05:00

I don't post often about the AIDS denialist movement--those who argue that HIV does not cause AIDS--but a particularly egregious example of the dishonesty of some of its practitioners came across my desk today.

Curtis Cost, author of "Vaccines Are Dangerous" and an associated blog, demonstrated his ignorance of the HIV field by posting an item about a 1997 study by Nancy Padian, an AIDS researcher at the University of California, San Francisco. The title of Cost's post is "Dr. Nancy Padian Study Proves HIV Is Not Sexually Transmitted."

You have to read the post, and the paper (which can be found at this link on Cost's blog), to see how fully and totally Cost misrepresents it. In fact, the study comes to the exact opposite conclusion, and also provides evidence that condoms are very effective in preventing HIV transmission.

Cost's post says that this study was "discussed" at the recent Harlem AIDS Forum 2, although it is not clear what was said about it. But to know what Nancy Padian says about the stunning misuse of her work by AIDS denialists, one need go no further than this link:

http://www.aidstruth.org/denialism/misuse/padian

Indeed, mis-citing the Padian paper is apparently a common scam by AIDS denialists too dishonest to use actual scientific arguments for their case. And Cost, who claims to be concerned about the effects that vaccines and AIDS tests have on the African-American community, actually poses a serious danger to that community by misrepresenting Padian's work to argue that heterosexual transmission of HIV is some kind of myth--thus by implication discouraging the use of condoms and other protections.

The AIDS denialists can't win on the science, so they use lies. Thus it has been from the beginning of the AIDS denialist movement, thus it continues today.

Where do Bahrain's tanks come from? I'm watching images on my television of tanks rolling down the streets of Bahrain, where the government seems intent on violently crushing the rebellion. Bahrain's military has been armed to the teeth by both the U.S. and Britain. This from the U.S. State Department 20 January 2011 background note on Bahrain (emphasis added):

With the help of the U.S. and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Bahrain has made significant efforts to upgrade its defense systems and modernize its armed forces over the last 20 years. In 1982, the GCC gave Bahrain $1.7 billion for this purpose. Since the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S. has provided military and defense technical assistance and training to Bahrain from Foreign Military Sales (FMS), commercial sources, excess defense article sales (EDA) and under the International Military and Education Training (IMET) program. The U.S. Office of Military Cooperation in Bahrain is attached to the U.S. Embassy and manages the security assistance mission. U.S. military sales to Bahrain since 2000 total $1.4 billion. Principal U.S. military systems acquired by the BDF include eight Apache helicopters, 54 M60A3 tanks, 22 F-16C/D aircraft, 51 Cobra helicopters, 9 MLRS Launchers (with ATACMS), 20 M109A5 Howitzers, 1 Avenger AD system, and the TPS-59 radar system. Bahrain has received $195 million in FMF and $410 million in U.S. EDA acquisition value delivered since the U.S.-Bahraini program began in 1993. The Bahrain Defense Force also placed orders for 9 UH-60M Blackhawk helicopters and 2 Mk-V Fast Patrol Boats. Delivery of both systems was planned for 2009.

I shall sup from your skull

2011-02-17T02:42:00.000-05:00

Some people, such as the Aghori sect of India, still do this today. As I report today on Science's online news service, the practice of making skull cups--and drinking or eating from them--goes back to Upper Paleolithic times, at least 15,000 years ago. Here's the first paragraph to get you started:

CHEDDAR GORGE, UNITED KINGDOM—How do you make a drinking cup out of a human skull? It's fairly easy if you have some sharp tools—and a strong stomach. Scalp the head; remove the ears, eyes, lower jaw, and other pesky parts; and buff the jagged edges. Voilà! You've got a skull cup fit to toast your friends or your enemies.

Photo: Natural History Museum, London

Hillary Clinton, Egyptian constitutional scholar

2011-02-09T08:38:00.003-05:00

The Obama administration, led by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, has been telling us for days that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak shouldn't be forced to resign right now. Why? Because according to the Egyptian constitution, elections would have to be held within 60 days, and that's too soon for free and fair elections to be organized. In other words, perhaps without realizing it, the administration is echoing Egyptian Vice-President Omar Suleiman's comments that his fellow citizens are not yet ready for democracy.

The administration's new-found respect for the rule of law in Egypt would sound more sincere if it had earlier protested against police torture of dissidents and other human rights abuses that I doubt are permitted by the nation's constitution. I wonder if Obama, Clinton, their immediate circle have even read the Egyptian constitution. But other scholars have, and they have also pointed out the illegitimacy of a constitution that was written by a dictatorship in its own interests. One of the most interesting commentaries on the constitutional issues was published recently in Foreign Affairs by Nathan Brown, a professor of political science at George Washington University. Brown agrees that the constitution says what Clinton et al. say it says, but he goes much further in laying out the options:

"So if Mubarak resigned, there would be three choices:

1.) Follow the constitution and wind up with the regime handpicking a successor after 60 days for a full presidential term. That hardly resolves anything. The procedures are written in such a way that Sulayman could be nominated, but it would break the promise both Mubarak and Sulayman made for constitutional reform. This procedure would not even put lipstick on the regime's current face.

2.) Follow the constitution with the promise that the new president (presumably Sulayman) pick up the constitutional reform process. That puts the crisis on hold for 60 days and offers the opposition promises for reform that might be redeemed later -- and might not be. This would put lipstick on, but not much else, particularly given the toxic lack of trust in the regime's promises.

3.) Suspend the constitution and negotiate a transition between the current regime leaders and the opposition. And then we are in regime change territory, operating outside the existing rules. If the process were successful, it would not produce merely a reconfigured regime but would be moving toward a different kind of political system. The opposition has made clear that it wants such an outcome, but it has not sketched out any vision in detail. The negotiations over transition would be difficult and confusing, demanding that the opposition transform its negative platform (Mubarak must leave) into a positive one.

If Mubarak resigned today, the third option is the only one that offers anything like real political change. It may be the best outcome and it is what the opposition is effectively demanding. It may very well deserve our support, but we should know that when we call for Mubarak to step down, then legally at least this is where we are effectively pushing."

Bottom line: if the Obama administration seriously wants to see real political change in Egypt, it has to back option 3, which is what the democracy movement wants. And why not? This is a revolution, after all, and revolutions mean you stop playing by the rules of the rulers and make up new ones. Of course, I'm sure there were those who argued the American Revolution was illegal too...

Update: A paragraph from a New York Times story today by David Kirkpatrick, reporting that the pro-democracy movement is gaining strength as labor unions go out on strike: As reports filtered in of strikes and unrest spreading to other parts of the city and the country, the government seemed to dig in deeper. Mr. Mubarak’s handpicked successor, Vice President Omar Suleiman, warned Tuesday that the only alternative to constitutional talks was a “coup” and added: “We don’t want to deal with Egyptian society with police tools.” In other words, Suleiman is threatening a bloodbath if the movement does not disband. This is the man that Obama and Clinton want Egyptians to trust to make the transition to democracy? Fortunately, the movement is so strong now that Mubarak and Suleiman will soon be swept aside, and American diplomacy will be left empty-handed.

The Middle East doesn't need stability. So argues the always excellent Gideon Levy, in Haaretz. An excerpt: Indeed, that stability should be undermined. The stability in the region, something which Westerners and Israeli have come to yearn, merely means perpetuating the status quo. That situation might be good for Israel and the West, but it is very bad for the millions of people who have had to pay the price. Maintaining Mideast stability means perpetuating the intolerable situation by which some 2.5 million Palestinians exist without any rights under the heel of Israeli rule; and another few million Palestinian refugees from the war of 1948 are living in camps in Arab countries, where they also lack any rights, hope, livelihood and dignity.

This so-called stability encompasses millions of Arabs living under criminal regimes and evil tyrannies. In stable Saudi Arabia, the women are regarded as the lowest of the low; in stable Syria, any sign of opposition is repressed; in stable Jordan and Morocco, the apple of the eye of the West and Israel, people are frightened to utter a word of criticism against their kings, even in casual coffee-shop conversations. Please read it all.

Profiles in courage and cowardice

2011-02-08T03:33:00.002-05:00

Every day that President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton fail or refuse to back the demand of Egypt's pro-democracy movement that Hosni Mubarak resign from office immediately, they are emboldening the regime and endangering the lives of the courageous demonstrators. No one knows how this is all going to end, but trusting a dictatorship to build democracy is like trusting the fox to do community organizing amongst the hens.

The reasons for their waffling are many, but it apparently all boils down to concerns over "stability"--a euphemism for fears that Egyptians will decide themselves who their leaders are going to be rather than being content with yet another dictatorial or authoritarian regime sympathetic to U.S. and Israeli interests. I would like to think that Barack Obama knows better in his heart, so what is his abject cowardice in the face of these historical events based on? Fear of what Sarah Palin might say if the Muslim Brotherhood gets to play a role in the new government? Fear that he might lose his bid for re-election if the right-wing could claim that he "lost" Egypt?

Whatever the case, if the government cracks down on the movement, which they will indeed do if it falters for lack of international support, Obama and Clinton will have blood on their hands. Come to think of it, they already do, since until the pro-democracy movement began they were content to simply continue decades of U.S. support for the Mubarak regime.

PS--Oh, believe it or not, presidents can resign. Remember Richard Nixon?

Afterthoughts: If the Obama administration is concerned about how its stance on the Egyptian revolution will play out in domestic politics, then why not play it smart? The right-wing is very vulnerable right now to charges that it prefers dictatorship to democracy--why not stick them with that? But of course that would not be civil nor bipartisan...

Update: If the Obama administration (and the Egyptian government) were hoping that the protests would run out of steam, no such luck. Today's demonstrations in Tahrir Square were reportedly the largest yet in the two week long movement.

Jewish Voice for Peace

2011-02-07T06:21:00.000-05:00

One of the most important organizations fighting against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, Jewish Voice for Peace, finally got the recognition it deserved from the New York Times the other day, in an article entitled "A Jewish Group Makes Waves, Locally and Abroad," by Daniel Ming and Aaron Glantz. As a sometimes advocacy journalist, especially where political issues are involved, I am proud to be a member of JVP's New York chapter.

The video above is a montage from JVP's December 10 nation-wide events in furtherance of its campaign to get TIAA-CREF to divest its pension funds from corporations involved in the Israeli occupation--most notably Caterpillar, which provides most of the bulldozers used to destroy Palestinian homes and other buildings.

By the way, although JVP is made up mostly of Jews fed up with Israeli policies, non-Jews are most definitely welcome in the organization. I hope you will consider joining.

Is democracy in Egypt good for the Jews?

2011-02-02T03:02:00.008-05:00

One of the more amusing aspects of the revolution in Egypt is the reaction in Israel. While most of the world is rejoicing over the impending overthrow of a brutal, authoritarian regime, Israelis are loudly nervous about what could come next--so much so that one can't help concluding Israel would much prefer the status quo.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (pictured at right with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak) has expressed his fears that Islamic extremists, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, could come to power, thus ending the cosy relationship between Egypt and Israel. This relationship has kept U.S. military aid ($1.5 billion/year) pouring into Egypt and has been pivotal in keeping the people of Gaza under lock and key.

Yet while Barack Obama has been smart enough to embrace the tide of events in Egypt, and is now pretty much telling Mubarak that he has to go--a move that will strengthen the hand of democratically-minded Egyptians--Israel just can't help but reveal its preference that nothing had happened and that Mubarak had stayed in power. This viewpoint was well expressed in an op-ed piece in yesterday's New York Times by Yossi Klein Halevi, entitled "Israel, Alone Again?" (Interestingly, the title of the link comes up "Islamists at the Gate" on my browser tab, which may have been its original--and perhaps more appropriate--title.)

Halevi leads off with these hopeful thoughts:

ISRAELIS want to rejoice over the outbreak of protests in Egypt’s city squares. They want to believe that this is the Arab world’s 1989 moment. Perhaps, they say, the poisonous reflex of blaming the Jewish state for the Middle East’s ills will be replaced by an honest self-assessment.

But the rest of the piece tells us that this is very unlikely to happen, and that a takeover by the Muslim Brotherhood is pretty much a foregone conclusion. Of course, this might be wishful thinking on the part of many Israelis, and certainly Israeli leaders, because if Egypt became a democracy--or at least more democratic--Israel would be denied one more excuse not to make peace with the Palestinians and give them back their stolen land.

As things stand now, there is no real reason to think that the Muslim Brotherhood will become the dominant power in Egypt. But if does, it will be thanks in large part to the Israeli and American direct support for Mubarak's suppression of democratic forces all these years, and Mubarak's tolerance of and complicity with Israeli policies. One would think that Israelis would be smart enough now to embrace the revolution underway in Egypt, in hopes that their support of the Egyptian people at this historic moment might pay dividends down the line. Some Israelis are that smart, but they are not to be found among the nation's leaders nor among its apologists.

Update: Tom Friedman also cautions Israel about its misguided attitudes in a Times op-ed piece today. I like his conclusion: "There is a huge storm coming, Israel. Get out of the way."

Sane voices in Israel: As I said above, they can't be found among the country's leaders, but as usual they are featured in the excellent Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Commentator Anshel Pfeffer asks why Israel should be the only democracy in the Middle East and chastises the fear mongers; Amira Hass writes about what she calls the "collective tyranny of Israeli Jews... over the Palestinians."

Is U.S.-Israeli dominance in the Middle East over? So says William Pfaff in a Truthdig post.

Who is Omar Suleiman? Jane Mayer of the New Yorker tells us. In short, he was the man who helped the C.I.A engage in "renditions" of terrorist suspects who were then tortured in Egyptian jails.

Between Orwell and a hard place

2011-01-20T06:50:00.003-05:00

Yesterday Lebanon introduced a draft resolution into the U.N. Security Council condemning Israeli settlement expansion on the West Bank. The New York Times' Neil MacFarquhar reported the event in a brief story, in which he made the following unattributed statement:

No vote is expected soon because the United States criticized the resolution, arguing that the Council should not be the forum for addressing knotty Arab-Israeli issues.

Of course, Israeli settlements on the West Bank are not a "knotty Arab-Israeli issue," but a clear violation of international law. Indeed, even the United States regards the settlements that way, as MacFarquhar implies himself in the next sentence of his story:

A veto would be awkward because the language used in the resolution, which attracted some 120 co-sponsors, echoes previous statements that Washington has endorsed condemning settlements, diplomats said.

I've now actually quoted two of the story's three sentences, which I still think falls within copyright fair use. But wouldn't it be nice if the Times would do some stories about the contradictions between U.S. acknowledgement that Israel's actions are illegal--thus making them very appropriate subjects for Security Council resolutions--and its continuing protection and financial support for those same illegal actions? Just because our government engages in double-speak doesn't mean our news media have to follow suit.

Update: An illustrious group of commentators, policymakers and former government officials are calling upon the U.S. to support the Security Council resolution. This is important reading.

Is Israel an apartheid state? A South African group issues a report saying yes.

Peter King's proposed bill would ban guns near lawmakers

2011-01-12T16:52:00.001-05:00

According to this article in Politico, the bill would make it illegal to carry guns within 1000 feet of many officials. The Republican Congressman from New York is quoted as saying this would make constituents feel safer when they meet with their representatives.

Seems like a great idea. And while we're at it, how about making it illegal to carry weapons within 1000 feet of children, pregnant women, veterans who have already been shot at least once, eligible voters, and other vulnerable categories of people.

Other news reports indicate that gun sales are skyrocketing in Arizona after the shootings of Gabrielle Giffords and others. Perhaps the entire state should be put under quarantine until the fever dies down.

Sarah Palin et al. responsible for shooting of Gabrielle Giffords

2011-01-09T04:33:00.000-05:00

This image was still on Palin's Facebook page as of Saturday. These are the kind of people that President Barack Obama wants to be bipartisan with. Perhaps it's time to start treating them like the enemies they really are.

Only in Israel...

2011-01-08T15:12:00.002-05:00

... is it permitted to criticize Israel.

Just a little justice for homeowners

2011-01-07T21:15:00.000-05:00

So Massachusetts' highest court, the Supreme Judicial Court, has voided two foreclosures because the banks involved (U.S. Bancorp and Wells Fargo) didn't have the proper documentation to show that they they had the right to throw the owners out of their homes. The New York Times, whose report I link to above, says this ruling could have ramifications across the country.

Let's hope so. Basically, the same banks that drove the U.S. economy into recession through their greed and irresponsibility now want to snatch up the property of their victims. But it will take more than a few court decisions to put things right. How about an entire new social and economic system based on justice and equality?

Happy New Year from Sydney Harbor

2011-01-01T02:31:00.000-05:00

Suppression of expression in an art gallery (it easily happens when Israeli actions are involved)

2010-12-26T04:00:00.000-05:00

Please read two online accounts, one in the New Yorker and the other posted on the excellent blog Mondoweiss, about a recent incident at the Gagosian Gallery in New York. Just wearing a T-shirt can provoke the thought police into action, especially if anyone gets the idea that Israeli actions are being questioned.

Happy Holidays from Down Under

2010-12-25T02:39:00.000-05:00

Sydney Harbor (Opera House at right)

Julian Assange: Did he or didn't he?

2010-12-12T09:55:00.006-05:00

I'm linking without comment to the most detailed and interesting article I have seen yet on the sexual misconduct allegations against the WikiLeaks founder, in the Sydney Morning Herald. Whatever the truth turns out to be, you can bet the American, British and Swedish governments are talking nonstop about how to get Assange extradited to the United States.

The coverage of the sexual allegations in the U.S. press has been pretty poor as far as I can see, leaving the field mostly to the imagination of wild-eyed bloggers, some of whom are trying to connect accuser Anna Ardin with right-wing anti-Castro groups.

I will be based in Sydney for a month beginning in just a matter of days, so I look forward to more stories in the Australian press, which seems to be a little ahead of the game if this article is any indication.

PS--I'd be grateful to readers for links to any other interesting stories they see.

Afterthought: A lot of commentators have criticized WikiLeaks for releasing some documents with the names of Afghans who have been cooperating with the U.S. government. But a story in the New York Times about the unsavory character of one such informer (a drug lord) makes me wonder if Americans are not entitled to know exactly who we are dealing with? Especially as we are sending our young men and women to die in Afghanistan? And dying they are.

Update (or downdate): Another perspective on the accusations against Assange can be found here.

Photo: Macdiarmid/Getty

Obama's betrayal on "Don't Ask Don't Tell" comes home to roost

2010-12-10T08:02:00.000-05:00

What will the Obama Justice Department do now that the Senate has pretty much killed repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"? Will it continue to defend the law in the courts--using the lame excuse that it is obligated to do so--or embrace a federal court ruling that it is discriminatory and unconstitutional?

To put it another way: Is the Obama administration's position that bigotry against gays is okay if Congress approves it, but not okay if our legislators vote against it? Is bigotry against gays a civil rights issue or not?

Few today would argue that Congress has the right to decide whether African-Americans or other groups have the right to vote, attend integrated schools, etc. But the Obama administration is taking that position when it comes to gay rights. And for that, it deserves all the contempt it is receiving from those who know better.

Another mine explosion: Will the mainstream media get it right this time?

2010-11-19T08:06:00.000-05:00

News is breaking today that 27 miners are missing after an explosion in a New Zealand mine. After all the hoopla over the Chilean miners, in which mine safety issues were rarely mentioned in news media accounts over the long months, journalists have another chance to get this story right.

If you don't like the verdict, move to another "court"?

2010-11-18T12:35:00.005-05:00

In his story in today's New York Times about the acquittal of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani on all but one of 285 charges related to the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, reporter Benjamin Weiser states that "the result seems certain to fuel debate about whether civilian courts are appropriate for trying terrorists."

Could I pull out my editor's red pencil and change that to "the result seems certain to fuel debate about whether civilian courts are appropriate for trying [alleged] terrorists [who have been subject to torture during their interrogations]."

Ghailani may well have played an important role in the bombings, as prosecutors claim, and he will probably stay in jail for a long time for the one charge he was convicted of. But just because we don't like the verdict doesn't mean we can keep changing the rules of the game until we get an outcome we like.

Nevertheless, the Times is hosting a debate on the subject, and the Obama administration will have one more excuse to continue acting just like the Bush administration when it comes to lowering legal standards for convicting terrorist suspects.

Update: Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantanamo, takes a similar position in a Times op-ed, arguing that a military commission judge probably would have suppressed the same witness evidence that the civilian judge did in this case. While I don't like arguments that are based on pragmatism rather than principle, Davis argues that the two go hand in hand, and most importantly that critics of civilian trials are flat wrong on both counts.

Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani

Nazis were given safe haven in the U.S.

2010-11-14T06:58:00.000-05:00

Someone has leaked a long-suppressed Justice Department report on this topic to the New York Times, which carries an article about it today. A heavily redacted version had previously been given, under the threat of a lawsuit, to the National Security Archive (an excellent group you should know about if you don't already); but the Times got its hands on the uncensored version. Read the story carefully, because reporter Eric Lichtblau gives some examples of sections that were originally redacted--no national security secrets, of course, just things that would be embarrassing to various past U.S. and foreign governments. (Oh, and the Obama Justice Department was among those who tried to keep it secret.)

The idea of compiling the report was the "brainchild" of the late Justice Department lawyer Mark Richard, Lichtblau reports. Richard urged that it be made public but died last year while the fight to get it released was still going on. If you read between the lines of the article, you might even be able to make some guesses about who leaked it.

Photo: Wernher von Braun, former rocket scientist for Nazi Germany and later NASA space flight leader/Wikimedia Commons

Is debate about its history now taboo in Israel?

2010-11-13T09:04:00.000-05:00

The photo at right is of Lisa Strombom, a PhD student at Lund University in Sweden. She has just completed and defended (yesterday) a thesis about the effective suppression in Israel of discussion about the nation's history, especially the oppression and exiling of Palestinians that accompanied its birth in 1948. The following is from the Lund University press release about her thesis, which makes interesting reading on its own. You can access the entire text of the thesis here and at the link given below.

Understanding the enemy’s view of history is important if there is ever to be peace in the Middle East. Unfortunately it has become almost taboo to create understanding for the opposite side in today’s Israel. This is the view of Lisa Strömbom, who defends her thesis in political science at Lund University on 12 November.

Lisa Strömbom has studied the history debate that took place in Israel during the 1990s when the peace process between the Israelis and the Palestinians looked promising. The Oslo Accords in 1993 were the closest they had come to a peace settlement since the state of Israel was founded in 1948.

During the same period, Israeli historians began to view the country’s birth with somewhat new eyes – the war that preceded the creation of the state was not as unblemished as had previously been claimed: it was not the case that the Jews began building their country in a fairly uninhabited region and that the Palestinians who lived there left the country on their own initiative or that of their elite.

“The history debate was not lacking in controversy, but it did exist and was very animated”, says Lisa Strömbom.

In 1995 Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was murdered and the Oslo Process stagnated. Since then, and in particular since the outbreak of the second intifada in 2001, the history debate in the Israeli media has ceased.

Textbooks that take up the Palestinian perspective on history have been revised or removed from classrooms. History teaching has also been complemented by a new subject, ‘heritage’, which gives a more ideological picture of Israel’s history.

“Today there is no longer any history debate in the Israeli press”, says Lisa Strömbom. “Powerful and influential nationalist forces label all questioning of the traditional Israeli history writing as anti-Israeli. Human rights organisations, peace activists and academics critical of society are branded disloyal to the state and are even described as a threat to its survival.”

As an example of how Israeli society has changed, Lisa Strömbom mentions the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who turned out en masse to demonstrate against the Lebanon War in 1982. Unlike previous wars, they considered that it could have been avoided and that the Israeli military had used excessive force. In the Gaza War, when, according to subsequent reports, there were a lot of attacks on the Palestinian population, large sections of Israeli civil society remained passive, which can partly be explained by strong campaigns of delegitimisation against all those who opposed the current government’s policies in different ways.

Lisa Strömbom defends her thesis on 12 November at 10:15 in Kulturen’s Auditorium, Lund. The title of the thesis is Revisiting the past. Israeli identity, thick recognition and conflict resolution. A PDF of the thesis can be found at: http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=1691351&fileOId=1691352

http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=1691351&fileOId=1691352

Attached files

Lisa Strömbom

Courageous young Jews disrupt Netanyahu speech at Jewish Federations General Assembly

2010-11-09T09:43:00.003-05:00

Young Jews Disrupt Netanyahu at Jewish General Assembly from stefanie fox on Vimeo.

I'm sure that some critics will try to brand the heroic activists who carried out this widely covered action as "self-hating Jews." Indeed, Netanyahu implied that in his response to them. As one who applauds such actions, and as a new member of Jewish Voice for Peace, my response is that we Jews who oppose Israeli policies--especially the theft and occupation of Palestinian lands--don't hate ourselves. Rather, we detest those Jewish leaders who have betrayed Judaic values of tolerance and social justice by using the Holocaust as an excuse for the oppression of other peoples.

PS--Due to a heavy teaching and writing schedule in New York this fall, this blog has been largely dormant. I am hoping that will change in the weeks and months ahead.

Update: A detailed explanation of this action, by Rae Abileah of CODEPINK and Jewish Voice for Peace, can be found here; and one of these brave activists explains, in the face of criticism, why he participated in it.

More update: Another of the five young Jewish protestors against Netanyahu and his policies, Matthew Taylor, explains his views in an op-ed in Haaretz.

Getz and Coltrane together

2010-10-16T14:19:00.000-04:00

This blog is supposed to be about many things, including jazz, but I've been so busy lately I didn't even blog about going to see the sensational Anat Cohen at the Village Vanguard last month. But I hope to make amends by posting this rare clip of Stan Getz and John Coltrane playing together, something that apparently only surfaced very recently.

New York is a city that soaks up all your energies and then gives them back to you hypercharged, so I'm hoping to get this blog back in gear very soon--at least on a weekly basis.

Anti-racist actions in Manhattan

2010-09-12T10:10:00.001-04:00

Yesterday, September 11, saw three demonstrations in lower Manhattan: One of bigots opposed to the building of an Islamic cultural center at 51 Park Place; one of left-wing anti-racists in favor of it and opposed to bigotry of all kinds; and a small group of Jesus people who had the idea that their savior was a bigot opposed to all other religions (was he? Comments welcome.)

Regular readers of this blog will know which one of these events I attended, but just in case I submit this photographic evidence. I'm not much of a photographer and even my spiffy new Lumix with a great wide-angle lens didn't allow me to capture the size of this demonstration, which had a pretty good turnout. The police, cited by the New York Times, estimated 2000 anti-racists, and slightly more bigots.

I don't much like demonstrations where only leftists show up, preferring broader coalitions. So perhaps more heartening was an event that took place the evening before, which I did not attend, a candlelight vigil also at Park Place. The Indypendent has a good account of it here with lots of links to the organizations involved.

Of course, it still seems up in the air whether the cultural center will be built on Park Place or whether it will end up being moved elsewhere. My sense, as a part-time New Yorker just newly arrived in town, is that the project will probably go ahead as long as Mayor Michael Bloomberg sticks to his so-far very principled stand against bigotry. It's a sad day when the best position on an issue comes from a political conservative (I'm referring of course to the flock of cowardly Democrats who have come out against locating the center near Ground Zero), but we have to take our favors where we find them.

Update: Nicholas Kristof tackles bigotry and religious intolerance in his column in Sunday's New York Times. And he quotes one evangelical Christian on the question I posed above about what Jesus would do: “Shame on you,” the Rev. Richard Cizik, a leading evangelical Christian, said to those castigating Islam. “You bring dishonor to the name of Jesus Christ. You directly disobey his commandment to love your neighbor.”

Cooking the intelligence on Iraq's alleged WMDs

2010-08-30T03:21:00.000-04:00

The August 19 New York Review of Books features an important letter from former intelligence officer Fulton Armstrong about how the Bush administration put pressure on the intelligence community to come up with evidence that Iraq had "weapons of mass destruction" as a justification for invading Iraq. It is critical reading for anyone who wants evidence to counter the claim that this judgement represented the best intelligence estimate available. The text of the letter follows; Thomas Powers replies below it.

The following letter, by a former USintelligence officer, was sent in response to Thomas Powers’s review of Robert Jervis’s Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and the Iraq War in the May 27 issue.

To the Editors:

Mr. Jervis’s exoneration of the Bush administration for cooking the intelligence on Iraq’s nonexistent WMDs—by blaming the intelligence community alone for the failure—is understandable. Jervis wasn’t in the kitchen and, perhaps, doesn’t know the pressure analysts feel when a vice-president and cabinet members ask the same question over and over—signaling “try again, try again.” Nor, perhaps, does he know the power of an administration’s flattery.

I was a member of the National Intelligence Council (NIC), as national intelligence officer (NIO) for Latin America, from 2000 to 2004. The NIC is the intelligence community’s senior analytical group responsible for preparing National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs), including the Iraq WMD NIE. At the time, it reported to the director of the CIA, George Tenet, in his “intelligence community hat” and was located at CIA headquarters. Although the NIC is an interagency body, the CIAhas always dominated its staff and work.

The first congressional briefing I ever took part in as an NIO, along with my colleagues, included discussion of WMDs, and it started with fifteen minutes of paeans of praise by Jesse Helms, and other Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, for our intelligence work. Several of the NIOs were praised for having embraced the findings of the Rumsfeld Commission, which pressed upon the Clinton administration a hyped analysis of the missile threat (and rationale for an accelerated “missile defense strategy”). The NIOs clearly knew what was going on in that room. Intelligence officers are all trained to remind the recipients of their reports that they are never to take sides in a policy debate. These NIOs, however, said nothing and were clearly happy with the praise by the Republican committee members.

The National Intelligence Estimate produced by these NIOs on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, with the participation of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, was not subjected to the customary “peer review” of the National Intelligence Council because, after delaying the project for months, the NIOs didn’t have a spare hour for the discussion and debate that the council’s review would have provided. But we knew what they were up to. During our closed-door council meetings, they would eagerly report their progress in dividing the fifteen coordinating agencies that had contributed to the NIE. They boasted how, after an obviously extensive search, they finally found an Energy Department employee willing to contradict his agency’s consensus position that Iraq’s missile tubes were not, as the administration and the NIOs asserted, centrifuge tubes.

The NIOs who were preparing the NIE also boasted how they found an Air Force analyst to dissent from his service’s position that Iraq’s little unmanned surveillance planes could not be armed. They were happy that challenges to their and the administration’s assumptions about Iraq’s chemical weapons and biological weapons capabilities were minimal; after all, who’s going to try to prove a negative?

The most back-patting, however, was reserved for their success in forcing the State Department’s intelligence shop, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), to take a “footnote”—a dissent at the bottom of the page—on a lesser judgment in the paper rather than on the overarching judgment that Saddam Hussein had WMDs. One of the NIOs smiled when he reported that INR couldn’t prove that Saddam did not have WMDs and that no one wanted to be seen as defending Saddam anyway. That was exactly the Bush administration’s political strategy as well. Instead of allowing INR to develop an alternative analysis in the main text of the NIE—the proper form for a different view when the information is so obviously weak—the NIOs humiliated the only agency at the table, the State Department’s INR, that dared to question the administration’s preordained conclusions.

When we on the National Intelligence Council finally got a full read of the National Intelligence Estimate on WMDs, after its publication, a couple of us expressed grave reservations about the fatally weak evidence and the obsessively one-sided interpretation of what shreds of information it contained. (We were not told at the time that “Curveball” was a solitary source of obviously questionable credentials, nor that contradictory evidence was actually suppressed from the intelligence collection and dissemination process.) One colleague said it was clearly a paper written to provide a rationale for a predetermined policy decision to go to war. When I challenged the lack of evidence and the lack of alternative explanations, including forcing the questions raised by the INR into a lowly footnote, one of theWMD-promoting NIOs leaned forward and bellowed: “Who are you to question this paper? Even The Washington Post and The New York Times agree with us.” The irony was complete: previously respected reporters, spoon-fed by Bush administration officials, were now being used to provide cover for the NIOs’ similar compromise in accepting the administration’s view.

The National Intelligence Council and director of central intelligence, George Tenet, gave the NIOs concerned with WMDs big cash awards for producing theNIE, and seven years later and seventeen months into the Obama administration they remain in the same or equivalent jobs. The Bush administration left office, and its defenders still claim that the errors in the WMD debacle were innocent, just as the hyperventilation about “yellowcake” from Niger in a State of the Union address—cleared by a careerist in a CIA line office who worked closely with the administration and the NIC on WMD issues—was said to be innocent. Intelligence community spokesmen are rolled out to deny allegations of politicization, even though at least one of them, a former analyst who threatened to resign several times because of political pressures when he was working on Cuba, has witnessed it close up and paid a short-term career price for resisting it.

Covering up or ignoring the problem of politicization won’t make it go away. USintelligence will continue to fail again and again until we resolve it.

Fulton Armstrong
Washington, D.C.

Thomas Powers replies:

Fulton Armstrong’s important letter states as fact something Americans have been resisting for sixty years—that presidents tell the CIA not only what to do, but what to say. By Americans I do not mean only ordinary citizens puzzling over intelligence flaps every few years, but observers thought to be sophisticated, like professors, senators of long experience, foreign policy professionals, and reporters for serious newspapers. Armstrong describes the reality about as plainly as I have ever seen it done in his letter explaining the source of error in the CIA’s insistently wrong estimate of the progress of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in its purported effort to develop weapons of mass destruction.

Armstrong’s letter is in reply to the many-layered, nuanced, and above all forgiving analysis of that error by Robert Jervis, a professor of international politics at Columbia University. Jervis’s case was made initially in a new book,Why Intelligence Fails, and then clarified in a letter to The New York Review, responding to my review of his book. In the beginning, Jervis says, he guessed that the agency’s misreading was probably the result of pressure from the White House to pump up the Iraqi “threat” as a way of justifying war. But Jervis found no intelligence insider who would flatly tell him that was what happened. Later, he identified so many interesting complexities in the evidence that he was compelled to dismiss White House pressure as too simple an answer, leading him to conclude in the end that the error was honest. It goes without saying that this was the answer the White House and the CIA had both been maintaining all along—we did our best, nobody’s perfect, everybody made the same mistake. We might call this the aw-shucks, gosh-darn explanation of weirdly wrong intelligence estimates.

Armstrong is having none of it. With polite good humor he forgives Jervis for making a naive mistake typical of outsiders but puts first things first—not the limitations of evidence but the naked fact of unambiguous White House intent. When a vice-president visits the CIA eight times to express his views, as Cheney did in the run-up to the Iraq war, he’s not struggling with the higher geometry of intelligence analysis but turning up the heat in the kitchen. Cheney knew it and the agency analysts knew it. This is fundamental. If you can’t get this right you can’t get anything right.

Armstrong deals with the point in a sentence but it ought to be emphasized that a great deal more than a sentence supports this interpretation of what was going on. The literature on the history of the origins of the Iraq war is filled with instances of White House and Defense Department efforts to press their views on analysts, and in each instance the motive is the same—policymakers know what they want, and they are making sure the CIA knows what they want, and they are not going to let it alone until they get what they want.

As a former official of the CIA, Armstrong was required to submit his letter to the agency for clearance before publication, which was done. What Armstrong can say in this instance is thus limited to the text of his letter, as cleared. But other sources easily found on the Web make it clear that he has had an active career. Some years back he was identified during a Senate hearing as a CIA officer specializing in Latin America; more recently he has been identified in the press as a staff member of a Senate committee. He is fluent in both Spanish and Chinese, and worked for several years in Taiwan. Beginning in 2000 Armstrong was the CIA’s national intelligence officer (NIO) for Latin America, and as such was a member of the National Intelligence Council (NIC), which writes official intelligence estimates, a process frequently more protracted, contentious, and laborious than might be suggested by the simple word “writes.” But it ought to be remembered here that the special 2002 NIE on Iraqi WMDs was hastily written at the last minute when President Bush was pressing Congress for authority to go to war. Under usual circumstances Armstrong and other members of the NIC would have debated every detail of the estimate, a process sure to have highlighted the thinness and the fragility of the evidence, such as it was. In 2002, so far as we know, theNIC had no opportunity to weigh in on the final language before the estimate was published.

But Armstrong and other members of the NIC caught the drift easily enough, as he makes evident. It is not the details of the arguments over WMDs that explain what was happening but the tone of the office chatter as the various NIOs cobbled the estimate together. They were unmistakably delighted with their success in finding someone—indeed, anyone—to back scary claims that Saddam’s Iraq was building unmanned aerial vehicles that could deliver chemical and biological agents, and that aluminum tubes purchased by Iraq were intended for use in centrifuges to separate fissionable uranium. Self-congratulation reached its apex when they convinced the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) to limit its doubts about Iraqi WMDs to a “footnote,” rather than insisting on incorporating a substantive dissent into the text of the estimate. Armstrong was present in the NIC office; he heard the NIOs on weapons matters crowing about their success; he knew they were hammering out the estimate they needed to help the White House justify war.

On paper the National Intelligence Council is a company of equals, including the different intelligence agencies of the US goverment; in reality in 2002 it was run by the CIA, and its paper was signed by the agency’s director, George Tenet, who worked directly for the President. The estimate Tenet signed was tortured in argument and thinly supported by evidence, but it was just what the doctor ordered—an ominous piece of paper that few members of Congress were prepared to question. Armstrong’s letter is only the most recent evidence that what went into the estimate was not left to chance.

The world of intelligence analysis is arcane, with its own vocabulary, body language, pecking order, and secret history. Few outside that world can readily understand what was signaled by the INR’s agreement to accept a footnote, but all involved in the process knew that the State Department analysts had been given their marching orders, and backed out of the room in misery with heads hanging low. Who had the authority to tell them to cave? Armstrong does not pursue this awkward point, but there can be only one answer—it was the man who laid out the intelligence case before the UN a few months later, the secretary of state, Colin Powell. Was Powell second-guessing his experts, or bowing to higher authority? And what about the higher authority? What is the proper response to a president who has conspired to launch an unjustified and therefore illegal war against another country? The more clearly the matter is stated, the more troubling are its implications.

It is my guess that Armstrong must have thought long about the American way of doing intelligence, but his letter halts with “the problem of politicization.” Tenet, like other CIA directors, always insisted that the agency “calls them as they see them”—a formulation that suggests it is the agency’s duty to resist pressure, and that the agency is to blame when it caves. But this way of putting the matter ignores the power of presidents. Why are sophisticated observers—Robert Jervis is a good example, but far from alone—so reluctant to reach the obvious conclusion, that presidents who know what they want will turn up the heat until they get what they want?

Simple realism suggests the answer. Somebody got the Iraqi WMDs equation completely wrong and plunged the United States into a seven-year war, not over yet. But who shall we blame—intelligence analysts or the President? Consider the fighting weight of the two candidates: on the one hand is the bundle of organizations referred to as “the intelligence community”—many thousands of anonymous civil servants barred by law from telling what they know, and who, if fired, may have nowhere to take their skills. On the other hand is the president, champion and hero of roughly half the American population, given the benefit of the doubt by nearly all, backed by a national political party, with the immense publicity-generating apparatus of the White House under his immediate control. The one is usually innocent but defenseless. The other is deeply culpable but dangerous to challenge.

How dangerous? Reflect on Watergate for a moment. It is no longer a secret how the Bush White House pushed, cajoled, bullied, and deceived the United States into war with Iraq. But which leading national figure is pressing for a national commission with power of subpoena to dig out the facts and establish what happened and why? None that I can see. It’s easier and safer to conclude that the anonymous analysts just got it wrong.

Photo: Ray Stubblebine/Reuters

More on that "Ground Zero Mosque"

2010-08-27T12:59:00.001-04:00

I’ve been debating this issue with a Jewish friend of mine who is against the mosque but should know better (he is a liberal and voted for Obama, but he is a New Yorker now living in Paris.) He thought putting a mosque there was “idiotic” and “tasteless” and that it wasn't just bigots who thought that way but "reasonable people" too. Here is what I said to him:

9/11 was carried out by an organization called Al-Qaeda. It claimed to be acting in the name of Islam, but it wasn’t. Likewise, the KKK claimed to be acting in the name of Jesus Christ when it burnt crosses and lynched Black people, but it wasn’t either, and we don’t blame Christians or Christianity itself for those actions.

What does the Islamic cultural center have to do with 9/11? Nothing whatsoever, unless you want to blame Islam and all Muslims for it.

As Bloomberg said, how big should the no-mosque zone be? How far would a mosque have to be from Ground Zero before it was not tasteless or idiotic? 4 blocks? 6 blocks? 10? All of downtown? All of Manhattan?

No one said a peep about the center for months, and then some conservative bloggers made a deal out of it, and right-wing and racist politicians seized on it as a wedge issue for the upcoming elections. Unfortunately, some “reasonable people” have been suckered into falling into their trap and helping them do their work. Meanwhile, a lot of other Americans are remembering our core values of religious freedom and tolerance and pointing out that Constitutional rights only have meaning if they are allowed to be expressed without intimidation.

Nazism was a racist movement in which a small fringe sucked in a lot of “reasonable people,” indeed pretty much a whole nation. It was also a movement that scapegoated an entire religious and ethnic group for the perceived sins of a few of its members. It’s just a matter of degree.

Photo: Seth Wenig / AP

You can build a mosque at ground zero when we can build a synogogue in Mecca

2010-08-23T07:43:00.001-04:00

This is the caption on one of the signs (see photo at right) held at a protest against the "Ground Zero Mosque" yesterday, August 22. So this is how we set our standards of tolerance in the United States, according to those of religious fundamentalists? Boy, does this country ever need to go back to school for a civics lesson.

By the way, as Frank Rich pointed out yesterday in the New York Times, it's not a mosque, it's an Islamic cultural center with a prayer room. But I'm sure that doesn't make much difference to the bigots who attend these protests.

Anyway, I will be in New York for several months beginning August 31, and I am sure there will be plenty of demonstrations in favor of this building project for me to attend. Hope to see some of you there.

Photo: asterix11

Madness over Manhattan mosque

2010-08-19T05:18:00.002-04:00

I haven't weighed in on this issue, even though I am about to become a part-time New Yorker, because much ink has been spilled and everyone who reads my blog regularly will know how I feel about it (I'm not a bigot, thus my attitude should be clear.)

But every once in a while someone expresses what many of us are feeling and thinking in such a clear and powerful way that we wish we had done it ourselves. Those people are called, um, writers! And in his blog today, my friend and close comrade-in-arms Marc Cooper, a journalism professor at the University of Southern Calfornia, surpasses his usual eloquence. Please read it at this link. Oh, and please forgive Marc for the rather disgusting image he chose to illustrate his post, although it is probably well deserved in this case.

Let me just highlight one paragraph from Marc's post, on a subject close to my heart, but be sure to read it all:

Most repulsive to me, as a nominal Jew, has been the unspeakable but rather predictable posture of the Anti-Defamation League. I say predictable because the ADL has been running one of the greatest of scams for way too long, baldly capitalizing on the Holocaust while serving, primarily, as a lobby for the state of Israel. Anti-semitism is charge no one wants to bear, and the ADL has cynically manipulated the issue and politcally blackmailed (and blackballed) way too many legitimate critics of Israel by smearing them as anti-Semites (yours truly included).

The revenge of the bulls. I hate to see anyone get hurt, especially children, but it's hard to feel entirely sorry for the spectators injured by a taunted bull run amok in Spain. At least the people of Catalonia have had the good sense to ban bullfighting. The bull always loses in the end, but sometimes takes people down with him along the way--bullfight enthusiasts should at least be able to appreciate the poetic justice when that happens.

Israel reaches new peak in arbitrary razing of Palestinian homes. So says Human Rights Watch. "While Israel is demolishing more and more Palestinian homes, it continues to subsidize the Jewish settlements nearby," said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. "Israel has flouted international law not only by supporting settlements on occupied territory, but also by erasing longstanding Palestinian communities next door."

Generous gesture or guilty conscience?

2010-08-17T12:03:00.004-04:00

A big debate has broken out in the UK over Tony Blair's announcement that he will donate the entire proceeds from publication of his memoir (which includes an advance reported to be over £4 million) to the Royal British Legion. The money will reportedly go to pay for a new rehabilitation center for the soldiers injured in the Iraq war he helped propagandize and carry out.

The question being debated is whether this should be considered a generous gesture or a sign of a guilty conscience. It seems to me that both are right, since it is often the case that two contradictory things are true at the same time.

And a guilty conscience is better than no conscience at all. Can one imagine George W. Bush making a similar gesture with the profits from his own memoirs?

Facebook photos of soldiers posing with bound Palestinians are the norm. So says the Israeli group Breaking the Silence, quoted in an article in Haaretz.

"Defining Israel as a Jewish state condemns us to living in a racist state."

2010-08-11T10:37:00.000-04:00

So says Gideon Levy in a superb column in Haaretz. Please read it.

Thanks again to the superb Mondoweiss blog for the heads up.

US To Gaza

2010-08-03T08:40:00.000-04:00

There is a lot of excitement building over this fall's planned wave of boats to Gaza, including one from New York organized by USTOGAZA. The sponsors of the American effort include a roster of leading progressives. Some of my personal favorites include Russell Banks, Phyllis Bennis, Henry and Kathleen Chalfant, Rachel Corrie's parents, Rashid Khalidi, Michael Ratner, Alice Walker, Blase Bonpane, Len Weinglass, and David Zirin. Just so you will know you are in good company if you decide to donate, which you can do on the home page.

The momentum against Israeli brutality towards the Palestinians is building at a rate unimaginable even a year ago. I will be in New York this fall and plan to be there to see the boat off. I hope you will join me, at least in spirit and with your donations to this essential cause.

Photo: Gaza harbor.

Lady Gaga vs Sarah McLachlan

2010-07-25T06:22:00.002-04:00

A few days ago, the music section of the New York Times carried a piece by Jon Caramanica entitled "Girl Pop's Lady Gaga Makeover." To me, it makes for pretty depressing reading. The basic theme, if you don't mind me oversimplifying somewhat as I paraphrase, is that songs and singers who feel something and have something to say are being replaced by entertainers for whom such motivations are anathema. In other words, we're going post-modern yet again. Except now we're post-post-modern, or perhaps even post-post-post modern. It's so hard to keep track of the trends these days, especially when trendiness if often all that popular culture seems to be able to offer us.

Caramanica makes the point that Sarah McLachlan, who a decade ago seemed to be heralding the end of endless inventing and reinventing as the way to success in popular music, is now in retreat, having had to cancel a third of the concerts in her current revival of the Lilith Fair tour while Lady Gaga is raking in the money and the attention (actually, again, I am paraphrasing what I take from his piece, but I think this is the basic message.)

Don't get me wrong, I often find Lady Gaga entertaining, for no other reason than that the real secret of her popularity--the vicarious thrill she gives to wannabes who want to identify with her ability to make a great deal of money with very little talent and nothing to say that hasn't been said much better many times before--forces her to be reasonably clever about the way she goes about doing it. And she seems to have good progressive politics, although how brave she will be if the Tea Party goes after her in a big way remains to be seen (I would hope more brave than Commander-in-Chief President Barack Obama was in the face of the right-wing smear of Shirley Sherrod.)

But you know, there's a lot of sadness in the world, and like many people, sometimes I want to feel it. And I know Sarah will always be there for me. Lady Gaga, on the other hand, will probably be old news this time next year--unless she reinvents herself as someone who has something to say. One never knows.

Sheikh Jarrah: A Just Struggle for a Just Jerusalem

2010-07-16T05:00:00.000-04:00

If you want to keep up with the struggle against Israeli attempts to drive Palestinians out of Jerusalem with evictions, house demolitions, settlement building, and other measures illegal under international law, please check out the Just Jerusalem blog. Among other things you will learn what you need to know about the mythology of a "united Jerusalem" created by Israeli leaders, a myth directed in large part at gullible American Jews whose support Israel needs more desperately than ever--support that is rapidly waning as more and more Jews put Judaic values of justice and tolerance before primitive tribal bestiality.

The Goddess and the Bull: Kindle edition

2010-07-14T08:55:00.000-04:00

For those very few of you out there who have not yet read my book about Neolithic Catalhoyuk and the dawn of civilization, the Kindle edition is now published by the good folks at the Free Press. You can purchase it by clicking at the link above or this link right here.

Happy reading!

Religious bigotry intensifies in Israel

2010-07-13T09:05:00.000-04:00

One of the most outrageous aspects of the so-called "Jewish state" is the monopoly given to Orthodox Judaism in deciding not only matters of religion in the country, but also issues that should be strictly civil, such as marriage and divorce. This has long been an embarrassment to American defenders of Israel, the great majority of whom are not orthodox.

According to an article in today's Washington Post, a bill is advancing in the Knesset that would sidestep an Israeli Supreme Court decision that conversions to the Reform and Conservative branches of Judaism must be recognized in terms of eligibility for Israeli citizenship. This is the equivalent of an "Islamic state" recognizing only the most fundamentalist branches of Islam. A few details from the Post article:

Representatives of the Reform and Conservative movements, which have been battling for years for more rights in Israel, saw the committee vote as a threat to their efforts to strengthen their legitimacy in Israel. The chief rabbinate already holds a monopoly on such rituals as marriage and divorce.

"It sets us back 20 years in terms of the advances that were made," said Rabbi Steven Wernick, executive vice president of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, an umbrella organization of Conservative Jewish congregations in the United States, who spoke by telephone during a visit to Jerusalem. "The practical implication of this bill is one that we are very, very concerned about and angry about."

The article reported some additional news about religious bigotry in the country:

Also on Monday, police detained for several hours a woman who carried a Torah scroll to the women's prayer section of the Western Wall, one of the holiest sites in Judaism.

Police said that Anat Hoffman, a leader of Women of the Wall, a group that challenges the limitations put on women's prayer at the Western Wall, had violated a Supreme Court ruling that says women cannot read from the Torah in the area.
People who witnessed the confrontation said Hoffman was not reading from the Torah in the prayer area and had only brought it with her. Hoffman was ordered not to pray at the wall for 30 days.

Photo: Women of the Wall ((Anat Hoffman, rt.)

By Hook and By Crook: Israel’s Settlement Policy in the West Bank

2010-07-08T04:14:00.004-04:00

This is the title of a report issued earlier this week by B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization. The group claims that settlers effectively control 42% of the West Bank. The full text (pdf file) is available here.

From the introduction on the group's Web site:

Some half a million Israelis are now living over the Green Line: more than 300,000 in 121 settlements and about one hundred outposts, which control 42 percent of the land area of the West Bank, and the rest in twelve neighborhoods that Israel established on land it annexed to the Jerusalem Municipality. The report analyzes the means employed by Israel to gain control of land for building the settlements. In preparing the report, B'Tselem relied on official state data and documents, among them Attorney Talia Sasson’s report on the outposts, the database produced by Brigadier General Baruch Spiegel, reports of the state comptroller, and maps of the Civil Administration.

Israel Holds Firm in Banning Gaza Residents From Studying in the West Bank. A report in the Chronicle of Higher Education on this brutal Israel policy.

The firing of Octavia Nasr. Glenn Greenwald on the hypocrisy of the so-called "Liberal Media." Funny, the UK's ambassador to Lebanon saw things in a similar way.

"Safe Passage": How to get from Gaza to the West Bank

2010-06-22T05:14:00.003-04:00

The Israeli human rights organization Gisha, which fights for the rights of movement of Gazans, has launched a new computer game designed to illustrate the nearly insurmountable obstacles that Israel places in the path of Gazan students who want to study in the West Bank, merchants who want to do business there, and so on. The animated game (which interestingly is supported in part by funds from the European Union) can be accessed here, and is loaded with actual Israeli documents used to prevent the movement of Palestinians between one part and the other of what eventually should be their unified state.

I've linked many times before to Gisha and the important work it is doing. Please check it out and also consider supporting them.

Wikileaks and the truth. I hope that readers of this blog are following recent events concerning Wikileaks, Pfc. Brian Manning, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, and the planned release later this week of yet another video showing U.S. forces mistakenly killing civilians (this time in Afghanistan, the village of Garani.) A good summary can be found in this Washington Post article. (Glenn Greenwald also recently penned a column on this topic for Salon.com.) We've really gotten to the point where nearly all so-called "classified" information is kept secret not primarily because it would help the "enemy" but because it would help opponents of U.S. foreign policy make their case. Indeed, perhaps that has almost been true.

Emily Henochowicz lost an eye...

2010-06-19T15:15:00.002-04:00

... to an Israeli tear gas canister while protesting the Israeli blockade of Gaza. An American Jewish artist, she saw injustice clearly and tried to do something about it. But she hasn't lost her artistic and political vision (nor her sense of humor), and she keeps on blogging and exhibiting her art at thirstypixels.blogspot.com. Why not bookmark it and show your support for this heroic and courageous young woman?

Lorrie Moore

2010-06-18T06:49:00.002-04:00

I'm in a Lorrie Moore phase. I've been in it for a long time, going back and forth chronologically in her bibliography. Reading her first novel, "Anagrams," at the moment. Is there a greater writer on the planet? I would say more but I wouldn't say it as well as Lorrie Moore, so what's the point? Just kidding. Someday I will try to write like Lorrie Moore, be a fraction as good, and be happy about it.

Photo by Linda Nylind

Mondoweiss

2010-06-15T22:57:00.003-04:00

I want to call the attention of readers to what I think is one of the best, if not the best, blogs on the Middle East and Israel-Palestine in particular: Mondoweiss, a project of The Nation Institute. Mondoweiss is essential for those who want to remain informed about what is going on in that region. It not only provides a roundup of news and sources that are easy to miss, but its sharp-eyed and perceptive contributors routinely hit the mark in exposing Israeli hypocrisy and that of those who would defend the "Jewish state's" indefensible oppression of the Palestinians.

Just one small example: A post yesterday, by James North, pointing out that the New York Times seems to have an aversion to mentioning the name of Emily Henochowicz, the young artist at Cooper Union in New York City who lost an eye to an Israeli tear gas canister. Be sure to subscribe to Mondoweiss, for information and comment you really need to have.

Update: Mondoweiss reports on a Jewish flotilla being organized against the Gaza blockade.

Tempest in a Tea Party?

2010-06-12T04:58:00.002-04:00

Today's Washington Post has a post-mortem on the primary elections which makes clear that the Tea Party is not quite the powerful movement it was made out to be by obsessed journalists and many liberals. A typical graf from the story:

But Tuesday's primary results provided fresh evidence of the amorphous network's struggle to convert activist anger and energy into winning results. Frustrated and lacking agreement on what to do next, self-identified tea party leaders say the movement may be in danger of breaking apart before it ever really comes together.

I've been meaning for some time to comment that to a certain extent, the danger posed by the Tea Party is based more in the imaginations of easily-scared liberals than in reality. I say to a certain extent, because there is no question that a minority of Americans lust for fascism of some sort, and demagogic movements and politicians are the conduit that would get us there, if we ever do get there. But too many liberals spend much more time scaring themselves to death about the right-wing than they do organizing for the kinds of positive changes that would make the Tea Party even more marginalized than it already is. It is easier to cluck one's tongue at the stupidity of some Americans than it is to fight for things we need, like better health care or immigration reform or an end to offshore drilling. Trotting out and voting in elections is only the first step in political involvement, and hardly sufficient.

I will be spending the fall in New York City, teaching at NYU, and plan to use this blog to report on just such political activism in that city, such as it might be. Stay posted.

Pope begs forgiveness for sexual abuses, shifts blame to Devil, and announces no new measures

2010-06-12T04:47:00.002-04:00

So says the New York Times today.

The Devil Made Me Do It. A great way to avoid personal responsibility. And asking forgiveness before announcing specific measures to stop it?

The pope said the Devil was behind the scandal, saying it had emerged now, in the middle of the Vatican’s Year of the Priest, because “the enemy,” or the Devil, wants to see “God driven out of the world.”

A somewhat different view from lay Catholics, the Times reports:

In a statement, the lay Catholic group BishopAccountability.org, which is based in the United States, called the pope’s remarks “a great disappointment and a squandered opportunity.”

It called on the pope to “endorse and facilitate certain external measures that would increase transparency and advance justice,” including posting all abuse cases handled by the Vatican on the Vatican Web site and ordering “his bishops to cooperate fully with secular investigations, not oppose them."

When the Catholic Church finally accepts that sex is normal and that abstaining from it does not make one holier or closer to God, perhaps it will be able to recruit priests with normal sexual desires.

A Brief History of the Gaza Folly

2010-06-03T18:53:00.002-04:00

... by Gershom Gorenberg, pictured at right, appears in The American Prospect. Gorenberg has a long history of trying to talk sense to Israelis, notably on the important blog South Jerusalem. In this latest piece, he traces the tragic disaster of Israel's assault on the Gaza flotilla back to its roots, Israeli intransigence and reluctance to accept Palestinian rights and aspirations. Towards the end, he tells the story of Lova Eliav, a former Labor politician who died the day before the assault and who saw early on the folly of Israeli policy.

Were Israel's current leaders able to read the past as Eliav did, to see oneself in one's adversary, they would have seen the implications of the voyage of the Mavi Marmaraand the folly of interdicting it. They might even understand that their consistent effort to avoid a two-state solution is a mistake. Eliav embodied a heroic, humanistic Zionism. The omen of his passing was ignored. It remains for Israelis who believe in his path to demand that the government finally break the chain of folly.

Read the entire piece.

Israel's sea of stupidity (and brutality, illegality, etc)

2010-05-31T11:31:00.006-04:00

Columnist Gideon Levy of Ha'aretz called it right yesterday when he predicted that Israel would do something stupid today. In a piece entitled "Gaza flotilla drives Israel into a state of stupidity," Levy excoriated the current attitude of Israeli leaders and much of its population for the kind of self-delusion of people who believe their own lies. A few excerpts from Levy's piece, and then a few thoughts of my own:

The chorus has been singing songs of falsehood and lies. We are all in the chorus saying there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza. We are all part of the chorus claiming the occupation of Gaza has ended, and that the flotilla is a violent attack on Israeli sovereignty - the cement is for building bunkers and the convoy is being funded by the Turkish Muslim Brotherhood. The Israeli siege of Gaza will topple Hamas and free Gilad Shalit. Foreign Ministry spokesman Yossi Levy, one of the most ridiculous of the propagandists, outdid himself when he unblinkingly proclaimed that the aid convoy headed toward Gaza was a violation of international law. Right. Exactly.

Levy adds:

And facing them on the seas has been the Israeli ship of fools, floating but not knowing where or why. Why detain people? That's how it is. Why a siege? That's how it is. It's like the Noam Chomsky affair all over again, but big time this time. Of course the peace flotilla will not bring peace, and it won't even manage to reach the Gaza shore. The action plan has included dragging the ships to Ashdod port, but it has again dragged us to the shores of stupidity and wrongdoing. Again we will be portrayed not only as the ones that have blocked assistance, but also as fools who do everything to even further undermine our own standing. If that was one of the goals of the peace flotilla's organizers, they won big yesterday.

Today, we are confronted with tragedy, the death of numerous activists who had right on their side. Israeli stupidity has had a big price. Today, it is for those who lost their lives and their friends and loved ones. But Israel and Israelis will also pay a big price, the loss of whatever was left of the legitimacy of the "Jewish state" and the beginning of the end for the apartheid system which most of the world has tolerated way too long. Basing a state or a nation on ethnicity, and defining its citizens and its in and out groups in that way, was odious when the Nazis did it, and it is odious when Jews do it. The jig is up, and Israel seems to know it, thus the desperation of its actions. It remains now for the Jews of Israel, the United States, and the rest of the world to salvage what remains of their reputation as a just people--if they can.

Update: Bradley Burston, also writing in Ha'aretz today, pursues the theme of Israel stupidty and self-delusion.

Israel's legal obligations to Gaza. A legal analysis by the Israeli NGO Gisha, which advocates for the rights of Gazans.

The failure of the American Jewish establishment. If you have not yet done so, be sure to read Peter Beinart's article earlier this month in the New York Review of Books. It could not be more relevant today.

Goldstone was right about Gaza

2010-05-14T15:01:00.001-04:00

That's according to a Human Rights Watch report on the Israeli operation "Cast Lead," available at this link. Read it and weep.

Boston's Museum of Science hosts Israeli propaganda effort

2010-05-04T14:44:00.002-04:00

Noam Chomsky and a number of other noted scientists have issued an open letter to Boston's Museum of Science, condemning it for hosting "Israeli Innovation Weekend" a few days ago. The letter is carried on the excellent blog Mondoweiss (a project of the Nation Institute) and many others. A few quotes:

IIW is far from an innocent educational endeavor. It is part of a propaganda campaign by the State of Israel to present itself as a beacon of progress in a desert of backwardness and deflect attention from its atrocious human rights record and fundamentally discriminatory policies.

Another key paragraph from the letter:

Propaganda efforts such as IIW are key to sustaining the virtually unconditional U.S. support for Israel that only exacerbates the conflict. The U.S. singles out Israel for special treatment, lavishing billions of dollars of aid upon it every year and protecting it from any concerted action in the UN Security Council. This assistance supports a state that systematically privileges Jews from anywhere in the world over the country’s non-Jewish inhabitants and which continues to perpetrate war crimes and other human rights abuses to uphold this fundamental inequality.

The letter is cosigned by a number of well-known researchers, including Nancy Kanwisher from MIT, Robert Trivers from Rutgers, and, importantly, a number of Israeli scientists as well.

I am heartened that we are now entering a phase in the struggle against Israeli apartheid (yes, that's what it is) that approaches the campaign against South African apartheid of the 1980s. Another example, of course, is the support in the University of California, Berkeley student government for university divestment from firms that do business with Israel, which failed to overturn a veto by one vote but nevertheless is an excellent sign of things to come. The old canard that any criticism of Israel is based on anti-semitism is fast losing credibility, especially when Israelis themselves are in the forefront of the struggle against their nation's inhuman policies against the Palestinians. We need to build a movement that exacts the kinds of sanctions from Israel appropriate for any country that routinely violates human rights.

Volcanoes and air travel chaos: Blaming the messenger

2010-04-22T07:30:00.006-04:00

It didn't take more than a few days for the airline industry to start slamming European officials responsible for air traffic safety, and the media has given industry officials plenty of ink and air time. I followed events mostly on BBC World, whose reporters often lobbed softball questions to International Air Transport Association spokespersons while mercilessly grilling air safety officials.

In my view the "bureaucrats" made exactly the right decisions and demonstrated that they were the ones most concerned about the public's safety, while the airline industry was clearly ready to take risks with peoples' lives in the interests of maintaining their profits. Could this have been more clear? Certainly the lives of hundreds of thousands of people were disrupted, but at least they are still alive and not the victims of aircrashes caused by melted silicates in aircraft jet engines.

This situation reminds me of the recent criticisms of public health officials around the world who pushed the emergency button on the "swine flu" epidemic. Thanks to their efforts and cautionary advice, we avoided a major pandemic, although thousands of people did die, especially young people. Yet now public health officials are accused of "overreacting," even though the virus is still lurking in the shadows, ready to spread again, while armchair experts with no knowledge of viruses or epidemiology hold forth about how silly it all was.

These situations have given me a new found respect for those who must make difficult decisions on a minimum of knowledge, and a new contempt for those who would criticize them when their decisions create inconvenience. In the case of the airline industry officials, it was profits first, safety second--but wow, you wouldn't know it from all the self-interested self-righteousness they are now dishing out.

Eyjafjallajokull volcano/ Photo: REUTERS

Update: Lest readers of this blog think I am exaggerating, I just watched the top of the hour report on this on BBC World. It featured interviews with three airline executives--Richard Branson of Virgin, Ryanair president Michael O'Leary, and an American Airlines VP whose name I did not catch. Not one interview from a European government official, air safety official, or ANYONE on the other side of the issue. If the respected BBC is so amazingly biased in its reporting on this issue, what is the future of journalism?

The Pope must resign

2010-03-25T06:41:00.007-04:00

It would appear that the smoking finger is now being pointed directly at Pope Benedict XVI, as the New York Times today ties him directly to the sexual abuse scandal that has been plaguing the Catholic Church for many years. Here's the basic news:

Top Vatican officials — including the future Pope Benedict XVI — did not defrock a priest who molested as many as 200 deaf boys, even though several American bishops repeatedly warned them that failure to act on the matter could embarrass the church, according to church files newly unearthed as part of a lawsuit.

The internal correspondence from bishops in Wisconsin directly to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, shows that while church officials tussled over whether the priest should be dismissed, their highest priority was protecting the church from scandal.

Be sure to read the whole story. Meanwhile, Sinead O'Connor, who tore up a photo of Ratzinger's predecessor, John Paul II, on "Saturday Night Live" years ago, is calling for the current pope to be criminally prosecuted.

I've suggested half-seriously in previous posts that the Catholic clergy is merely a pedophile ring in robes, but the incredible number of sexual abuse cases seems to make that hypothesis plausible. Perhaps a better way to think about it is that the clergy attracts many pedophile men who have gone into the Church thinking that it is either a solution to their urges or an opportunity to indulge in them under the cloak of papal authority, as it were. As for the Church's coverup of the scandal, in which Benedict is now seriously implicated, that also could have at least two underlying aspects. Either the Church knows that it is attracting pedophiles and doesn't have a serious moral problem with that, and/or it knows that the vow of chastity is really against human nature and doesn't want to admit that--because it would increase pressure to withdraw the celibacy requirement for the priesthood.

It's up to ordinary Catholics to make sure their church deals squarely with this issue (or better yet, in my personal view, to leave the church, a moribund and corrupt institution.) And it's up to the courts to bring these priests to justice, including the man who supposedly talks to God.

Afterthought. As a journalist, I continue to find it very odd that the news media don't ever seem to ask why there is so much pedophilia in the Catholic Church. Perhaps I am missing something. If any readers of this blog have come across such analyses, I would be grateful if they would share them with all of us.

Additional thought. I suppose the vow of chastity is what nuns take, but you know what I mean.

Update. Yet more evidence against Benedict XVI surfaces in the New York Times.

More on this topic. A biting commentary in Slate by Christopher Hitchens.

The oppressor has no right to criticize the tactics of the oppressed

2010-03-18T08:02:00.003-04:00

I have searched in vain trying to find the original source of this expression, which I recall from the 1960s. If anyone here can provide a source for it please let me know.

But please also apply it to any current situation in the world that you find appropriate.

The Palestinians are surrounded

2010-03-16T02:42:00.003-04:00

Sometimes visual aids are necessary to see just what the Israelis are up to in Jerusalem and the West Bank. This map and the legend below are from the BBC.

1 Gilo: 850 homes approved for publication and planning objections in Nov 2009

2 Pisgat Zeev: 600 homes approved for publication and planning objections in Jan 2010

3 Sheikh Jarrah: Several Palestinian families evicted in past 18 months to make way for Jewish settlers after court ruled in ownership dispute

4 Ramat Shlomo: 1,600 homes approved for publication and planning objections in Mar 2010

5 Silwan: Demolition orders on 88 Palestinian homes built without difficult-to-get permits - Israel planning controversial renewal project

6. West Bank barrier: Making Palestinian movement between West Bank and Jerusalem harder - Israel says it's for security

Now, a word from me: It is hard not to conclude that the "peace process" has failed because Israel neither needs, nor perhaps even wants, peace. Israel does not need peace because it has been successful in suppressing nearly all Palestinian resistance with the military hardware that the United States largely pays for; and it does not want peace because Palestinian resistance, and occasional terrorism, provides the excuse Israel needs to continue its oppressive policies and its collective punishment of the Gaza and West Bank populations.

Does Israel deserve security?

2010-03-15T07:42:00.004-04:00

Israel's annexation of East Jerusalem is understood by pretty much every nation, including the United States, as a violation of international law, as are the settlements in the West Bank. So Israel's announced plans to build 1600 apartments in East Jerusalem was not just "ill timed" with Joe Biden's visit, but represents a clear-cut provocation and a demonstration of the Jewish state's true motives: Take as much land as possible from the Palestinians while pretending to be interested in peace.

Under those circumstances, Israelis are lucky they are not being subjected to more resistance, violent or otherwise, from the Palestinians, because they fully deserve it just as the South African apartheid regime deserved the militant movement mounted against it by Mandela, the ANC, etc.

But since the Palestinians are relatively powerless, and the Obama administration so far seems unwilling to do much more than issue ever louder "condemnations" of Israeli actions, no one should be surprised if Palestinian terrorism raises its desperate head once again.

Addendum: The Israeli human rights group Gisha has been documenting Israel's oppressive policies towards the Palestinians for a long time. Most recently they have tackled Israel's attempts to prevent movement between Gaza and the West Bank.

Update. A Ha'aretz editorial expresses the alarm that many Israelis are feeling at the possibility that Netanyahu has pushed things too far with the United States, and that Israel will be the loser.

Change of venue

2010-01-30T00:59:00.004-05:00

Here's the lede of a story in the New York Times today:

The Obama administration on Friday gave up on its plan to try the Sept. 11 plotters in Lower Manhattan, bowing to almost unanimous pressure from New York officials and business leaders to move the terrorism trial elsewhere.

Shouldn't that be alleged Sept. 11 plotters? The administration's decision to hold the trial in New York City was a dumb-ass move from the get-go, because the attorneys for the defendants were sure to argue that they couldn't get a fair trial there. And they almost certainly would have been right.

Obama was right to insist that they should be tried in the United States rather than by a military commission in Guantanamo. But by picking a highly controversial place to hold the trial, and then--much worse--giving in to pressure to move it someplace else, Obama has shot himself in both feet.

He has also taken the punch out of what otherwise could have been a good lesson in the principles of American justice, which Americans are sorely in need of.

Obama is making all the wrong moves these days. The joy of having elected a liberal Black Democrat as president didn't last long, which perhaps should not have surprised us. After all, he is still a Democrat.

PS--At some point, on some issue, Obama will have to stand his ground and demonstrate that he can't be pressured. Otherwise he is finished.

Howard Zinn, RIP

2010-01-28T01:21:00.003-05:00

An excellent obituary of the "people's historian" can be found here, and a very recent interview with Zinn about his documentary "The People Speak" and other important matters is at this link.

(Thanks to PG for the heads up on these links.)

On another matter entirely. I gather that America (or some of it) has been transfixed by the Jay Leno-Conan O'Brien affair. So much attention to two guys who aren't very funny, nor are their writers.

Why have so many died?

2010-01-14T03:32:00.004-05:00

We all know that if an earthquake of the same magnitude that hit Haiti struck a developed Western country, the death toll, while possibly significant, would be much lower. Why? This article from Socialist Worker explains how the policies of the United States and other developed countries towards Haiti have contributed greatly to its impoverished state. I won't vouch for every statement in the piece, but overall this analysis is correct.

Thanks to PG for the heads up.

More about why. From Tracy Kidder, an opinion piece in the International Herald Tribune.

Is the Haiti rescue effort failing? From Danny Schechter on Alternet.

Was Harry Reid right?

2010-01-11T16:16:00.006-05:00

I've read a lot about Senator Harry Reid's remarks over the past days, except that he might have been right. That was redressed today in a post by Jeff Zeleny on the New York Times' Caucus blog. Zeleny's source is none other than Barack Obama himself, who was very aware of the need to keep white voters at ease. As Zeleny puts it:

The comment – made to the authors of a new book on the presidential campaign – is not so different from remarks Mr. Obama has made himself while navigating the complicated intersection of race and politics in America during his rapid rise to the White House.

It's nice to see a little honesty about racial politics in America, a refreshing break from the sanctimony on both sides of the Democratic-Republican divide. Give it a read and you will see what I mean--I hope.

PS--The use of the word "Negro" is not necessarily racist, and depends on the context.

Feigned outrage. Rutgers professor of history, journalism and media studies David Greenberg has some interesting comments on the insincere reactions to Reid's remarks, in a commentary in the Los Angeles Times.

A truth, crudely put. So says the Washington Post's Pulitzer Prize winning columnist, Eugene Robinson, on Truthdig.

Yemen: The mouse that roared?

2010-01-08T15:28:00.004-05:00

I don't know about you, but I am so pleased to have this opportunity to learn so much about Yemen in the past days. Here's Christiane Amanpour on my television giving me all the background I need to find Yemen on a map when the U.S. decides to send troops there.

Actually, I doubt this will happen, but one never knows. When the Duchy of Grand Fenwick invaded the United States back in the 1950s, hoping to lose immediately and then receive foreign aid so it could avoid bankruptcy, things didn't work out as planned. You may have seen the documentary, "The Mouse That Roared."

Anyway the Yemeni government must be pleased as punch to be getting so much money and help from the U.S. so that it can pretend to fight al-Qaeda while crushing the various other insurrections now going on and throw dissidents into jail, or worse. Who says the United States doesn't have a big heart?

Why is it so easy for al-Qaeda to recruit terrorists? Glenn Greenwald has some insights about how U.S. Middle East policy helps out.

A Looking Glass War?

2010-01-05T11:46:00.002-05:00

When a suicide bomber blew up seven C.I.A. agents at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Afghanistan last week, including the base chief, I waited for news analysts to point out the obvious: U.S. policy and strategy in Afghanistan were in a lot of trouble. After all, when the enemy can infiltrate to the very center of your most sensitive operations and kill your operatives, that enemy can be said to have the upper hand in the war. But unless I missed something, none of the mainstream news media I saw flagged the obvious point that this disastrous episode was symptomatic of a greater problem.

Now we find out that the bomber was a double-agent invited into the base for a meeting. So now I am wondering if today's C.I.A. agents should be reading John Le Carre's novels as part of their training? If they had, they would know that when an intelligence agency "turns" someone it remains an open question which way they are really pointing, or at least should remain so in the minds of the agent's handlers.

I don't mean to be facetious with these remarks. I am sure the C.I.A. agents involved thought they were doing their duty to protect Americans from terrorist attacks. But the cloak-and-dagger strategy they are following is a sure loser, as these events should make clear. The "enemy" is pretty smart, and is operating in his own territory, swimming like a fish in the sea--whereas "our" team is, apparently, completely out of its depth.

No one, in politics or in the news media, seems to want to say that this kind of disaster makes America and Americans look dumb, silly, vulnerable, and weak. But if other commentators are pointing this out, I would be grateful to readers of this blog if they would bring it to our attention.

Now it's Yemen

2010-01-03T06:48:00.005-05:00

The year is not starting off well. The Obama administration, having made the fatal mistake of escalating troop presence in Afghanistan, is now going down a dangerous road in Yemen (with much of the news media, so far at least, tagging along relatively uncritically.) But as Obama seeks to "strengthen" the Yemeni government, the consequences of propping up and allying with a repressive regime will become obvious soon enough. Human Rights Watch has got the Yemeni government's number; will the U.S. government continue to repeat the Cold War policy of supporting (ie, giving arms and money to) any government that promises to cooperate with the "war on terrorism," just as they did with the war on Communism? Can American troops be far behind? Will Americans support a policy that actually strengthens the terrorists and provides them with an ever greater number of recruits?

It's so sad and tragic that things have to get so much worse before they can get better. Bad times ahead.

PS--How is the closing of the American Embassy in Yemen going to be viewed by potential terrorist recruits? A victory for their movement, perhaps? So much for projecting strength, at least American strength.

A New Year

2010-01-02T02:06:00.006-05:00

I'm back in Paris after a family holiday in Rome and Pompei between Christmas and New Year's Eve (we celebrated the New Year in the taxi coming back from Charles de Gaulle airport.) I want to wish all readers of this blog a happy and productive 2010. This blog will be picking up the pace in the days to come, although posts will be less frequent than in the past. Look for a number of changes soon!

Photo: The Roman Forum/Michael Balter