SYRIA–6,000 DEATHS AND (NOT) COUNTING

Bertolt Brecht reputedly asked,”If the government doesn’t trust the people, why doesn’t it dissolve them and elect a new people?” While Robert Anton Wilson may have been the only person who knows where and under what circumstances Brecht coined this cynical bon mot, and Brecht certainly saw plenty of efforts by Nazi and Communist governments alike to put it into practice, word that a government is undertaking this program never loses its appall, and the latest place where this practice appalls me is Syria, where the government has so far killed around 6,000 people in an attempt to “continue the beatings until morale improves,” and the UN has said things are so chaotic that it is not going to even attempt to keep track of the number of dead.

Syria, like the rest of the Middle East, is no stranger to such campaigns.  When the Ottomans wanted to kill mass numbers of Armenians without having to work too hard, they just sent them out into the Syrian desert to starve.  The population of Syria’s neighbor, Palestine, has been the subject of slow-motion strangulation by the Israelis for over sixty years, and plenty of Middle Easterners would be only too happy to see that karma rebound onto the Israelis.   In classical times, the Romans crucified Maccabean rebels by the thousands, ultimately killing somewhere between a quarter-million and a million Jewish Palestinians–and now the survivors’ descendants, osmosed into Muslims through the years, are now under the heel of their brethren who remained Jewish.  But that’s not what I’m here to talk about today.

More recently, in Syria’s neighbor Iraq,  ten years of American sanctions in the 90′s resulted in the deaths of over half a million Iraqis, mostly children, termed “an acceptable cost” by Democrat Secretary of State Madeline Albright, whose own children were not among the victims.  Our government’s 2003 invasion is responsible for the deaths of a million and a quarter more Iraqi civilians.   So, from a certain perspective, a mere six thousand casualties is chump change.   Meanwhile, the U.S. won’t fund abortions because so many people in our Congress and our country profess a “respect for life.”  Do I detect a disconnect here?  “Protect the unborn, but once you’re out of your momma, tough nuggies”?  But that’s not what I’m here to talk about today, either.

Perhaps a more apt comparison, at least for the time being, can be found in the situation in Libya last Spring, when rebels there, with the eventual help of NATO, threw out Col. Qadhafi, at the cost of  5-10,000 lives.  By that standard, the six thousand known deaths in Syria could almost be called par for the course, but there are important internal and external differences between the two situations. There are four times more Syrians than Libyans, in a country only 1/9 the size of Libya.  The populated part of Libya is the long, narrow coastal strip, which made it easier for the initial protesters to have some territorial integrity and create an alternative government in the far east of the country right from the beginning.  The Libyan rebels were able, in effect, to barricade one end of the hall and fight with their backs to the wall of the Egyptian border.  In little, triangular Syria, the population is in the situation of a hapless amateur trapped in the wrestling ring with Hulk Hogan, who keeps attacking again and again, from any and all angles, at any time. It’s enough to get a person nervous, ya know?

Another big difference is the two countries’ standing in the international community.  Qadhafi had gone his own way, using Libya’s oil wealth to maintain its political independence.  For this reason, and because he did in fact spend a fair amount of money on social programs that actually did improve the lives of most Libyans, as long as they were willing to kowtow to him, Qadhafi had a certain cachet in international radical political circles, especially when he proposed to start asking for gold, rather than dollars, as payment for his country’s oil.  But that made him a major pariah in the West.  Threatening to deny the dollar was a far more unforgivable sin than the Lockerbie bombing or murdering his own people, and with no major power to watch his back, his fall was inevitable.

Syria, on the other hand, enjoys a fairly close relationship with several world powers.  Its relationship with Russia dates back to Soviet days, when the current dictator’s father cultivated close ties.  Many Syrians go to Russia for advanced studies, but most importantly, the Syrian army uses Russian-made weapons, purchased with their oil cash, and Russia has continued to supply Syria with killing devices even as the rest of the civilized world has attempted an arms embargo on Syria.   (Just for the record, Syria’s oil production is declining sharply.) Russia’s only military base outside the borders of the former Soviet Union is on the Syrian coast.  The Russians do not want to see this relationship upset, if at all possible, especially since they gave their Chechen population similar treatment.  If they have to do something similar to some other would-be breakaway republic, they don’t want to help set the precedent of international intervention.

China, too, is more inclined to support Syria, where it has major oil interests.  Like Russia, China also has a strong interest in discouraging internal revolts in China, where the Uyghurs and Tibetans have suffered fates similar to what Russia visited on the Chechens.  Like Russia, China does not want to give the U.N. any precedent for poking around in what it regards as its internal business, nossir.

Iran is yet a third country that is watching Assad’s back.  Iran and Syria have a longstanding close relationship, going back to Biblical days, really, but most lately renewed over the Iran-Iraq war, and Syria’s provision of a refuge for Hezbollah, which both countries employ as a proxy to keep pressure on Israel.  While the Russians provide diplomatic support, the Iranians have “boots on the ground,” providing support, training, and reputedly troops to help the Assad government kill dissenters, or anybody who lives in the same neighborhood as somebody who might be a dissenter.

Add to this the fact that Russia is the source of much of Western Europe’s fuel supply, and that China is a source of just about everything for everybody, and that makes the Europeans (and Americans) shy about jumping into a situation that might turn out to involve tightening a noose around their own necks.  Now, throw in the many similar pogroms the U.S. has countenanced–the slaughter of half a million alleged “communists” in Indonesia in the mid-sixties and the elimination of around a hundred thousand citizens of East Timor who happened to object to the seizure of their country by Indonesia are just two further examples of U.S. government-approved mass murder, in addition to the ones I mentioned above, that deny our leaders any ability to claim the moral high ground on this issue.  There are many, many more.  There is blood on Uncle Sam’s hands, and it ain’t “the blood of the lamb.”

OK, just one more example of mass deaths caused by U.S. government policy–it is now estimated that about thirty thousand Mexicans have been killed in just the last four years due to the “war on drugs” (or, in this case, the war over drug profits)–that’s a kill rate similar to what we are seeing in Syria, albeit in a country with five times Syria’s population.  The war over drug profits would be over tomorrow if marijuana were legalized and thus inexpensive enough to out-compete crack and meth.  Coca?  Talk to the Bolivians–they’ve got a plan.  But, I digress.

What the Syrian situation adds up to is a dangerous pile of kindling with the potential to spark something like World War III if it is dealt with crudely.  It looks to me like the U.S. couldn’t go in there with guns blazing to protect the civilian population without our blazing guns setting fires that cause far more damage than the intervention might prevent.  Mere hand wringing is not an acceptable alternative, either.  What would a Green foreign policy on this issue look like?

I need to preface what I am about to say by remarking that it is a  very easy for me, sitting here in the safety of America, to proclaim, and not necessarily so easy for a citizen of Homs or Damascus.

First and foremost, I believe, a Green foreign policy would support the essential nonviolence of the Syrian movement.  Bashir Assad’s brutal response to his people’s peaceful protests will, ultimately, undermine him,  but only if the protestors can maintain the moral high ground.  This is where the rubber meets the road for nonviolent resistance, the place where the bombs and artillery shells start to fall–and yet fail to instill fear in the people at whom they are aimed.  Non-violent resistance is not easy, and it is carried out with no guarantee of the personal safety, much less the success, of those who undertake it.   But if we are going to create an alternative to mass murder as a government policy, we have got to start by rejecting mass murder as a way to change governments.  That is the great challenge, and the great hope, of the situation in Syria.  A non-violent revolution there will take the wind out of the sails of Russian, Chinese, Iranian, American, Israeli and Palestinian peddlers of repression alike, and mark a new, peaceful direction for unraveling the tangled knot of Mideast tension.  Violent intervention, at best, will fuel more old scores than it settles, and at worst create a regional or even global conflagration that we can ill afford at this time of planetary environmental peril.  If the essence of the Syrian uprising can remain nonviolent, and replace Assad with a truly populist movement, it would mark a major turning point in world politics.  We need a major turning point much more than we need more violence.  It’s time for a change.

music:  Judy Collins, “Carry It On”

IT’S THE OIL, STUPID!

Once upon a time, I thought Moammar Qadhafi was cool, a twentieth century Barbary pirate who gleefully steered an independent course, used his country’s oil money to benefit the Libyan people, and thumbed his nose at Moscow and Washington alike.  I soured on him a long time ago, though, as it became apparent that he was pocketing most of the oil money himself, and his regime was blowing up airliners and assassinating exiled Libyan dissidents.  His visit to Rome in February was little short of bizarre, as he suggested that Europeans should convert en masse to Islam, abolish all political parties, and that the etymology of the word “democracy” had to do with people sitting on chairs, not to mention quotes like these:

I am not a dictator to close facebook… But I will be arresting anyone who enters it!

Demonstrate all you want, but do not go to the streets and squares!!

So, I was thrilled when a revolt broke out in Libya that seemed to have the strength to kick his crazy ass out of the country.  I mean, the guy reminds me of Michael Jackson–way cool in the eighties, nuts in the twenty-first century.  But Qadhafi, while he may be as crazy as Michael Jackson, is a lot less musically talented and a lot more dangerous.  It became obvious that he was going to use every means at his disposal to destroy the rebellion, and he definitely had the resources to do it:  modern weaponry, 6.5 billion dollars worth of gold to buy supplies, and a porous southern border with sub-Saharan Africa, a region where money talks and anything goes.  It looked like ol’ Qadhafi Duck was gonna crush the rebellion and give any rebels who survived reason to envy the dead.  But then, but then–instead of hanging these rebels out to dry, as the West has almost invariably done, NATO came to their aid.  Wow!   The empire was doing the right thing for a change!

So why, I wondered, were Cindy Sheehan and the Green Party and a lot of my usual cohorts going ape about this?  Did they actually support Qadhafi?  Did they know something I didn’t?

It didn’t take long for the truth to come out.  First came the disclosure that there had been a quid pro quo to gain Arab support for the intervention:   the U.S. agreed not to squawk about suppression of pro-democracy demonstrations in Bahrain in exchange for co-operation.  It was fine with the Saudis–Qadhafi Duck has long been a loose cannon in the Middle East, and they would be happy to see him replaced with someone more tractable.  Second, I found out that Qadhafi had recently decided to start selling Libya’s oil to India and China, rather than the West.  As Saddam Hussein found out when he tried to ask for Euros instead of dollars for his oil, defections will not be tolerated.

Think of all the oppressive situations the Empire has ignored.  Repression in Iran, Syria, Turkish actions against the Kurds, the civil wars in Sudan and the Congo, the genocide in Rwanda, brutal regimes in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Israel’s persecution of the Palestinians, the concentration camps known as North Korea and Burma, China’s crushing of Tibet and Tiananmen Square, “dirty wars” in Chile and Argentina–the list goes on and on.  The US has tsk-tsked, turned a blind eye to, or actively assisted in the crushing of one popular revolt after another–but Libya–Libya we can, and will, do something about–and why?  It’s small enough to beat and rich enough to be worth taking.  This is not about freedom and democracy, it’s about greed and hypocrisy, about getting our people in there and taking over from the amateurs who started the revolt. I would like to see those amateurs succeed, but it’s not about freedom any more, it’s about their blood for our oil–again.

My bad, Ms. Sheehan.  You called it right.

The Clash:  “Rock the Casbah“

WORM WAR ONE

A very unusual and deeply significant event happened last Fall, but largely escaped notice in the media. The significance of this story is that we have crossed a threshold, entered a new territory, and there is no telling what will happen next. Sometimes that’s a good thing. In the long run, this particular event may be beneficial, but I have a feeling it is going to raise a lot of hell along the way.

I’m not even talking about climate change here. The event was the infection of the control system for Iran’s nuclear program with a computer worm called “Stuxnet.”

Stuxnet is a very carefully designed worm. It won’t use your computer to send spam. It won’t eat your hard drive. But, if your computer is one that controls certain kinds of industrial equipment, especially nuclear centrifuges, Stuxnet will cause the centrifuges to malfunction, while it shields the malfunction from monitoring equipment. Nuclear centrifuges have to spin at a certain speed in order to properly separate out the uranium isotopes. If the speed varies, they don’t do the job right, and the end product will not function properly in a nuclear reactor–or an atomic bomb.

That is not the kind of worm that is designed by bored teenage hackers in LA.  It is a highly sophisticated computer program that could only have been designed by a very big business or a government. “Dissection” of the worm uncovered several clues that seem to point to Israeli involvement.

I’m not big on either nuclear reactors or nuclear weapons.  To me, they are both clear examples of technologies that a truly wise and intelligent species would have theorized about but not actually created, due to the inherent dangers.  But we are not a truly wise and intelligent species, and we have gone ahead and created hundreds of nuclear reactors and, according to once source, 23,000 nuclear weapons.  (Twenty-three again!  Who’s writing this script?)

Iran claims its nuclear program is intended for peaceful uses only.  But most of its neighbors have nuclear arsenals–the Russians on the north, the Pakistanis to the east, the Israelis to the west, (although we’re supposed to act as if they don’t!), and the US on its south, in the Persian Gulf.  When you’re surrounded by mean monkeys with big sticks, it’s a natural monkey reaction to grab the biggest stick you can and look as threatening as you can.  If the US really wants Iran not to reach for a big stick, we should stop harassing them.  That, however, is unlikely to happen.

There has been a great deal of speculation that, via its proxy, Israel, the US would act to take out Iran’s nuclear program with an air strike, similar to the Israeli attacks on an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981 and a mysterious target in Syria last fall.

Iran, however, is a much more problematic target for this kind of violence.  It’s further away from Israel than Syria or Iraq and has  more sophisticated air defense systems, leading to a greater possibility of failure.  With its superior resources and the experience of Israel’s attacks on its neighbors, Iran has doubtless “hardened” its nuclear facilities, making them less vulnerable to bombing.  Because the facilities are up and running, attacking them would also be more likely to involve considerable loss of life and widespread nuclear contamination, not to mention condemnation.  And then there’s blowback; Israel has repeatedly beat the crap out of Syria, so that its response to the Israeli attack was largely bluff and bluster; but Iran has much more capacity and willingness to retaliate.  An Israeli air strike on Iran could well have the same effect as throwing a lit match into a very large pool of gasoline.

So, attacking Iran’s nuclear program with a computer worm is, in many ways, a far more sensible choice than sending in the bombers.  And, from a realpolitik viewpoint, the accompanying assassinations of several top Iranian nuclear scientists is more compassionate, or maybe just less uncompassionate, than dropping a bunker-buster on the site and spreading radioactive debris all over the surrounding countryside.

I can understand Israel’s skittishness.  There is a genocidal holocaust in their past, and they want to do all they can to make sure there isn’t another, nuclear, holocaust in their future.  If they’re serious about that, maybe they should just give up on Palestine and move to Nevada or Utah.  But that’s another story.

My guess is that we have not heard the last of this exchange.  You can be sure Iran is looking for a way to retaliate, some back-door, plausible-deniability m.o. that will cripple US and/or Israeli infrastructure without being blatant.  China is apparently actively researching ways to cripple American computer networks.  Perhaps Iran can serve China in the same way that Israel serves America?

It doesn’t have to be high-tech.  It’s long been known that a few tons of gravel, launched into the same low-earth orbit as communications and spy satellites, would rapidly take out every one of those vital links in our communication network.  Bye-bye internet, bye-bye cell phones, bye-bye credit card transactions, bye-bye military communications. Sure, putting gravel in outer space is “rocket science,”  as well as a bad pun, but it’s pretty simple rocket science.  The North Koreans could probably pull that one off.

The worm war is on.  Its campaigns are  well disguised and waged in secret, and there’s no telling when, or what, the next attack will be.  Make hard copies of your favorite data and keep plenty of cash on hand.  Things could get primitive in the blink of an eye–or the launch of a rock.  Taking down communications satellites with rocks–back to the stone age, eh?

music:  Medeski, Martin, and Wood, “Bloody Oil”

“OUR S.O.B.” GOES DOWN

remember, remember....

It was Franklin Roosevelt, speaking of Nicaraguan dictator Somoza Garcia, who said “He may be an S.O.B., but he’s our S.O.B.”  And Hosni Mubarak has been our son of a bitch, or maybe just our bitch, in Egypt for thirty years.  As of this writing, he may still be America’s S.O.B., but he is apparently no longer Egypt’s dictator, and it appears that his designated successor, Omar Suleiman, is only passing through.

There are a lot of angles to this story.  First and foremost, obviously, is how the massive frustration of the Egyptian people bred collective courage and determination and a largely non-violent, decentralized popular revolution.  If only it would happen here!

There’s the question of why the Egyptian people feel so frustrated, what it will take to satisfy their demands, and how or even whether it is possible to meet those needs and aspirations.

There’s the question of how this may affect the situation with and within Palestine and Israel.

There’s the role of the Egyptian Army in the transfer of power.

There’s the invariably lame and sometimes downright bizarre responses of American politicians to this movement.

There’s the angle of American (as well as Egyptian) so-called “intelligence services” completely getting this wrong.

There’s the angle of the depth of support the U.S. government has consistently shown for Mubarak’s notoriously repressive rule in Egypt.

And there’s the question of who’s next.  Saudi Arabia?  Algeria?  Mexico?  The United States?

Let’s start with U.S. involvement and work more or less back up the list, but save “who’s next?” for last.

Thanks to WIkileaks, we know that America’s FBI schooled Egypt’s police in torture techniques at a Quantico, Virginia, training center–interestingly enough, the same one where Bradley Manning, of Wikileaks fame, is being held–but not tortured!  Oh, no, no no!  Verry interesting.  But I want to focus on Egypt.  Most of the weapons, from tear gas canisters to…let’s not go there, have “made in U.S.A.” stamped on them somewhere, and even the ones that don’t were mostly paid for by Hosni’s Uncle Sam.  However President Obama tries to position himself now, it is clear that the U.S. has long known about and been a willing accomplice in Mubarak’s repression of the Egyptian people.

Obama’s approval of Suleiman is a case in point.  Suleiman is widely known as “the CIA‘s man in Egypt.”  He is head of the secret police.  He’s co-operated with the U.S. to carry out kidnappings and torture, and to suppress Hamas, which has been labeled a terrorist organization by the US because it is willing to use violence to resist violently enforced US/Israeli hegemony.  I’m opposed to the use of violence, but I’m opposed to hypocrisy as well.  Hypocrisy is just a subtle form of violence.  Wikileaks has revealed that Suleiman’s attitude towards the Gaza Ghetto is that it’s OK for people there to “go hungry but not starve.”  How compassionate!   Considering Suleiman’s position in Mubarak’s government and the overwhelming popular support for the Palestinians around the Middle East, Obama’s endorsement of Suleiman is hardly a “change we can believe in.”

The problem for repressive regimes, in Egypt or the U.S., is that they grow increasingly out of touch with reality because, due to the fear factor, nobody is going to tell them anything they don’t want to hear.  That’s why torture doesn’t work–people will tell their torturer anything just to stop the pain.  It doesn’t have to be thumbscrews, either.  Any kind of power over another person’s life will do. Can you say “paycheck,” boys and girls?  How about “membership in the American upper class”?

Mubarak’s own “intelligence service” seemed bent on pinning the unrest on “outside agitators.” (ah, the “song of the South!), which would have been laughable if not for the number of people who were beaten, imprisoned, and outright killed due to this rhetoric.  Our own so-called intelligence services seem to have been surprised by these events, just as they have failed, or simply refused,  to foresee many major shifts in the currents of history–Pearl Harbor, Mao’s triumph in China, the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, the end of the Soviet Union and of so-called “Communist” hegemony over eastern Europe, the destruction of the World Trade Center.  The Bush administration, in particular, was famous for fabricating “facts” that bolstered what it wanted to hear.  Ah, the burdens of empire!

(Yes, I am quite open to the likelihood that the CIA, et al.,  neither failed nor ignored, but actively fomented some of the above events…but that’s another subject!)

Yes, the burden of empire will drive any country crazy.  We have been treated to the ironic spectacle of Republican “populists,” frightened out of their tunnel-vision wits at the involvement of radical Islamist organizations like The Muslim Brotherhood in this revolution. throwing their support to Mubarak, who is exactly the kind of strongman they claim to see in Obama.

Ah, the tangled webs we weave, eh?

I mentioned the Egyptian Army, which is a very peculiar institution, as armies go. Last month I said that the U.S. military is one of the best examples of state socialism in the world today, but the Egyptian have us beat.  Since the cessation of hostilities with Israel, they haven’t had a lot to do, militarily.  Instead, they have turned their manpower and resources into an enormous business conglomerate that is involved with everything from resort hotels to agriculture to appliance manufacture to road building.  They don’t want a protracted power struggle.  When it comes to a choice between a stable, happy Egypt without Mubarak or a grim, sullen country with him, the army’s preference is obvious–and that is the choice they have made.  Mubarak is out.

Whether Egyptians will find more happiness without Mubarak may depend on how philosophical the people can be.   From a materialist standpoint, the numbers are not good.  The population has tripled in the last fifty years and at current rates will double again in the next twenty.  Most of the country is virtually uninhabitable desert.  The Aswan dam has proved to be a trade-off:  the country has more electricity, but soil fertility is slipping without the annual Nile floods, and, unreplenished by silt from those floods, the Nile delta, the largest concentration of both population and arable land in the country, is washing away into the Mediterranean Sea.  The country’s oil production peaked fifteen years ago and has fallen 30% since, so it needs to import an increasing amount of its fuel as well as its food. The prices of both oil and food are rising.

What this boils down to is that the Egyptian standard of living is unlikely to improve. As long as the Egyptian people are glad to have more freedom to chart their own destiny in a world of diminished expectations, there is a chance that the country’s gross national happiness index will rise.  If they were expecting a chicken in every pot and a car in every driveway once Mubarak left, they will be sorely disappointed.

A change to a more sympathetic government in Egypt could be very good news for the people of Palestine.  If Egypt opens its border with Gaza and becomes more proactive in offering aid, the Israelis will have a much more difficult time keeping the screws tight on that unfortunate ghetto, and will have less energy and for making trouble elsewhere in the Middle East.  Maybe it’s time they started checking out real estate in Nevada?  Nevada, Negev, sounds a lot alike, nu? But I digress….

It’s that famous “butterfly effect.” An oppressed, underemployed fruit vendor immolated himself in Tunisia, and not long after that, the government of Tunisia fell.  To the surprise of everyone and the delight of some, that energy bounced into Egypt and dislodged a long-established,seemingly intransigent regime there in a matter of weeks.  The world is far too complex a system to predict where the next strand in the world-wide web will unravel, or when.  But we seem to have reached a tipping point.  In world politics as with the climate, bigger and bigger things are shifting faster and faster.  It’s no longer “After us, the deluge.”  The deluge is happening.

music:  John Lennon, “Power

remember, remember....

to the People”

THIS MONTH: THE “INCONVENIENT TRUTH” AWARD

This month, instead of a “truth in strange places” award, I’m giving an “inconvenient truth” award, to the once revered but now reviled Helen Thomas, for this exchange, as reported on Democracy Now:

RABBI DAVID NESENOFF: Yeah, and any comments on Israel? We’re asking everybody today. Any comments on Israel?

HELEN THOMAS: Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine.

RABBI DAVID NESENOFF: Ooh, any better comments than that?

HELEN THOMAS: Remember, these people are occupied, and it’s their land. It’s not Germany, and it’s not Poland.

RABBI DAVID NESENOFF: So where should they go? What should they do?

HELEN THOMAS: They could go home.

RABBI DAVID NESENOFF: Where is their home?

HELEN THOMAS: Poland, Germany—

RABBI DAVID NESENOFF: So the Jews—you’re saying Jews should go back to Poland and Germany?

HELEN THOMAS: —and America and everywhere else. Why push people out of there who have lived there for centuries?

Ms. Thomas’ expression of her honest opinion had several unfortunate effects.  Personally, it marked the end of her career as a White House reporter.  In general, the resulting spin storm eclipsed, in the US at least, the outrage of Israel’s violent attack on an unarmed convoy bearing relief supplies for Gaza, where millions of Palestinians are enduring near-concentration camp conditions.

Government and media in this country conveniently ignore the reality of the Palestine/Israel situation, which in many respects eerily parallels the European subjugation of the Americas:  White people with a sense of entitlement helped themselves to territory long held by darker-skinned people, couldn’t understand why this created resentment among the natives, and then used their superior technology and tighter organization to violently suppress native resistance to European invasion.

The further irony in the case of Palestine as a “Jewish homeland” is that, just as  Hindus,  Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Mithraists, and many Christians  in the zone of Muslim conquest  ultimately became Muslim, so many of the original Jews of Palestine became Muslim, and now find themselves oppressed, in the name of “Israel’s right to exist,” by Jews with only a very distant genetic tie to “the Jewish homeland.”

Don’t get me wrong–I was brought up Jewish and have a deep appreciation for its tribal, earth-based traditions.  Whatever European roots my family had were erased in the Holocaust.  I am further aware that the Holocaust wasn’t solely the construction of a few perverted Germans.  They were aided and abetted by anti-Semites all across Europe, especially Eastern Europe, where anti-Jewish riots after the Second World War made it clear that the Nazis had tapped into a deep, long-lasting prejudice with their genocide.

But nobody really asked the Palestinians.  With all the furor about “illegal immigrants” in the US these days, it’s surprising that so few people get it that Israel was populated in part by–illegal immigrants.  Even those who entered legally were allowed in by the British, who had the power to enforce their rule over Palestine and paid little more than lip service to the needs, wishes, and feelings of the native population.

I don’t have time this month to explore this explosive, expansive topic as much as I’d like, but I will say that Helen’s suggestion that the Jews in illegal settlements in Palestine (which I think is part of  what she meant by “Israel should get out of Palestine”) should go back to their countries of origin has some merit.  The standoff between Israel and the Arabs needs to be de-escalated.  Israel’s piratical attack on the Gaza relief convoy, relentless oppression of its native people–the Palestinians–and many other provocations I wish I had time to go into (can you say USS Liberty, boys and girls?)–have made Israel into the pit bull of the Middle East, with the USA as its enabler.  No wonder people can entertain the notion that the Israelis planted explosives in the World Trade Center!   They make the North Koreans look laid-back and friendly.

But I digress….thank you, Helen Thomas, for daring to speak the truth.  I’m sorry you’ve been pilloried for it, but that just shows how closed the discourse in our “free society” really is.  We can get to peace and honesty from here, but we’ve got a lot of work to do.

music:  Steve Earle, “Jerusalem“

TEA PARTIES: BOSTON….OR WONDERLAND?

When I read about the shenanigans perpetrated by the Republican Party lately, I don’t just wonder “What are they thinking?”  I wonder if they are thinking at all, or if they are merely DNA-powered robots in an extremely reactonary, defensive response to the fact that everything that has ever given them security and a sense of self is vanishing like smoke.

There’s plenty of evidence that there is no thinking involved here, most prominently the “Obama is a Marxist/Socialist!” movement, which I commented on last month.  That post, in which I decried the absurdity of calling Obama a “socialist” and pointed out some of the many ways he does the bidding of the capitalist, corporatist masters of America, prompted a reader who identified himself as “Commieblaster,” from College Road in Olive Branch, Mississippi (oh, the irony!), to comment “Obama isn’t a socialist, he’s a Marxist,” and direct me to his website, www.commieblaster.com.

Well, fair is fair.  If Mr. Commieblaster is open-minded enough to read me, I owe it to him to pay a visit to his domain, and so I did.  Oh, my.

“Eighty members of Congress are Socialists!”  he warns.  What, in his book, makes them “socialists”?  Primarily, it seems, association with an organization called “Democratic Socialists of America,” whose website opens with these words:

Democratic Socialists believe that both the economy and society should be run democratically—to meet public needs, not to make profits for a few. To achieve a more just society, many structures of our government and economy must be radically transformed through greater economic and social democracy so that ordinary Americans can participate in the many decisions that affect our lives.

So….the tea partiers, who are reacting to what they perceive as an autocratic government, also feel threatened by the idea that “ordinary Americans” ought to be able to “participate in the many decisions that affect our lives”?   Go figure….

DSA’s site also features a number of articles complaining about Obama’s rightward course  and an interview that specifically addresses “Why Obama is Not a Socialist.”  Other criteria for being a “Socialist,” according to Mr. Commieblaster, include supporting Hamas rather than Israel (which was once described as “the most socialist country outside the Eastern Bloc” and where the government still has far more influence on the private sector than in the US), and entertaining the possibility that Mumia Abu-Jamal was framed.  So…does that make sense to you?

Shortly after hearing from Mr. Commieblaster, I ran across an article written by that ol’ devil Commie, the last Marxist left standing, Fidel Freaking Castro himself, in which Castro said flat out

BARACK Obama is a fanatical believer in the imperialist capitalist system imposed by the United States on the world. “God bless the United States,” he ends his speeches…..

The current administration’s militarist policies, its plunder of natural resources and unequal exchange with the poor countries of the Third World are in no way different from those of its predecessors, almost all of them extremely right-wing, with some exceptions, throughout the past century.

That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement, is it?

Perhaps Commieblaster would say that Castro is dissembling (the devil is, after all, “the father of lies”), but actions speak louder than words, and the evidence still stands that, with every move they have made, from bailing out banks in the financial crisis to promoting coal and nuclear energy development to subsidizing for-profit health insurance to creating a nationwide broadband system by helping out Comcast, the strategies that Obama and all those “socialists” in Congress have employed have propped up the capitalist system, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that highly centralized, private, for-profit systems are the least sensible, efficient, and economically viable means to promote the common good of the American people.

But I’m not going to talk about that right now.  I’m going to keep examining the reactionary, right-wing mindset that looks at Democratic party corporate shills and sees Marxist-Leninists.  Commieblaster is, as far as I know, just another guy on the street like me.  Let’s look at what happens when the people he supports are elected to office and actually get to act on their vision.

We don’t have to look far to do that, because our own state legislature here in Tennessee is dominated by tea-party types.  What have they been up to lately?

Exhibit A:  A committee of the Tennessee House recently sent four bills on to the whole legislature.    To quote Jeff Woods of the Nashville Scene:

Two .. measures are state constitutional amendments …to ban the individual mandate and the other to decree that the free enterprise system will live forever in Tennessee.

(The other) Two… are identical–both bills that supposedly would nullify the law’s mandate that all Americans buy insurance. There are two of these bills because their respective sponsors, Rep. Susan Lynn and Sen. Mae Beavers, are running against each other in August’s primary and anxious to take sole credit for this monumental achievement.

They all passed by voice votes to loud cheers from tea partiers…..

And…two things stand out about this example.  The first is that our country’s first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, fought and won a civil war in this country  over the question of whether states have the power to nullify Federal law.  The decision was, they can’t do that.

Well, times have changed, you might argue.  OK, how about this one:  our most recent Republican administration likewise argued strongly that states did not have the power to nullify Federal law….in the words of that notorious socialist, Antonin Scalia,

The regulation of an intrastate activity may be essential to a comprehensive regulation of interstate commerce even though the intrastate activity does not itself “substantially affect” interstate commerce. Moreover… Congress may regulate even noneconomic local activity if that regulation is a necessary part of a more general regulation of interstate commerce. …The relevant question is simply whether the means chosen are “reasonably adapted” to the attainment of a legitimate end under the commerce power.

In other words, the Federal Government can tell the states to sit down and shut up.

But hey, Scalia said that in the Raich vs. Ashcroft case, which was about whether the federal government had to recognize California’s medical marijuana laws, and everybody knows that anything goes when you’re trying to stamp out the evil weed…but the Bush junta also successfully swatted down Oregon’s assisted suicide  law and California’s attempts to raise mileage standards on cars. So….states can nullify federal law if Republicans want to fight the gummint, but when Democrats try to insist on states’ rights, it’s not OK.  That seems to be the underlying principle here, does it not?

Exhibit B:  Our state legislature has, by overwhelming majorities and without debate, passed a law requiring all medical facilities that perform abortions to post the following language prominently (in 40-point type) in their waiting rooms, or face serious fines if the signage is absent:

“Notice: It is against the law for anyone, regardless of the person’s relationship to you, to coerce you into having or to force you to have an abortion. By law, we cannot perform an abortion on you unless we have your freely given and voluntary consent. It is against the law to perform an abortion on you against your will. You have the right to contact any local or state law enforcement agency to receive protection from any actual or threatened criminal offense to coerce an abortion.”

Lawmakers soundly rejected an amendment that would have included language pointing out that it is also against the law to force anyone NOT to have an abortion.  In their perception, pro-abortion pressure from Planned Parenthood and domineering husbands is much more of a threat than anti-abortion pressure from fundamentalist churches and domineering husbands. Senator Beverly Marrero, one of the only two State Senators who had the courage to vote against this bill (the other was Andy Berke), said of it

We all know this legislation is purely political, designed to increase the anti-abortion bona fides of lawmakers up for re-election this year.

I couldn’t agree with her more.

Exhibit C:  My state representative’s “weekly update” informed me about HB 3280 which, to quote from the bill summary

..revises the substances that give rise to the offense described above in (1), so that it would be unlawful to operate or be in control of a motor driven vehicle while under the influence of any intoxicant, marijuana, “drug, substance or combination thereof, affecting” the central nervous system instead of a “narcotic drug or drug producing stimulating effects on” the central nervous system.”

“Any substance that affects the central nervous system”?  What substance that we take into our bodies doesn’t affect our central nervous system?  The bill was aimed at making it illegal to operate a motor vehicle under the influence of anything that might negatively affect a person’s judgement and response time, but, taken literally, makes it illegal to drive under the influence of coffee, food, or any of the many prescription drugs that have “do not operate heavy equipment” warnings on their labels.  I take one of those, metoprolol, and I can’t say that I or anyone close to me has observed it affecting my judgement or co-ordination.   Of course, this  It will  probably be used mostly to persecute people whose urine tests positive for marijuana, in spite of overwhelming evidence that marijuana metabolites in urine are not an indication that one is “under the influence of” marijuana, and despite research by the National Highway Traffic Safety Board that pretty well exonerates marijuana as a cause of hazardous driving.

Well, maybe I shouldn’t get my dander up too much about this, just yet.  Although it passed the House unanimously, so far it’s bogged down in committee in the Senate, which is taking up more important things like allowing mountaintop removal in Tennessee, in spite of the fact that the state generates far more revenue from people coming to appreciate our scenery than it does from people destroying the scenery to pull a little coal out from under it.  And that’s just one argument.

And there’s a bill that will insist that all driver’s license tests shall be conducted in English,unless the applicant’s stay in the country has been

approved and authorized by the United States department of homeland security for a specific purpose, including investing, overseeing investment, or providing needed services to companies or businesses in Tennessee, and for a specified period of authorized stay,

In other words, rich foreigners are welcome; poor ones are not.  This one, too, has yet to emerge from the committee thicket, and the state’s business interests are speaking up against it, so sense may yet prevail in this case.

We also have the spectacle of our supposedly Democratic governor worrying that more people will find out they’re eligible for Medicare and sign up for it, easing their own medical expenses but increasing the state’s.

I could tell you more, but I think I have gone on just about long enough.

Into this tea party atmosphere, more reminiscent of Wonderland than Boston, strides Howard Switzer, who is once again the Green Party’s gubernatorial candidate.  I wish we had a horde of people running for state legislature positions to back him up, but alas, it ain’t happening this year.  You can find Howard’s blog at switzer4governor.blogspot.com/

Naomi Wolf, author of The Shock Doctrine, has found a new popularity among the tea partiers, and in a recent interview she said she has some faith that their questioning of authority will, in the long run, be beneficial.  I hope she’s right.  I am concerned that the tea partiers will turn out to be the 21st century version of the SA, the “brown shirts” who provided the populist muscle that brought Hitler to power and were quickly disposed of as a political force once he and his corporate conspirators consolidated their hold on Germany.  On the other hand, Hitler did not have to contend with shrinking resources and a shifting climate, both forces that are more than equal to the task of toppling a civilization.

Unless they do come to their senses, the tea partiers, who seem to have the momentum in US politics at this point, will continue to spend their energy in irrelevant, illusory, paranoid pursuits, codifying intolerance and ignorance, and squashing any dissent other than their own.  I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

music:  Greg Brown, Worrisome Years“

PEOPLE LISTENING TO EACH OTHER FOR A CHANGE

Most of the news we hear from the Middle East is horrendous. Wars, rumors of wars, airstrikes on civilian targets, cluster bombs, car bombs, suicide bombers. It makes this grown man cry, especially because there seems to be no way out of it through the political process.

We’re all told to be very afraid of Middle Eastern Terrorists and that Israel is the bulwark of Western Democracy and needs to be unconditionally supported, but this is the root contradiction on which the whole mess rests. Most people have forgotten, if they ever knew, that some of Israel’s roots spring from the Jewish terrorist group the Irgun, which attacked and killed Arabs and British army personnel and even went so far as to blow up Britain’s headquarters in what was then called Palestine and the British embassy in Rome. And who was leading the Irgun? Menachem Begin, who later became Israel’s prime minister.

The situation was far from black and white. Beginning in the late twenties, Arabs increasingly resented and resisted the rising wave of European Jews who were trying to make room for more and more of themselves in the fragile, limited ecosystem of the western fertile crescent. Jews were desperate to escape from certain death in Europe, and felt they had a God-given “right of return,” which is just what the Arabs who are now refugees from their long-time homes in Palestine feel. It’s the same irresistible force meets immovable object story that fills the Old Testament, only with more people, better communications, and firepower and other technology that would have seemed absolutely miraculous in the days of Joshua and King David.

And what this has done is create suffering on a truly massive scale. About a million and a half very angry, desperate people are now confined in the Gaza strip, where a fearful Israeli army keeps ratcheting up the oppression because they’re afraid of what will happen if they stop. Conditions in Gaza are strangely parallel to those in the Warsaw Ghetto during WW II, except that Gaza has about four times as many people and has lasted for decades, while the Nazi concentration and persecution of Polish Jews was over and done with in four years. One difference, of course, is that the Nazis had a system of death camps to which they sent their Jewish victims, and the Israelis have no such outlet. Thank goodness.

As an aside, I have to say that I cannot consider Israel a “Jewish” state. Growing up Jewish, I was taught that the basis of Judaism is, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” and that doesn’t seem to me to be the principle on which the State of Israel is operating with its Muslim neighbors.

So, what can be done to defuse this ticking time bomb? Just as with the US defense budget, it’s another case in which the resources that could be used to make everybody’s lives better are all tied up in weaponry that seems to be necessary because everybody feels so deprived and threatened. The US political establishment is utterly clueless, with McCain chanting “Bomb, bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran” and Obama and Hillary singing backup. The good news is, there is some under-the-radar citizen diplomacy going on.

I recently received a forwarded email from Jack Kornfield, the meditation teacher, about his experiences meeting with Muslims and Jews in Palestine and Israel, and it was some of the first good news I’d heard from that troubled land in a long, long time.

While the governments and the militias duke it out, a lot of people on both sides of the conflict are realizing that there can be no victory through violence, that there can only be finding a way to live with each other, which can only be found by Israelis and Palestinians not just talking to each other, but listening to each other.

Listening, really listening, to somebody you’ve been brought up to hate and fear is not easy, but what Jack Kornfield reports is that there are several techniques that have been developed through the years for use in far less charged settings that work very well to create frameworks for dialogue for these polarized people.

One of the techniques is called “Non-Violent Communication.” To quote from the Non-Violent Communication website,

Nonviolent Communication (NVC) is sometimes referred to as compassionate communication. Its purpose is to strengthen our ability to inspire compassion from others and to respond compassionately to others and to ourselves. NVC guides us to reframe how we express ourselves and hear others by focusing our consciousness on what we are observing, feeling, needing, and requesting.

We are trained to make careful observations free of evaluation, and to specify behaviors and conditions that are affecting us. We learn to hear our own deeper needs and those of others, and to identify and clearly articulate what we are wanting in a given moment. When we focus on clarifying what is being observed, felt, and needed, rather than on diagnosing and judging, we discover the depth of our own compassion. Through its emphasis on deep listening—to ourselves as well as others—NVC fosters respect, attentiveness and empathy, and engenders a mutual desire to give from the heart. The form is simple, yet powerfully transformative.

I have been aware of Non-Violent Communication for some time and thought of it as one of those New-Agey feelgood thingies for rich white folks with too much time and money, but the news that it works in the fiery crucible of Israeli-Palestinian relationships has definitely upped my opinion of it.

Another technique that has worked very well to get both sides of this conflict together has been Compassionate Listening, which, according to its originators,

requires suspending our judgments and listening from an open heart. Through the skills of reflective listening and non-adversarial questioning the compassionate listener generates healing in the heart of the speaker. Once this healing has begun, the compassionate listener builds a bridge by the humanization of the other. When both sides understand the suffering of the other, reconciliation can begin.

Two of their favorite sayings are

“An enemy is someone, whose story we haven’t heard.” and “ Behind every act of violence is an unhealed wound.”

Gene Hoffman, one of the founders of the movement, has written,

Reconciliation is the most difficult of peace processes because it requires the resumption of relationship between those in conflict. It means the coming together in harmony of those who have been sundered.

My sense is that if we would reconcile, we must make radically new responses to the radically new situation in a world where violence is mindless, hopeless, meaningless and almost every nation has nuclear weapons — if they don’t now, they soon will. We must move beyond initiatives we formerly used, into realms we have not yet considered, not yet discovered, trusting that there are always open to us new divine possibilities.

We peace people have always listened to the oppressed and disenfranchised. That’s very important. One of the new steps I think we should take is to listen to those we consider ‘the enemy’ with the same openness, non-judgment, and compassion we bring to those with whom our sympathies lie.

Everyone has a partial truth, and we must listen, discern, acknowledge this partial truth in everyone – particularly those with whom we disagree.

This kind of approach, I think, is true radicalism, because it goes to the root of the problem. Jack Kornfield, in a talk on meditation that he gave during his visit to Israel and Palestine, said that people needed to

“drop below the levels of identity that we make, such as ‘I am a man,’ ‘I am a woman’ or ‘I am a Muslim,’ ‘I am a Jew.’ You feel the humanity… that we all share, and to recognize that in a deep way… changes the way you relate to everybody,”

He continued

“Here in Israel, there are so many differences [stemming from] identity. The question for us as human beings is how can we respect identity, but also see that it is not the whole truth, and that there is a deeper truth we all share.“

The third technique that Kornfield reported on was Trauma Therapy–and, in a land where violence is pandemic, that makes sense even before you find out the details. Most Americans (except the ones who have been to Iraq) have not had to deal with having their homes bulldozed while they were still in them, or being at the mall when somebody blows herself up and takes fifty people with her. We lead such insulated lives. Our credit is drying up and our homes are losing value? Big deal! Nobody’s firing rockets at us or dropping cluster bombs in our yard or assassinating our family members while they’re driving down the road.

Here’s some of what Trauma Therapy does for those who have lived through, and are stuck in, that kind of hell:

Narrative trauma processing is the first of three basic tasks in trauma therapy …. In our approach the more conventional goal of dealing with the meaning of the trauma comes only after narrative closure is achieved and the traumatic dissociation is repaired. Only then do we expect the person to be able to gain a perspective that makes it possible to change one’s assumptive world and replace the mythology of being hopelessly vulnerable. The goal of narrative processing is for the patient to reconstruct a complete narrative of the traumatic experience. That is, we ask patients to tell the story of their traumas. The creation of a detailed coherent narrative with a beginning, middle, and end brings together the fragmented images of the trauma. Telling the story from start to finish, complete with all the details is crucial to helping patients reverse their dissociation.

The language is rather academic, but I think you get the point.

These are real things that really help real people with their real problems. They have nothing to do with bloviated peace conferences that are little more than photo ops for the pirate captains of the world.

They are far more effective than body armor, attack helicopters, high-tech surveillance, or car bombs. They are limited in that they have, as yet, no power to stop those who prefer the tools of destruction and domination, nor can they, at this point, change the horrific life conditions imposed by such oppressors, whether they be Israeli, Palestinian, Chinese, or American. But they provide a way to rehumanize those who are caught in the web of their own violence.

Accomplishing that task one person at a time seems agonizingly slow, but this movement is growing and gathering energy. It, just as assuredly as solar buildings and workplace democracy, is part of the technology we need to know and spread to create a more just, compassionate, and sustainable world.

And, by the way, I did, after some searching, find who had originated the email that tipped me off to this saintly reconciliation effort. It came from Ralph Metzner, famed for his early association with Tim Leary and Richard Alpert. Thank you Ralph, you done us proud.

music: Steve Earle, “Jerusalem”

A WAY OUT OF THE MAZE

Since I can’t find it on a webpage anywhere, I’m posting a letter that was forwarded to me because it describes “change from the bottom up” which I think is the only thing that will avert or at least blunt catastrophe.  I have linked the references to Non-Violent Communication and some other modalities that Kornfield mentions, but for those of you who would rather have a summary than chase down a link, I would call them “listening disciplines”–ways to remind ourselves that the best way to be heard is to listen well and ask good questions.

A SHINING WEB OF GOOD HEARTS AND GOODWILL

IN ISRAEL AND PALESTINE

Jack Kornfield Ph.D.

 

          In a recent visit to the peacemaking communities of Holy land, I found an astonishing (and hardly reported) web of hundreds of organizations fostering reconciliation and peace in powerful ways among goodhearted people on all sides.

 

          Careening around the West Bank through armed checkpoints and guardposts, guided by the wise Sheik Abdul Aziz Bukari and unflappable Jewish activist Eliyahu Mclean, founders of Jerusalem Peacemakers I was led to meet with leaders (and sometimes to offer teachings to) Arab, Israeli, Christians and Druze who were dedicated to planting seeds of respect and healing in this torn land.

 

          It was a wild ride. We drove around the West bank and through barrier wall avoiding checkpoints, listening to Santana and the Grateful Dead (the Sheik lived in California for some years) changing our garb and hats to fit the need, Arab Kaffia, Jewish yarmulke/kippah, secular jackets. Sometimes it was like the Marx brothers, sometimes like James Bond. We met with fundamentalists, mystics, shopkeepers and soldiers in Hebron and yogis and sages in the desert beyond Jericho.  There were peace marches across Jerusalem to the Mount of Olives for hundreds, with Muslim, Jewish Christian leaders. And an amazing walk from the Holocaust Memorial into the Palestinian refugee camps, led by an Arab leader intent on teaching his people about the painful history of the Jews in Europe. And thus also helping the Jewish people understand the Naquba, the catastrophic loss of Palestinian homes and villages in the 1948 war to found Israel. There were the Combatants for Peace, former Palestinian and Israeli fighters now fighting for each other’s well being. There were the Bereaved parents in Ramallah/West bank and their partners in Israel. There were the Israeli/Arab women’s groups “Beyond Words” that are working for women’s right and planting hundreds and thousands of olive trees. There is the wise old bearded Chassidic settler Rabbi beloved on all sides who was mediating between Hamas fighters and the Israeli Dept of Defense. There is the Holy Land Trust, run by Semi Awad, a Palestinian center for Gandhi’s teaching of non-violence in the Arab world located a stone’s throw from the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.  There was Neva Shalom the peace village founded by a catholic priest for Muslims and Jews, hosting a hundred Palestinian and Israeli teens who had been meeting for 2 years and were now bringing their parents from the west bank and Israel together with tears in their eyes trying to teach them to listen to one another. There were the widespread activities of a whole group of Rabbis for Human Rights, and the Interfaith environmental and peace council meeting at the Sheik’s Sufi center in the Arab quarter of the old city with Bishop’s, Imams, Rabbis, and other community leaders. There was Ipisam the big hearted Arab woman whose name means smile, who runs empowerment and peace groups for women and ran for political office (to the chagrin of the local male Muslim leaders) and who inspires healing work on all sides.

 

           There was Stephen Fulder, Naturopath who opened a large clinic in the Galilee for the Palestinians in the adjacent village and is teaching Arab women the ancient tradition of herbal medicine and Stephen’s counterpart,the village Sheik who has spent all his family money bringing sick Palestinian children across the wall to good hospitals in Israel. There was Abdulla, the dignified Arab director of the large Jenin refugee camp, now actively a part of the Middle Way peacemaking group. And all over these committed people are using the widely spreading skills of Marshall Rosenberg’s Non-Violent Communication, of Jack Zimmerman’s Listening Council, of mediation, mediation, Mindfulness, of Peter Levine’s Trauma Therapy, of Arab practices of Houdna reconciliation. I spoke to a hall of a thousand people in Tel Aviv teaching them some of these practices and honoring the widespread support for these heartening possibilities.

 

          EVEN THOUGH THE SITUATION IS BAD, POLITICALLY POLARIZED AND DIRE, THIS IS ONLY ON ONE LEVEL. ON ANOTHER THERE ARE A HUNDRED GROUPS OF UNRECOGNIZED COMMON FOLKS, HEROES AND HEROINES, TIRELESSLY SOWING THE SEEDS OF GENUINE RECONCILLIATION OF THE FUTURE FOR ALL WHO WILL LIVE IN THE HOLY LAND. BECAUSE THE LIVES OF THE ISRAELIS AND PALESTINIANS ARE NOW SO INTERWOVEN ON THIS SAME PIECE OF LAND, THERE IS CLEARLY NO LONG TERM MILITARY SOLUTION. THEY KNOW THE WORLD IS WATCHING AND THAT IF THEY CAN SHOW HOW TO LIVE TOGETHER IT WILL BE A SYMBOL FOR ALL OF HUMANITY.

 

          I WANT TO TELL THESE STORIES AND GET THE WORD OUT TO THE MEDIA SO THEY CAN REPORT ON THEM (otherwise the continually repeated stories about fear and violence will sow more fear and violence).

 

          AND I WANT TO LOOK FOR FUNDING FOR SOME OF THESE BRAVE PEACEMAKERS. IF WE CAN SEND BILLIONS OF DOLLARS FOR ARMS, WE CAN SPARE A FEW PERCENT FOR PEACE. THIS IS OUR TRUE FUTURE.

 

          With appreciation for all who read these words,

 

                   Dr. Jack Kornfield

                   Spirit Rock Meditation Center

                   Woodacre, Ca 94973   415-488-9780

YOU COULDN’T MAKE THIS STUFF UP IF YOU TRIED

And nobody would believe you if you did.  I’ve been delving deeper into the Sibel Edmunds case, and as far as I can tell, this is what she found:

Neocons in the US government were helping the Turks and Israelis steal US nuclear secrets and sell them to the Pakistanis, who moved them on to Saudi Arabia, Iran, North Korea, and the various Central Asian “republics.”  They also helped sell stolen/surplus NATO weaponry–everything from helicopters to RPGs–to various militia groups in the Middle East, as well as bringing the heroin these groups produce into Europe to finance themselves.

In other words, they were helping  create the “terrorist problem” that they have been so eager to curtail our civil liberties in order to fight.  Does that extend to fomenting the 9-11 attacks?  I wonder, especially in light of the revelation that Pakistani intelligence chief Mahmoud Ahmad had $100,000 sent to Mohammed Atta, the alleged head of the 9-11 hijackers, shortly before the attack.  (I wonder why somebody who is about to die would need that kind of money?  Well, there’s payments to bereaved families, and then there’s bribes, bribes, bribes…..)

Ms. Edmunds has been under a gag order in this country because the government alleges that what she has (and has not yet, in some cases) revealed compromises US security.  It certainly should make a lot of neocons feel insecure, because it reveals that they ought to be tried for treason.  I think that’s what government officials who sell nuclear secrets get tried for, isn’t it?  Is it still a hanging offense?   Hey now, I’m against capital punishment.  I just want to know some big hulking con has made Richard Perle his bitch…

The mainstream media in this country have not touched this story, and the Democrats won’t investigate it, probably because it leads back to Israel, and  one of the basic rules of politics in this country is to never make Israel look bad.

Here’s an excerpt from an article by  former CIA agent Philip Giraldi, published in, of all places, The American Conservative:

The ATC, founded in 1994 and modeled on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, was intended to promote Turkish interests in Congress and in other public forums. Edmonds refers to ATC and AIPAC as “sister organizations.” The group’s founders include a number of prominent Americans involved in the Israel-Turkey relationship, notably Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and former congressman Stephen Solarz. Perle and Feith had earlier been registered lobbyists for Turkey through Feith’s company, International Advisors Inc. The FBI was interested in ATC because it suspected that the group derived at least some of its income from drug trafficking, Turkey being the source of 90 percent of the heroin that reaches Europe, and because of reports that it had given congressmen illegal contributions or bribes. Moreover, as Edmonds told the Times, the Turks have “often acted as a conduit for the Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s spy agency, because they were less likely to attract attention.”

And here are excerpts from the articles in the London Times, the first from Jan. 6:

“What I found was damning,” she said. “While the FBI was investigating, several arms of the government were shielding what was going on.”

The Turks and Israelis had planted “moles” in military and academic institutions which handled nuclear technology. Edmonds says there were several transactions of nuclear material every month, with the Pakistanis being among the eventual buyers. “The network appeared to be obtaining information from every nuclear agency in the United States,” she said.

They were helped, she says, by the high-ranking State Department official who provided some of their moles – mainly PhD students – with security clearance to work in sensitive nuclear research facilities. These included the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory in New Mexico, which is responsible for the security of the US nuclear deterrent.

Two weeks later, the Times continued the series:

The anonymous letter names a high-level government official who was allegedly secretly recorded speaking to an official at the Turkish embassy between August and December 2001.

It claims the government official warned a Turkish member of the network that they should not deal with a company called Brewster Jennings because it was a CIA front company investigating the nuclear black market. The official’s warning came two years before Brewster Jennings was publicly outed when one of its staff, Valerie Plame, was revealed to be a CIA agent in a case that became a cause célèbre in the US.

And here’s a tidbit from the most recent installment, Jan. 27th:

The FBI denied the existence of a specific case file about any outing of Brewster Jennings by the State Department official, in a response to a freedom of information request. However, last week The Sunday Times obtained a document, signed by an FBI official, showing that the file did exist in 2002.

Much thanks to Sibel Edmonds for bringing facts to the murky world of presumed conspiracy.  I wish her health, freedom, a long life, and protection from the many powerful people who are likely plotting her demise even as I write these words.

“TERRORISM IS THE WARFARE OF THE POOR; WARFARE IS THE TERRORISM OF THE RICH”–PETER USTINOV

I’ve been saying for quite some time that the United States has as much right to be in Iraq as the Nazis had to be in Poland. I’d like to take this opportunity to look through the lens of World War II and reframe more of the tragedy now unfolding in what was once the fertile crescent.

Israel’s destruction of Lebanon is a blitzkreig, a “lightning war,” waged against people who do not have the technology to deflect Israel’s strength. And Gaza is the moral equivalent of the Warsaw Ghetto. Our proxy state, Israel, has just as surely become the new Nazis as America has.

Think of it this way: “Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto captured two German soldiers and have held them hostage, demanding that all Jewish women and children held by the Germans be released. In response, the Germans have unleashed an aerial bombardment of the ghetto, leveling not only Jewish homes and businesses but those of non-Jewish Poles whom they suspect of sympathizing with the Jews.”

Of course, the Israelis have learned a few lessons from their Nazi tormentors, most importantly—no concentration camps. No point giving bleeding heart types anything to concentrate on, eh? Just keep the ragheads where they are and build walls around them, destroy their communities, homes, gardens, farms, schools, hospitals, water sources, communications routes. Make sure there’s plenty of lebensraum for God’s chosen people—us Jews. It’s not a policy that will ever win Israel any Muslim hearts and minds. They must know this. If they’re obviously not committed to reconciliation, what is the long-term goal of Israel’s policy towards the Palestinians? What is Israel’s “final solution to the Palestinian question?”

The conflict is not new, nor is it simple. The Old Testament is, among other things, a record of struggles over the narrow band of wet, fertile ground between the Mediterranean sea and the Arabian desert. The Palestinian people have been protesting for over a hundred years, often violently, against the influx of European Jews into their fragile ecology. In many ways, the story of Israel is the same story of Europeans vs. native people that has been played out all over the globe. I got a lot of insight into this by reading Starhawk’s dispatches from Palestine. I strongly suggest you look them up at her website, www.starhawk.org, for an eye-opening, positive picture of the Palestinian people, written by a Jew–like me.

So, when George Bush fires off lines about “fighting Islamic Fascism,” he is, as usual, about 180 degrees from the truth. Fascism is, in the words of fascist founding father Benito Mussolini, the marriage of corporate and state interests for their mutual benefit. Mussolini said that a synonym for “fascism” could be “corporatism.”

Hmm. That makes George Bush the fascist, not Hezbollah. The new order in the Middle East that Bush and his junta envision is a Middle East dominated not just by Shell, Mobil, and Halliburton, but by Coca-Cola, Col. Sanders, Walmart, and their ilk. The Muslim people of the Middle East are fighting to stay free of fascism, not to establish it. They may be fanatical, authoritarian, repressed, violent misogynists, but they are very strongly committed to their native cultures, and opposed to the corporatist/fascist business state model Mr. Bush and his cronies would like to impose on them. No, no, no, Hezbollah and friends are not fascists. It is you, Mr. Bush, who is the fascist. Your words and actions have demonstrated that over and over again.

You wish to fight terrorism, Mr. Bush? What you call terrorism is warfare fought by those who are too poor to afford armies. The way to stop terrorism is to stop the kind of military and cultural arrogance that leaves people feeling that they have no other option than a violent attack on their oppressors, and then reroute the resources that have been used to enforce oppression into improving the lot of the oppressed.

From Palestine up through Lebanon and Syria, then down the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, stretches the cradle of our civilization, an area still occasionally referred to as “The Fertile Crescent,” though it is hardly that any more. Its hills have been denuded by the demands of goatherds and wood-cutters; its fields and pastures have blown away in the wind or been saturated with salt from too much irrigation and not enough rainfall; its rivers are running dry, squeezed between emptying aquifers and burgeoning populations, choked with sewage and agricultural runoff. All of it has been trampled by too many marching armies. This once-fertile crescent, between the deserts of Arabia and the steep, rocky mountains of the Caucasus, does not need more wars, more bombs, more destruction. The Israeli campaign against Lebanon, like the American campaign in Iraq, is breaking something it cannot fix. A complete change of direction is needed to bring peace to the Middle East.

I can call it a Green proposal, but it comes from the Old Testament, that testament of sorrows, from the Prophet Micah, who suggested that if everyone could sit beneath their own vine and fig tree, there would be peace and happiness. The Old Testament also famously references the cedars of Lebanon, but there are hardly any of them left. Evidence from such primeval sources as The Epic of Gilgamesh suggests that, when civilization first arose, there was extensive forest cover (and its corollaries, regular rainfall and year-round streams) throughout the area we now think of as borderline desert. Is it possible to reclaim this devastated land? Such a massive bioremediation project would employ thousands, possibly millions of people, in a project that would demonstrate fairly immediate benefits to them. It would include ecological education as well as hands-on projects, and would be structured to give local people control over projects in their vicinity. That is the way to create a democratic Middle East—not by holding staged elections for a powerless government, but by giving people control over their lives.

But—but—you ask—what about this terrible plot that was just uncovered—they were going to blow up a bunch of airplanes full of tourists!?

Here’s what I think about the latest so-called “terrorist threat”: a great many of the so-called “terrorist threats” that have been revealed have turned out to be more hot air than substance; the timing of such announcements, I believe, usually has more to do with political calculations than with protecting the public. The war party needed some kind of shibboleth to wave in the face of growing awareness of their short-sighted stupidity, and so now they are confiscating perfume and toothpaste instead of scissors and nail clippers. None of these alleged plotters had even bought an airline ticket yet. We need to pull our attention out of this kind of nonsense and put it back into positive actions to save the planet—like recreating the Mideast’s devasted ecosystem. Vines and fig trees for everyone! Olive trees, too! Pomegranates! Dates! Oranges! Kif! Yes!

This does not directly address tensions between Sunnis and Shi’ites, or between Muslims and Jews; but I think that a greener, wetter, softer, more bountiful environment (notice how feminine those adjectives are!) will enable everyone to relax, share some grapes, figs, olives, a puff of kif or two, and figure out their differences– which are, beneath all the ideological trappings, squabbles over scarce and diminishing resources. Let’s, as Mr. Bush said,” make the pie higher.”

Doesn’t that beat dropping bombs?

Music:  Steve Earle, “Jerusalem”