Egypt: A Virtual Smoking Gun?
By Maidhc Ó Cathail | The Passionate Attachment | March 4, 2011
On January 12, 2009, US Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs James K. Glassman joined a group of Egyptian political bloggers from the Virtual Newsroom of the American University in Cairo.
Less than two months earlier, Glassman and Jared Cohen from the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff had given an on-the-record briefing on the State Department’s alliance with ten partners in the private sector—including Facebook, Google, MTV, AT&T, Howcast, Access 360 Media—to form the Alliance for Youth Movements (AYM). During the briefing, Glassman singled out Egypt’s April 6 Youth Movement for special mention, saying that some of its members would be in attendance at the inaugural AYM youth summit in New York from December 3-5. Asked about “the risk of unleashing something here that is going to come back to bite you, especially with our allies,” Glassman replied:
We are very supportive of pro-democracy groups around the world. And sometimes, that puts us at odds with certain governments.
When pressed by the questioner, Glassman added:
Now, we have to work with those governments. And let me also just say, there’s a difference on an operational level between public—what we do in public diplomacy and what is often done in official diplomacy. We are communicating and engaging at the level of the public, not at the level of officials. So you know, it certainly is possible that some of these governments will not be all that happy that—at what we’re doing, but that’s what we do in public diplomacy.
Commenting on Cohen’s point that “these organizations online that are coming together are more of a new kind of civil society organization” that “eventually makes the transformation,” Glassman acknowledged that the US government has “been engaging with such civil society organizations in places like Egypt for a long time.”
As Al Jazeera revealed in a behind the scenes look at Egypt’s non-violent coup, the State Department-linked April 6 Youth Movement played a crucial role in making that “transformation,” by organizing and directing the protests that toppled America’s erstwhile ally Mubarak. The April 6 leaders also received training from the Belgrade-based Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS), which works closely with the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC). The ICNC was founded and funded entirely by Peter Ackerman, the junk bond “teflon guy,” who chaired Freedom House from September 2005 until January 2009. Freedom House is funded in part by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the US government-sponsored neoconservative-led regime change specialists.
On April 19, 2010, Ackerman attended an event entitled “Cyber-Dissidents and Political Change” sponsored by the George W. Bush Institute, which Glassman has headed since September 3, 2009. “Inspired by President and Mrs. Bush’s unwavering commitment to freedom for all people,” its website states, “The Bush Institute works to embolden dissidents and freedom advocates, creating a powerful network for moral support and education.” Among the cyber-dissidents in attendance at its Dallas event were Rodrigo Diamanti from Venezuela; Arash Kamangir, from Iran; Oleg Kozlovsky, from Russia; Ernesto Hernández Busto, from Cuba (who lives in Barcelona); Isaac Mao, from China; and Ahed Alhendi, from Syria. Clearly, some countries are seen as more deserving of Mr. and Mrs. Bush’s freedom advocacy than others.
In 2007, Glassman became Chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), a US government agency that provides propaganda to non-American overseas audiences via the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (Alhurra TV and Radio Sawa), Radio Free Asia, and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (Radio and TV Marti). Norman J. Pattiz, the “founding father” of Radio Sawa, which is increasingly popular in Egypt, sits on BBG’s board. Pattiz is also on the national board of the Israel Policy Forum, which is “committed to a strong and enduring U.S.-Israel relationship and to advancing the shared interests of the United States and the State of Israel.” Its Israeli Advisory Council is comprised of prominent figures from the Israeli military and intelligence establishment, mostly notably David Kimche, who was once described as “Israel’s Leading Spy and Would-Be Mossad Chief.” According to a Washington Report profile:
The “man with the suitcase,” as Kimche became known by colleagues in Israel, would appear in an African country a day or two before a major coup, and leave a week later after the new regime was firmly in control, often with the aid of Israeli security teams. (One of Israel’s protege allies in Africa whom Kimche helped to groom was none other than the continent’s most infamous ruler, Col. Idi Amin of Uganda.)
Prior to his involvement with “democracy promotion,” Glassman was a resident fellow at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, the propaganda mill that hatched the “global war on terror” primarily to advance the national interest of Israel. While there he founded The American, a magazine of ideas for business leaders, published by the AEI, and was its editor-in-chief from 2005 to 2007. Clearly, his neocon paymasters were not put off by his unenviable financial track record. In his 1999 book “Dow 36,000,” written shortly before the dot-com bubble burst, he predicted that the Dow Jones Industrial Average would rise to 36,000 within a few years. Commenting on the “hysteria” that fueled the deregulation-induced financial crisis nine years later, Ralph Nader singled out Glassman’s bestseller, joking that he would send it back to Glassman with one of the zeros missing.
As evidence of what a small neocon world we live in, Glassman’s co-author, Kevin A. Hassett, was an economic advisor to John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign. Sen. McCain, who chairs NED’s Republican wing, the International Republican Institute, recently paid a visit to Tahrir Square with his inseparable travel buddy, Joe Lieberman, “the No. 1 pro-Israel advocate and leader in Congress.” Surveying the post-revolutionary scene, an “optimistic” Sen. Lieberman declared:
“This is a remarkable situation, and frankly, we should feel very good about the assistance we have given the Egyptian military over the years since the Camp David peace with Israel, because the Egyptian military really allowed this revolution in Egypt to be peaceful and let the people carry out their desires for political freedom and economic opportunity.”
Update: Jared Cohen’s buddy, Nicole Lapin, the daughter of a former Miss Israel, has been romantically linked to Twitter founder and CEO Jack Dorsey, whom Cohen contacted in June 2009 to help keep Iranian dissidents twittering.
Why is Hillary Not Defending the Rights of Saudis to Protest?
By Eric Blair |Activist Post | March 8, 2011
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had been exhaustively in front of cameras promoting the right for people to protest in Egypt, Bahrain, Iran, and Libya. She’s been touting the freedom to use social networking sites as a way for Arab people to organize against their oppressive regimes. Now, the Administration is even considering arming the opposition in Libya.
Clinton’s perpetual propaganda efforts exposed her blatant hypocrisy when a silent peaceful protester was violently removed from one of her recent speeches on the very subject. However, the hypocrisy now seems to go much deeper in her deafening silence over the prospect for protests in Saudi Arabia.
After Human Rights Watch revealed that a nationwide “Day of Rage” protest had been planned in Saudi Arabia for this week, March 11th, Bloomberg reported that the Saudi government claims that demonstrations and marches are “strictly” prohibited by law. A Saudi Interior Ministry official said protests “contradict Islamic values” and “They harm public interest, infringe on the rights of others, spread chaos and lead to bloodshed.”
This prohibition of popular dissent proves beyond a shadow of doubt that Saudi Arabia is indeed the most tyrannical authoritarian regime in the Arab world. Yet, U.S. Administration officials have been strangely silent about supporting the people’s uprising there. Perhaps they think the protests won’t be large enough to warrant a response. Well, that certainly didn’t stop their best propaganda push to stoke the puny protests in Iran, so the size or ferocity of unrest shouldn’t matter to their exploits of supposedly backing human freedom. And one would think that given what has happened to oil prices due to the unrest in Libya and Egypt, even a minor protest in the largest oil-producing dictatorship in the world would draw more public response from the White House.
Or perhaps the Administration believes that the hastily-crafted $35 billion social aid package ordered by King Abdullah will be enough to tamp down escalating tensions in Saudi Arabia. So far, there have only been reports of small Shiite protests in Saudi Arabia, mostly demanding the release of political prisoners held by the Sunni monarchy.
These protests would seem to be very minor in comparison to the sea of people revolting in Cairo. However, the revolutionary whispers must clearly be getting louder as the Saudi stock market plummeted 11% in just two days of wild trading to its 7-year low on fears of civil unrest. It’s noteworthy that the plunge was reportedly led by large banks and insurers.
If Clinton is to stand by her new-found rhetoric, certainly she’ll call for restraint on the part of the Saudi government should a protest erupt, right? And surely she’ll demand that the kings of Internet censorship in the Arab world, Saudi Arabia, will open communication channels so the people can freely unite, right? And if push comes to shove in Saudi Arabia, she’ll definitely support arming the people’s opposition to the royal family, right? Eh hum . . . don’t count on it.
Regardless, many analysts believe the Saudi regime is the next to fall with or without the prodding of the U.S.
Internet Lovers! Know Your Enemy: Cass Sunstein
By C.J. Maloney | Lew Rockwell | March 2, 2011
Truth is the foundation on which the power of the press stands and falls, and our only demand of the press, also the foreign press, is that they report the truth about Germany.
~ Otto Dietrich, Reich Press Chief, 1934
Democracy is under assault! To the bulwarks! Quick, load the catapult with our freedom of speech and shoot it over at the enemy; it’s our only hope! So says Harvard professor Cass Sunstein in his On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done. More an 88-page gab session than a structured book, On Rumors makes me wonder if this is how Professor Sunstein sounds at the chalkboard…placid, scattershot and above all, repetitive. The villain of his piece is the Internet – a fertile breeding ground for “false” rumors – and his knight in shining armor the government censor.
The book starts off with, ends, and endlessly repeats a trumpet blast sure to grab the modern American ear – democracy is in peril. (Sunstein, 3, 10, 65, 85, etc.) The culprit? Free speech – a protective shield for the “false” rumors so hated by the author, all running amok and unfettered via the Internet highway, a regulatory void with no political infringements whatsoever. The Internet is, to the author, a dagger pointed at the very heart of democracy.
Sunstein puts forth two goals of his effort. First, to study how and why rumors spread, where he attempts to use social cascades and group polarization to paint the obvious with an intellectual varnish, a collegiate effort to erect something as earthy as “telegraph, telephone, tell a friend” into a three-month long lecture that costs $17,000 to hear at Harvard.
His second goal is the book’s main course – and the part of most interest to those in power itching for any excuse to regulate the Internet – where he grants some helpful suggestions as to “what we can do to protect ourselves against the harmful effects of false rumors.” (Sunstein, 4-5) His answer? Not censorship (heavens, no!) but the imposition of a “chilling effect” on such rumors; just the “false” ones, mind you.
Sunstein insists this is necessary as “False rumors…can threaten careers, policies, public officials, and sometimes even democracy itself.” (Sunstein, 3) Of course, no warning would be complete for post-9-11 America without pointing out how the Internet is “crucial in the process of radicalization.” (Sunstein, 41) He plays to the reader’s self-interest, as “rumors can harm the economy” (Sunstein, 3) and “fuel speculative bubbles, greatly inflating prices” (Sunstein, 8) as well as his self-conceit, since “all of us are potential victims of rumors, including false and vicious ones.” (Sunstein, 3)
A large concern of the author is the protection of the political elite, since with the spread of “false” rumors “people might lose faith…in their government itself.” (Sunstein, 10) Though he warns that “many rumors spread conspiracy theories” (Sunstein, 7) I’d advise him to read a copy of The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution by his fellow Harvard professor Bernard Bailyn, who helpfully points out that our Founders were rabid “conspiracy theorists” and, even more to the point, urge Sunstein to look at history and the innumerable times when “conspiracy” theories proved themselves to be absolutely true.
For all his learned sounding discourse, Sunstein freely admits he has no idea what exactly a rumor is, as “there is no settled definition of rumors, and I will not attempt to offer one here.” (Sunstein, 5) He has the mind of your standard American activist, her “progressives,” always on the look out for a social ill to cure via the application of political power. All he needs, in this case, is to assault the freedom of speech so he may stop something he can’t quite define but knows for certain is there.
The Censorship That Dares Not Speak Its Name
These points should not be taken as a plea for any kind of censorship…
~ Cass Sunstein, On Rumors, 2009
Most grating on the reader’s ear (and insulting to his intelligence) is Sunstein’s habit of softening every statement in an attempt to appear thoughtful and levelheaded about what he is proposing. This leads him to write in the same manner as an insecure teenage girl speaks, every sentence reads as if it should end with a question mark, as when “(the problem) seems to be increasing” (Sunstein, 10) and “rumors are nearly as old as human history.” (Sunstein, 3) Eventually his constant use of softeners make him appear not reasonable, but weak-kneed. This book lacks the courage of the author’s convictions.
Even his outright call for censorship arrives on stage with a timid limp – Sunstein is loath to come out and say what he means. He claims that “while old style censorship is out of the question” (Sunstein, 12) and “a chilling effect can be exceedingly harmful…let’s be careful about undue emphasis on the underlying risk…we should be able to agree that on occasion, the chilling effect is a very good thing.” (Sunstein, 72) As always with Sunstein, it comes back to the Internet. “It is not obvious that the current regulatory system for free speech – the current setting of chill – is the one that we would or should choose for the Internet Era.” (Sunstein, 78)
From back to the land crazes to imperialist designs on foreign lands to the atomic bomb, much bloodshed, misery, and inhumanity have flowed from America’s university system. Still I submit there is neither reason nor right to censure our universities and their free flow of ideas because much greatness, too, has come out of them. To obtain the good, we must put up with the bad. And, I suggest to Professor Sunstein, the Internet deserves the same consideration.
In this book’s most pertinent passage (for its author) Sunstein writes “Over the course of our lives, it is nearly inevitable that all of us will make or have made statements…that will seem to some members of the public a kind of smoking gun – proof of poor judgment.” (Sunstein, 64) On Rumors is indeed that, 88 pages of irrefutable proof of Sunstein’s exceptionally shoddy logic, intellectual arrogance and child-like trust in power.
For but one example of that last, while he points out (correctly) that “we lack direct or personal knowledge about the facts that underlie most of our judgments” (Sunstein, 5) he exempts whatever political gatekeepers he’d empower to enforce his “chilling” of “false” rumors from this shortcoming. Sunstein assumes that those in power will not only know what is true or false, but will use their power to “chill” what they claim to be false in a completely honest, benevolent manner. He has a trust in power, a trust in the political class, which neither human nature nor recorded history allows to any rational man.
It is best we remember J.S. Mill’s take on freedom of speech when he warned “the opinion which it is attempted to suppress by authority may possibly be true. Those who desire to suppress it, of course, deny its truth; but they are not infallible.” (Mill, 16)
And neither is Cass Sunstein; and On Rumors, a poorly written, blatant assault on our freedom of speech, proves my point.
Sources Cited
Mill, J.S. On Liberty. (Hackett Publishing Co., Inc., Indianapolis, IN, 1978)
Sunstein, Cass R. On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done. (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, New York, 2009)
~
CJ Maloney [send him mail] lives and works in New York City.
More Jobs Mirage In February—BLS Continues To Overestimate Job Growth
By Paul Craig Roberts | VDARE | March 5, 2011
The announcement on March 4 that 192,000 new jobs were created in February was greeted with a sigh of relief. But the number is just more smoke and mirrors, as I will show shortly. First, let’s pretend the jobs are real. What areas of the economy produced the jobs?
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 152,000 of the jobs or 79% are in private services, consisting of: 11,700 jobs in wholesale trade, 22,000 in transportation and warehousing, 36,400 in administration and waste services (of which 15,500 are temporary help services), and 36,200 in ambulatory health care services and nursing and residential care facilities. Entertainment, waitresses and bartenders accounted for 20,000. Repair and maintenance, laundry services, and membership associations accounted for 14,000.
As one who has often reported the monthly payroll jobs breakdown, I am struck by the fact that these categories are the ones that have accounted for job growth for year after year. How can this be? How can Americans, who have had no growth in their real incomes and who are foreclosed from their homes and maxed out on credit card debt, car payments, and student loans, spend more every month in bars and restaurants? How can a few service areas of the economy grow when nothing else is?
The answer is that there were not 192,000 new jobs. Statistician John Williams estimates the reported gain was overstated by about 230,000 jobs. In other words, about 38,000 jobs were lost in February.
There are various reasons that job gains are overstated and losses understated. One is the BLS’s “birth-death model.” This is a way of estimating the net of non-reported new jobs from business start-ups and job losses from business shut-downs. During recessions this model doesn’t work, because the model is based on good times when new jobs always exceed lost jobs. On the “death” side, if a company goes out of business because of recession and, therefore, doesn’t report its payroll, the BLS assumes the previously reported employees are still in place. On the “birth” side, the BLS adds 30,000 jobs to the monthly numbers as an estimate of new start-ups.
Williams estimates the “death” side is really reducing employment by about 200,000 per month, and the “birth” side is stillborn. Therefore, “the BLS continues regularly to overestimate monthly growth in payroll employment by roughly 230,000 jobs.” The benchmark revisions of payroll jobs bear out Williams. The last two benchmark revisions resulted in a reduction of previously reported employment gains of about 2 million jobs.
Another indication is that despite 10 years of population growth, there are 8 to 9 million fewer Americans employed today than a decade ago.
Some “New Economy” we have. If only we could have the old one back.
~
Paul Craig Roberts [email him] was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal.
Were the Newburgh 4 Really Out to Blow Up Synagogues? A Defendant Finally Speaks Out.
Was David Williams IV a terrorist? Or was he just out to make an easy score by scamming the government’s informant?
By Graham Rayman | Village Voice | March 02, 2011
On March 24, David Williams IV and three other Newburgh, New York, men face possible life prison sentences for plotting to blow up two synagogues in the Riverdale section of the Bronx and to shoot down military airplanes at Stewart Airport.
The Newburgh 4—ringleader James Cromitie, David Williams, Onta Williams, and Laguerre Payen—were found guilty in a six-week trial based largely on the work of an FBI informant, Shahed Hussain, who posed as a wealthy Pakistani businessman with ties to an overseas terror group as part of an elaborate government sting operation.
The trial showed that Cromitie had made anti-Semitic and anti-American statements, that he concocted attack plans with Hussain, that the four defendants met to view an anti-aircraft missile, and that they planted what they had been told were bombs at two Riverdale synagogues on May 20, 2009.
The evidence, which included secretly taped conversations, painted a picture of four men who wanted to strike a blow for radical Islam. After the verdict, one juror told reporters, “We considered what they did a serious crime.”
Defense lawyers tried unsuccessfully to convince the jury that the government had actually entrapped the four, but none of the defendants testified on their own or gave interviews.
Until now. David Williams tells the Voice what he hasn’t said publicly before: that he went along with the bomb plot because he was trying to cheat Hussain, the government’s informant, out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Even as they were being secretly recorded and trailed by the government, Williams says he and Cromitie were working on their own plot to take Hussain’s cash.
In other words, they wanted to scam a guy who, it turned out, was scamming them.
“We all said lots of things only to either impress [Hussain] or make him think he found a band of real killers. We never meant one word of what we said,” Williams wrote in a recent letter to a friend.
“That’s what the whole thing was about,” Williams tells the Voice from the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn where he is being held pending sentencing. He and Cromitie were plotting their own swindle, and both were clear nothing violent would happen. “Cromitie promised me nothing was going to happen.”
But plenty has happened to Williams and his fellow defendants. After turning down plea deals for significantly shorter sentences, they rolled the dice by going to trial and keeping their own mouths shut, hoping their defense attorneys could convince a jury that Hussain was an unreliable informant who had manufactured and relentlessly pushed a terror plot by plying them with cash and gifts—the FBI had even pulled strings to keep Williams out of a larceny case that would have had him behind bars when the plot was scheduled to go down. (Both federal prosecutors and defense lawyers declined to comment for this story.)
Would the jury have been more sympathetic if the defendants had instead portrayed themselves as greedy criminals looking for an easy score? It’s too late now to find out: Williams and the others are appealing their convictions, but for the moment they remain officially labeled home-grown terrorists who wanted to blow up Jewish people in the Bronx. And next month they could very well be sentenced to prison for the rest of their lives. … Full article
Israeli Air Force Launches New Media Campaign to Gain International Approval
By Tania Kepler for the Alternative Information Center | March 6, 2011
The Communications Unit of the Israeli Air Force (IAF) is launching a new media program targeting the English-speaking world in order to promote their military activities and gain international approval.
Israeli air force attacking the Gaza Strip in January 2009
International New Media program will include a constantly updated website, Facebook page and Twitter feed, according to the news site Arutz 7, and will be under the auspices of IAF Spokesperson Lt. Col. Assaf Librati.
The program will include staff 20 writers, photographers, videographers and editors who support the entire IAF Communications Unit.
Explaining the reasoning behind the new campaign, Lt. Col. Librati said, “The Israeli Air Force is a center of profound research, international cooperation, immense diversity, and advanced technology within the Israel Defense Forces. We believe that we have much to share with the world about who we are, what we do, our capabilities, and our ongoing participation in humanitarian operations around the world.”
It is unclear at this time as to whether the IAF will also be including Twitter updates on its regular attacks on the Gaza Strip and it’s training in the occupied West Bank.
“We see this as a force multiplier and an important step forward in communicating about Israel, the IDF, and the IAF directly with stakeholders around the world,” Librati stated.
The Israel Defense Forces already has a very active spokesperson unit, operating daily with 500 media outlets and 2500 journalists and civilian agents working to promote their activities worldwide.
The country actively uses social media like Facebook for public relations particularly during its controversial attacks, such as the attacks on Gaza during Operation Cast Lead, the fatal naval assault on the Freedom Flotilla aid convoy.
In 2009 the Israeli Foreign Ministry announced that NIS 600,000 of the year’s budget would be devoted to the establishment of a professional team of talkback writers who will flood websites throughout the world with pro-Israeli messages.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry has since established team of students and discharged soldiers who work around the clock writing pro-Israeli talkbacks on internet sites throughout the world, and participate in discussions concerning Israel in international blogs and in sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
“The internet is an arena in every way in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and we must act here or otherwise we lose,” said Ilan Shturman, Deputy Director of the Department of Public Relations at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the time the project was established.
“During ‘Operation Cast Lead’ we turned to Jewish communities abroad and with their assistance enlisted several thousand volunteers, to whom Israeli volunteers joined. We sent them background and public relations material and sent them to represent the Israeli perspective in the news websites on the internet,” said Shturman. “Our target audience then was the European Left, which was not friendly towards the government policy. We therefore began to get involved in discussions on blogs in England, Spain and Germany, very hostile environments.”
As Ilan Shurtman of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, “Our goal is to penetrate into the world in which these discussions are being held, and in which news and video-clips are sent onwards to blogs, social networks and news sites of all sites. We are going to bring to these places a pro-Israeli voice.”
Denying Nazi-Zionist Collusion
McClatchy, the Sacramento Bee, Darrell Steinberg and Islamophobia
By ALISON WEIR | CounterPunch | March 4, 2011
In an inversion of journalistic ethics, the Sacramento Bee reported on opposition to an event before and after it took place, but didn’t cover the event itself.
It featured an entire report on accusations against a flier, but didn’t include a response from the flier’s authors.
It printed claims by powerful local figures that the flier was “an outrageous lie,” but refused to print information showing that the flier’s statements were factual.
Its headline about the allegedly offensive flier emphasized a Muslim connection, even though there was virtually no Muslim connection to the flier.
It neglected to report that one of those attacking the flier had previously attempted to use his official position to prevent the event at which the flier was distributed from taking place.
And finally, the Bee’s parent company, McClatchy, one of the nation’s largest newspaper chains, then sent out the Bee’s deficient story about a flier nation-wide, also emphasizing a (largely non-existent) Muslim connection in its headline, which then appeared on newspaper websites in Florida, Texas, Idaho, Mississippi, Alaska, and elsewhere, generating anti-Muslim comments.
The event in question was part of a national speaking tour that featured an Auschwitz survivor speaking about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Called “Never Again For Anyone,” it was sponsored by a diverse array of eight national organizations and nine local ones, secular, Jewish and Muslim, who reserved a hall owned by the local Islamic Center as the venue for the event. Also speaking was Dr. Hatem Bazian, a prominent academic from UC Berkeley.
The talk was immediately opposed by the Jewish Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the 13-member Board of Rabbis of Greater Sacramento, who contacted the Islamic center and demanded that the center refuse to allow the event to take place.
The rabbis called it a “program of hate,” claimed that both the theme and the presence of an Auschwitz survivor speaking about the plight of Palestinians were “anti-Semitic,” stated that allowing the 86-year-old Auschwitz survivor to speak would “defile the sacred memory of millions who perished during the Holocaust” (nothing was said of the multitudes of non-Jews, including Arabs and Muslims, who died under the Nazis), and threatened that Jewish-Muslim relations would be fatally jeopardized if the Islamic Center did not renege on its agreement to allow the event to take place on its property.
The Sacramento Bee ran a news story on the rabbis’ complaints, claiming in its lead sentence that because of the proposed event, “Sacramento’s carefully cultivated interfaith bonds are being stretched to the limit,” although there is no indication that the planned talk was interfering with Christian, Buddhist, Hindu or other faith’s relations with the Muslim community.
Despite the attempt to prevent it, however, the event went forward as planned, drawing approximately 500 people. The Bee, despite choosing to cover prior complaints against it, chose not to cover it.
Four days later, however, the Bee carried another news story about the event, this time focusing on a complaint by the President Pro-Tem of the California Senate condemning a flier that was distributed at the talk.
California is in deep trouble. It is over $26 billion in debt and is facing potential bankruptcy. People have lost homes, businesses have failed, university fees have escalated. Yet, the Senate’s President Pro Tem, Darrell Steinberg, one of California’s most powerful politicians, twice took time out of his necessarily busy schedule to lodge semi-official complaints about the “Never Again” event.
Steinberg, who has worked to promote tolerance and build bridges with Muslim leaders to oppose bigotry, is devoted to Israel. In 2008 he was host of “Salute to Israel,” a celebration of Israel’s creation 60 years before, which had involved the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Muslims and Christians to make room for the Jewish state.
According to the Jewish Forward, Steinberg became President Pro Tem “after intense involvement in the Jewish communal world, including stints as chairman of Sacramento’s Jewish Community Relations Council… The lobbyist for the California Jewish Public Affairs Committee, Cliff Berg, said he is looking forward to working more with an old friend.” Both organizations advocate for Israel; JPAC sponsors an annual 9-day trip to Israel for state legislators.
Steinberg was strongly opposed to the “Never Again for Anyone” event. First, although the Bee didn’t mention this, Steinberg tried to stop it, sending a letter on official Senate stationery urging the Islamic Center to revoke permission for it.
Then, after the talk had taken place (which Steinberg did not attend), he sent a second letter to the Bee and to a few individuals in the interfaith community (it’s available only on a pro-Israel website), again on official stationery. In it he condemned a flier that had been distributed at the event.
Produced by the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, a cosponsor of the event, the flier included information about collaboration between Nazis and leaders of the Zionist movement (the political/military movement to create a Jewish state in Palestine that created Israel in 1948).
Steinberg was outraged. In his letter he particularly objected to the flier’s statements that “…Zionist leaders made ‘transfer agreements’ with the Nazis…. refused to observe the international boycott of Nazi Germany… and even kept silent about impending plans to deport Jews into Nazi death camps.”
Steinberg called the statements an “outrageous rewrite of history,” and claimed that “in essence, they are saying the Jews orchestrated the Holocaust,” although the flier said no such thing.
Similarly angered, according to the Bee news report, was one of the rabbis who had tried to prevent the talk, Rabbi Mona Alfi of Sacramento’s prominent Congregation B’nai Israel.
While the Bee didn’t mention this, Alfi is also the official California Senate Chaplain, a position she has held since 2008. She was appointed to this position by Steinberg, a member of B’nai Israel. (According to a survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, two percent of Californians are affiliated with the Jewish faith.)
According to the Bee, Rabbi Alfi called the flier’s allegations that some Zionists were Nazi collaborators “a disgusting lie.”
While the Bee’s report also included statements defending the talk, it contained no statements in defense of the flier itself, the paper having made no attempt to interview the authors of the flier that was the focus of its article.
As a result, the report contained none of the extensive evidence supporting the flier’s content, thus giving readers the impression that a flier filled with objectionable falsehoods had been distributed.
Worse yet, since the Bee and McClatchy then chose to emphasize the venue of the event in their headline (“Flier at California Muslim center condemned by state senator”), despite the fact that the center had nothing to do with the flier, a headline and news story were sent around the country that served to reinforce the Islamophobic fiction that Muslims are inherently anti-Semitic, generating comments such as:
“Muslims have been successfully trading in anti-Semitism for decades, Steinberg isn’t going to put a dent in it,” “ ‘The holocaust never happened.’ Since that didn’t work, certain Muslims decided to try this disgusting piece of nonsense,” “My, my, those Muslim propaganda sites must be working overtime.”
Zionist-Nazi Collusion
In point of fact, however, the flier’s statements are accurate. There is detailed evidence that some Zionists collaborated with the Nazis, that Zionists sabotaged anti-Nazi boycotts, and that Zionists interfered with efforts to rescue victims of Nazi oppression.
When facts first emerged in the 1950s about Zionist-Nazi collusion, it caused considerable scandal in Israel and led to the fall of the Israeli government of the time. A number of books are dedicated to this subject and it is discussed in numerous others, almost all by Jewish and/or Israeli authors. The topic inspired novels by well-known Israeli writers Amos Elon and Neil Gordon, was the subject of a 1987 British play, and was portrayed in a 1994 Israeli docudrama. It’s surprising that Steinberg and the Board of Rabbis make no indication of ever having heard anything about this.
Popular American playwright and fervent Zionist Ben Hecht wrote the first book on the subject, “Perfidy,” relating the history of a Hungarian Zionist leader who arranged for his family and several hundred prominent Jews to escape while facilitating the movement of the rest of Hungarian Jews to Nazi concentration camps.
Hannah Arendt, in her 1960 book “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report in the Banality of Evil,” writes: “To a Jew this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story.”
In “The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Pact between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine” (containing an afterword by ADL head Abe Foxman), pro-Israel writer Edwin Black reports that in 1933 Zionist leaders concluded a secret pact with the Third Reich that transferred 60,000 Jews and $100,000 to Palestine, Zionists promising in return that they would halt the worldwide boycott “that threatened to topple the Hitler regime in its first year.”
Author-researcher Lenni Brenner wrote of Zionist-Nazi collusion in “Zionism in the Age of Dictators,” of which the London Times stated: “Brenner is able to cite numerous cases where Zionists collaborated with anti-Semitic regimes, including Hitler’s.”
Brenner’s second book on the topic, “51 Documents, Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis,” includes a 1940 letter from underground Zionist terrorist leader Avraham Stern proposing that Jewish militias would fight on Germany’s side in exchange for Nazi help in creating an “historic Jewish state.”
In “What Price Israel,” American Council for Judaism member Alfred Lilienthal describes FDR’s efforts to set up a program to rescue refugees, only to find Zionists sabotaging it. Roosevelt explained: “The Zionist movement knows that Palestine is, and will be for some time, a remittance society. They know that they can raise vast sums for Palestine by saying to donors, ‘There is no other place this poor Jew can go.’”
When New York attorney Morris Ernst joined this refugee effort, he was shocked: “I was thrown out of parlors of friends of mine who very frankly said ‘Morris, this is treason. You are undermining the Zionist movement.’” Ernst wrote that he found a fanatical movement of men “little concerned about human blood if it is not their own.”
In “The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust,” Israeli historian Tom Segev quotes Zionist leader and future Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion: “If I knew that it was possible to save all the Jewish children of Germany by transporting them to England, but only half of them by transporting them to Palestine, I would choose the second.”
Segev writes that Ben-Gurion worried that ‘the human conscience’ might cause various countries to open their doors to Jewish refugees from Germany and saw this as a threat, warning: ‘Zionism is in danger.’”
In the Bee’s report on the controversy, Sacramento’s Rabbi Alfi is further quoted as saying “there is no comparison” between the treatment of Jews in pre-war Germany and Palestinians. Yet, in 2002 the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reported that the Israeli military was specifically studying Nazi Warsaw Ghetto strategies for use in the Palestinian Occupied Territories.
Journalistic Malpractice
The Bee’s decision not to cover an event about which it had reported prior complaints is highly questionable.
Even more serious, its decision to publish a news report featuring attacks against a flier without also interviewing the flier’s authors violates fundamental journalistic principles. The story was published four days after the event took place; taking the time to follow professional good practices would have made sense.
However, hindsight is always clearer than decisions made under a looming deadline, and in the rush of daily journalism serious lapses sometimes occur. The real test of a newspaper’s commitment to honest, principled journalism is how it handles such lapses.
Bee editors failed this test with flying colors. From here on I speak from personal experience.
I happened to read the Bee’s flier report soon after it was published. Because I’ve studied Israel’s history extensively and own the books mentioned above (and others that mention the topic), I was aware that the flier’s statements were factual and that the undisputed complaints against it were unfounded.
I felt this information needed to be given to readers as soon as possible to correct the misimpression conveyed by the Bee’s one-sided reporting. Since op-ed columns were specifically created as a place for outside writers to convey views and information not otherwise contained in a newspaper, I took several books on the topic and went to the Bee’s offices to propose an op-ed.
From the lobby I called opinion page editor, Stuart Leavenworth, saying that I’d like to discuss a potential op-ed for the paper. He said he was in a meeting and couldn’t meet with me, but asked what I wished to address.
When I told him, he expressed skepticism and said he would not print an op-ed saying that Zionists had collaborated with Nazis.
I told him that I had books on the subject with me that I could show him. He replied that normally someone would schedule such a meeting ahead of time. I agreed and asked when we could schedule such a meeting. He said he would not schedule one. He asked me a few more questions, interrupted my answers, and then told me to submit an op-ed. He said that I must supply citations.
I wrote the article, cited seven books, and said that I would provide more extensive citations if he wished (even though I had already supplied far more references than normally required for an op-ed). I also said that I would be glad to cut the piece if it was too long and said I was very comfortable with rewriting.
He refused to publish it, providing no explanation for this decision.
I am fully aware that editors always retain the power to decide what they will and won’t publish (I’ve been an editor myself). However, since journalistic ethics required the Bee to remedy sloppy, one-sided reporting that gave readers a false impression of a controversial local event, of Muslims at a time when violence and bigotry against them is escalating, and about Israel, with which the U.S. has a unique “special relationship,” I emailed and phoned my concerns to the Bee’s chief editor and others (it has no ombudsman), but to no avail.
The newspaper’s response was disappointing but unsurprising. Editors, particularly when it comes to Israel-Palestine, are far more concerned with daily deadlines, financial necessities, and the need not to anger powerful constituencies than with moral or ethical principles.
This reality, combined with considerable ignorance on the Middle East among many journalists, and pro-Israel, anti-Muslim bias among others, means that there is virtually no effort to correct errors or remedy significant omissions in coverage having to do with Israel.
As a result, Americans are largely left in the dark about the current reality and past history of the tiny, rich nation that receives more of our tax money than any other country on earth, currently at least $8 million per day, and that is at the center of profoundly important issues concerning both the region and our own nation.
Israel and its partisans are working to make sure it stays that way. If Steinberg, Alfi, Leavenworth, the Bee, and McClatchy continue their current pattern, it doesn’t look like this is going to change anytime soon – unless enough people start to demand better.
~
Alison Weir is President of the Council for the National Interest and Executive Director of If Americans Knew, a nonprofit organization that provides information on Israel-Palestine. She splits her time between Sacramento and Washington DC. She can be reached at contact@ifamericansknew.org.
Chernobyl, 25 Years Later
By Dr. JANETTE D. SHERMAN, MD | CounterPunch | March 4, 2011
April 26, 2011 will mark the 25th Annivesary of the Chernobyl catastrophe, and for more than 50 years, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have abided by an agreement that in essence, covers each other’s back – sometimes at the expense of public health. It’s a delicate balance between cooperation and collusion.
Signed on May 28, 1959 at the 12th World Health Assembly, the agreement states:
“Whenever either organization proposes to initiate a programme or activity on a subject in which the other organization has or may have a substantial interest, the first party shall consult the other with a view to adjusting the matter by mutual agreement,” and continues: The IAEA and the WHO “recognize that they may find it necessary to apply certain limitations for the safeguarding of confidential information furnished to them. They therefore agree that nothing in this agreement shall be construed as requiring either of them to furnish such information as would, in the judgment of the other party possessing the information to interfere with the orderly conduct of its operation.”
The WHO mandate is to look after the health on our planet, while the IAEA is to promote nuclear energy. In light of recent industrial failures involving nuclear power plants, many prominent scientists and public health officials have criticized WHO’s non-competing relationship with IEAE that has stymied efforts to address effects and disseminate information about the 1986 Chernobyl accident, so that current harm may be documented and future harm prevented.
On the 20th Anniversary of Chernobyl WHO and the IAEA published the Chernobyl Forum Report, mentioning only 350 sources, mainly from the English literature while in reality there are more than 30,000 publications and up to 170,000 sources that address the consequences of Chernobyl.
After waiting two decades for the findings of Chernobyl to be recognized by the United Nations, three scientists, Alexey Yablokov from Russia, and Vasily Nesterenko and Alexey Nesterenko from Belarus undertook the task to collect, abstract and translate some 5000 articles reported by multiple scientists, who observed first-hand the effects from the fallout. These had been published largely in Slavic languages and not previously available in translation. The result was Chernobyl – Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, published by the New York Academy of Sciences in 2009.
The greatest amount of radioactivity fell outside of Belarus, Ukraine and European Russia, extending across the northern hemisphere as far away as Asia, North Africa, and North America, while the greatest concentrations continue to affect the 13 million living in Belarus, Ukraine, and European Russia.
Immediately after the catastrophe, release of information was limited, and there was a delay in collecting data. WHO, supported by governments worldwide could have been pro-active and led the way to provide readily accessible information, but did not. These omissions resulted in several effects: limited monitoring of fallout levels, delays in getting stable potassium iodide to people, lack of care for many, and delay in prevention of contamination of the food supply.
The number of victims is one of the most contentious issue between scientists who collected data first-hand and WHO/IAEA that estimated only 9000 deaths.
The most detailed estimate of additional deaths was done in Russia by comparing rates in six highly contaminated territories with overall Russian averages and with those of six lesser-contaminated areas, maintaining similar geographical and socioeconomic parameters. There were over 7 million people in each area, providing for robust analysis. Thus data from multiple scientists estimate the overall mortality from the Chernobyl catastrophe, for the period from April 1986 to the end of 2004, to be 985,000, a hundred times more than the WHO/IAEA estimate.
Given that thyroid diseases caused such a toll, Chernobyl has shown that nuclear societies – notable Japan, France, India, China, the United States, and Germany – must distribute stable potassium iodide (KI) before an accident, because it must be used within the first 24 hours.
Key to understanding effects from nuclear fallout is the difference between external and internal radiation. While external radiation, as from x-rays, neutron, gamma and cosmic rays can harm and kill, internal radiation (alpha and beta particles) when absorbed by ingestion and inhalation become embedded in tissues and releases damaging energy in direct contact with tissues and cells, often for the lifetime of the person, animal or plant.
To date, not every living system has been studied, but of those that have – animals, birds, fish, amphibians, invertebrates, insects, trees, plants, bacteria, viruses and humans – many with genetic instability across generations, all sustained changes, some permanent, and some fatal. Wild and domestic animals and birds developed abnormalities and diseases similar to those found in humans.
It takes ten decades for an isotope to completely decay, thus the approximately 30 year half-lives for Sr-90 and Cs-137 will take nearly three centuries before they have decayed, a mere blink of the eye when compared to Pu-239 with a half-life of 24,100 years.
The human and economic costs are enormous: in the first 25 years the direct economic damage to Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia has exceeded $500 billion. Belarus spends about 20% of its national annual budget, Ukraine up to 6%, and Russia up to 1% to partially mitigate some of the consequences.
When a radiation release occurs we do not know in advance the part of the biosphere it will contaminate, the animals, plants, and people that will be affected, nor the amount or duration of harm. In many cases, damage is random, depending upon the health, age, and status of development and the amount, kind, and variety of radioactive contamination that reaches humans, animals and plants. For this reason, international support of research on the consequences of Chernobyl must continue in order to mitigate the ongoing and increasing damage. Access to information must be transparent and open to all, across all borders. The WHO must assume independent responsibility in support of international health.
~
Janette D. Sherman, M. D. is the author of Life’s Delicate Balance: Causes and Prevention of Breast Cancer and Chemical Exposure and Disease, and is a specialist in internal medicine and toxicology. She edited the book Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and Nature, written by A. V. Yablokov, V. B., Nesterenko and A. V. Nesterenko, published by the New York Academy of Sciences in 2009. Her primary interest is the prevention of illness through public education. She can be reached at: toxdoc.js@verizon.net and www.janettesherman.com
Lies and Truth in Wisconsin
Fact-Checking Gov. Walker
By WALTER M. BRASCH | CounterPunch | March 3, 2011
Historian Thomas Carlyle said “a lie cannot live.” However, Mark Twain casually remarked, “It shows that he did not know how to tell them.”
More than a century later, newly-elected Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican-dominated Wisconsin legislature have proven themselves to be “quick studies,” having learned how to tell whoppers about the working class and unions. Here are just a few.
LIE: The public workers’ pensions are what caused much of the financial crisis not just in Wisconsin but throughout the country. Gov. Walker has repeatedly said, “We’re broke . . . We don’t have any money.”
FACTS: Wisconsin had a $120 million surplus when Walker came into office in January. Had the newly-elected Republican-dominated Legislature in January not given about $140 million in special tax breaks (also known as “corporate welfare”) to business, the state could have had a surplus, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau. About two-thirds of all Wisconsin corporations pay no taxes at all, according to the Wisconsin Department of Revenue.
Wisconsin could also save significant expenses by having state-employed fiscal analysts, not Wall Street investment counselors, handle the entire pension investment portfolio. Wisconsin pays about $28 million to state managers to handle about half the portfolio; it pays about $195 million to Wall Street investment brokers to handle the other half, according to the 2010 annual report of the Wisconsin Investment Board… Even with the Wall Street crisis, and lower-than-expected revenue, the Wisconsin pension fund is fully funded, able to meet its obligation for several years, according to the independent PEW Center for the States.
Columnist Robert Greenwald says the “shortfall” would be wiped out if Wisconsin brought home only 151 troops from the war in Afghanistan. If the U.S. left Afghanistan completely, the state would save $1.7 billion, according to Greenwald’s analysis.
LIE: The reason the Republicans throughout the country want to end collective bargaining by the public service unions bargaining is to bring fiscal responsibility to the states.
TRUTH: In January 2010, the Supreme Court by a 5–4 decision along party lines declared that corporations enjoy the protection of the First Amendment. This meant that companies could increase funding and advertising for candidates. As expected, the Chamber of Commerce and corporate America gave vast amounts of money to Republican and conservative candidates; labor donated to liberal and Democratic candidates, who traditionally support the working class. In the 2010 mid-term election, seven of the top 10 donors contributed to conservative and Republican candidates. The other three in the Top 10 were labor political action committees. Eliminating collective bargaining for public sector workers would destroy the union movement and significantly reduce the influence of labor in campaigns. Walker has already shown his colors and intent when he was caught in a radio prank. On Feb. 23, Ian Murphy, editor of The Buffalo Beast, pretended to be billionaire David Koch, a supporter of far-right causes, and a major contributor to Walker’s gubernatorial campaign. Punked by the 20-minute call, Walker seemed to be little more than a sycophant for Big Business. The Republicans’ reaction? Instead of worrying about possible ethics violations by the governor, the Republicans planted a bill into the legislature to criminalize prank phone calls
LIE: The unions are greedy and won’t budge.
FACTS: The 267,000 Wisconsin public sector workers, as well as all elected officials, Democrat and Republican, do pay very little to their pensions. However, the unions have already said they’d be willing to pay a higher contribution, essentially taking an 8 percent pay cut, and negotiate fairly other parts of the contracts. Gov. Walker not only refused to budge on his autocratic stand, he refused to take calls from elected Democrats and bluntly told the Milwaukee Journal, “I don’t have anything to negotiate.”
LIE: Gov. Walker’s proposal affects every union in Wisconsin.
TRUTH: He exempted firefighters and police from his draconian assault upon unions, possibly because he was attempting to get support from the first responders, while mining sympathy from the public. What he didn’t count on was that the firefighters and police unions are firm in their opposition to the abolishment of collective bargaining.
LIE: Gov. Walker says he’s just helping the worker when he argues for elimination of the “dues check-off,” saying the workers would have more disposable income.
TRUTH: Eliminating dues check-off would cripple unions, which would have to rely solely upon voluntary contributions.
MYTH: Gov. Walker enjoys wide-spread support for his stand against the unions.
TRUTH: Walker has been governor less than two months. If the election were repeated, he’d receive only about 45 percent of the vote, according to the independent Public Policy Polling (PPP) of Raleigh, N.C. More important, while only 3 percent of Republicans voted for Tom Barratt, the Democratic candidate in the November election, 10 percent of the Republicans say they’d vote for him in a new election, according to PPP. The Republican governors of Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Indiana have said they will not follow Walker’s lead, and will support the rights of public workers to bargain collectively. The massive protests in Wisconsin—more than 100,000 in Madison on the same day—and throughout the nation give evidence that Walker doesn’t have the popularity he and his supporters believe. A New York Times/CBS poll, released March 1, indicates only about one-third of the nation supports the campaign against public sector collective bargaining. A week earlier, an independent USA Today/Gallup poll had almost the same results.
LIE: The protestors are unruly, and should be arrested for violating the law.
TRUTH: The First Amendment gives people the right to assemble peacefully. There have been no arrests because there have been no crimes committed by the protestors. Further, when the governor and the Legislature demanded that protestors be thrown out of the state capitol, and not allowed to stay overnight, the chief of the Capitol Police refused to do so, believing the order was a violation of Constitutional rights. In contrast, Walker had actually considered, then rejected, the idea of planting troublemakers among the protestors—a “dirty trick” that dates back to the ’60s.
LIE: Public sector union workers are overpaid.
TRUTH: A USA Today analysis, published March 1, shows that, on average, public service workers, with wages and benefits included, are paid about $2,500 more per year than those in the private sector. In Wisconsin, the difference is only about $1,800. However, government workers usually are “older and substantially better educated than private sector workers,” according to researchers Robert Pollin and Jeffrey Thompson, professors of economics at the University of Massachusetts. But, again contrary to the lies spewed by the anti-worker Rabid Right, individual union workers, when compared to the same criteria as private sector workers, actually earn 4 percent less income, according to the Center for Economic Policy Research. In Wisconsin, public sector union workers actually earn 4.8 percent less total compensation, according to research published in February by the Economic Policy Institute. One statistic stands out. “The average member of AFSCME, our largest public-sector union, earns less than $45,000 a year,” says author/journalist Bill Press, “and retires after a career in public service with a whopping pension of $19,000 per year.”
LIE: Public service union workers are lazier than non-unionized private sector workers.
TRUTH: Strong labor unions generally have higher productivity, according to independent research done by Harley Shalen of the University of California, because there is less turnover, better worker communication, better work conditions, and a better-educated workforce.”
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Walter Brasch is an award-winning syndicated columnist, author of 17 books, is a former newspaper and magazine writer/editor and tenured full professor of mass communications. You may contact him at walterbrasch@gmail.com.
J Street and the Middle East War Process
By Chase Madar | Pulse Media | March 3, 2011
J Street, America’s premier liberal pro-Israel lobbying group, has just wrapped up its third annual conference in Washington. There have been sessions and panels on “building peace from the ground up,” on “expanding the tent” and even some passionate condemnations of the Occupation. Amid so much good feeling it’s almost possible to lose sight of one of J Street’s fundamental missions: to promote and guarantee America’s lavish and unconditional military aid to Israel.
This may seem like a harsh assessment of the lobbying group. After all, isn’t J Street routinely attacked by neocon ultras and praised by American liberals? But hack through J Street’s verbiage about “dialogue” and “conversation” and one bumps into this blandly phrased position statement: “American assistance to Israel, including maintaining Israel’s qualitative military edge, is an important anchor for a peace process based on providing Israel with the confidence and assurance to move forward on a solution based on land for peace. J Street consistently advocates for robust US foreign aid to Israel.” This last sentence is 99% of what one needs to know about J Street.
We Americans aren’t used to talking about the one thing we are most directly responsible for in the Israel-Palestine conflict: our $3bn annual military aid package that goes almost exclusively to one of the two sides. A bit weirdly, debate about Israel/Palestine among Americans tends to leap immediately to the issue of a one-state versus a two-state solution. Or we presume to give the Palestinians tips and pointers about what degree of violence is morally acceptable, and where’s that Palestinian Gandhi? Or we vow to redouble our efforts towards a “peace process” which doesn’t quite seem to exist.
The one thing we Americans are not very good at discussing, or even acknowledging, is our already vigorous role in the conflict. Before we continue to micromanage the Palestinians, and (to a far lesser degree) the Israelis, might we first examine, and scale back, our own outsized contributions to what can only be called a war process.
We Americans badly need to understand that we are not now, nor have we ever been, a credible arbiter in the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. Our long record of doing things like shipping free-gratis cluster bombs to the IDF, expediting them when so requested for use on Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure in 2006, has long disqualified us as “honest brokers”. Rhetoric aside, such lopsided military aid packages are our real policy.
This is not another argument against all foreign aid. There are places on the earth where America does indeed owe a blood debt: Ghana, Haiti, Nicaragua for instance, nations historically wronged by our slave trade or by long-term US military occupation. It is strange that J Street or any ostensibly liberal outfit could believe that Israel is deserving of [far] more foreign aid than the three of these impoverished nations combined.
There is a standard response to this criticism of J Street. Their half-measures may be lame, it is conceded, but they are a “comfort zone” for young liberal activists inside the American Jewish community, a space where they can get their message out. I hope it does not seem callous to view ongoing ethnic cleansing, the collective punishment of 1.3 million Gazans, and significant American security interests to be orders of magnitude more important than the sensitivities of the college students who just attended J Street’s conference.
It seems the true function of J Street is to set the acceptable outer limit to our national discourse on Israel/Palestine, and this is worrisome. For J Street has not been brave in its positions. It disapproved of the Goldstone Report; it discouraged a UN investigation into the IDF assault on the Gaza aid flotilla; it threatens to withhold its support from pols who meet with other, less Israel-centric lobbying groups–and that’s just for starters. Of course it’s super that J Street rallied behind congressional Representative Donna Edwards after she voted “present” on a resolution in support of the IDF’s attacks on Gaza in 2009. But if she had voted against the measure, how would J Street have responded? More recently Edwards voted with the majority to give an extra $205 million in emergency military funding to Israel, with only four votes against. In the midst of the worst economic crisis since the 30s and Israel’s constant flouting of international law regarding settlement construction, a gift of even more military aid seems bizarre. (J Street, predictably, welcomed the disbursement.)
True, J Street sometimes breaks with its neoconservative peers, as when it urged the US not veto last month’s UN Security Council resolution condemning Israeli colonization of the West Bank. But J Street’s sporadic compliance with minimal standards is distinctly unimpressive compared to the clear-cut policy changes urged by other advocacy groups. With Jewish Voice for Peace, the Council for the National Interest, the Committee for a Just Peace in Israel and Palestine and New Policy, the rubber meets the road when it comes to reorienting US policy on Israel/Palestine, which they advocate without equivocation. Unlike J Street, these groups are not getting large checks from George Soros and his children.
Some analysts optimistically see J Street as a sort of gateway drug that will lead its youngish adherents to eventually support a very different role for the United States in the region. I hope they are right. For now, J Street will continue to lobby for dialogue, “expanding the tent”, and $3 billion in cluster bombs, white phosphorus and other armaments from the US government to the IDF, no strings attached, year after year.
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British weapons and personnel doing much of the killing in Yemen
Press TV – June 18, 2019
A detailed report published by the Guardian newspaper has shown how Britain is massively contributing to Saudi Arabia’s devastating war on Yemen as it suggests that London is not only supplying the bombs that fall on Yemenis, but it provides the personnel and expertise that keep the war going.
The comprehensive report by Arron Merat published on Tuesday showed that Britain was doing much of the killing in Yemen as the country continues to provide Saudi Arabia with everything it needs to turn its southern impoverished neighbor into a graveyard.
“Every day Yemen is hit by British bombs – dropped by British planes that are flown by British-trained pilots and maintained and prepared inside Saudi Arabia by thousands of British contractors,” said Merat in the report. … continue
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