You may have seen the recent letter by the Israeli peace and justice group “Boycott From Within” (BfW) asking Bob Dylan to heed the Palestinian call for BDS and therefore not perform in Israel. The letter follows reports of Dylan’s 2011 summer tour, during which he will perform at Ramat Gan Stadium on June 20th.
The BfW letter hits all the right notes and speaks truth. It asks Dylan “not to perform in Israel until it respects Palestinian human rights,” explaining that “a performance in Israel, today, is a vote of support for its policies of oppression.” The letter speaks of ethnic cleansing, land theft, martial law, air strikes, and massacres. It beseeches the folk legend, who has “been part of a civil rights movement,” to stand with the oppressed against the aggressor. BfW writes that “BDS is a powerful and united civil initiative in the face of a brutal military occupation and apartheid. It’s a nonviolent alternative to a waning armed struggle and it has reaped many successes and instilled much hope, in the past six years.”
A Ha’aretz article proudly notes that the Dylan concert will be held “where Leonard Cohen and Elton John recently performed,” and is being promoted by “Marcel Avraham, the promoter who organized the Leonard Cohen and Elton John concerts – as well as the upcoming Justin Bieber concert that will be held over Passover.”
So, will Bob Dylan – the man who wrote “Masters of War” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’” in 1963 – heed the call? Of course not. Although Dylan would appear to be the perfect political ally, his human and civil rights bona fides have faded over time – to the point of non-existence.
In 1971, Time Magazinereported that Dylan was “returning to is his Jewishness” and “getting into this ethnic Jewish thing.” A friend of his told the magazine, “He’s reading all kinds of books on Judaism, books about the Jewish resistance like the Warsaw ghetto. He took a trip to Israel last year that no one was supposed to know about and even, it is rumored, gave a large donation to the Israeli government.” The article continues:
Dylan denied giving money to Israel or to the fanatical Jewish Defense League, but he confesses great admiration for that “Never again” action group and its reckless leader Rabbi Meir Kahane. “He’s a really sincere guy,” says Bob. “He’s really put it all together.”
Yes, you read that right. Bob Dylan said Meir Kahane, who favored the forced expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland and whose racist Kach party has since been banned from Israeli politics, is “a really sincere guy” who’s “really put it all together.”
In 1983, twenty years after he sang, “you don’t count the dead” and “you never ask questions, when God’s on your side,” Dylan penned a song in response to the international outrage over the devastating Israeli assault on Lebanon in 1982, which took the lives of nearly 18,000 Lebanese civilians and wounded about 30,000 others. The song did not mention the Sabra and Shatila Massacre, in which between 800 and 2,000 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians were murdered. The Israeli Kahan Commission, published in February 1983, found that Israel bore “indirect responsibility” and Defense Minister Ariel Sharon “bears personal responsibility” for the massacre.
Rather, Dylan’s song, entitled “Neighborhood Bully” and featured on his Infidels album (which incidentally also contains the songs “Man of Peace” and “License to Kill“), is a bitter and indignant defense of Israel’s actions, an exercise in Zionist mythology, eternal victimization, and bogus “right to self-defense” hasbara, that sounds like it was written collectively by Alan Dershowitz, Abe Foxman, Benjamin Netanyahu, Anthony Weiner, and Golda Meir.
Dylan sings of nameless (though obvious) “neighborhood bully,” labeled such by “his enemies” who “say he’s on their land” and have him “outnumbered about a million to one” with “no place to escape to, no place to run.” And that’s just the first verse.
The hasbara escalates as the song continues. Dylan sings of exile (“The neighborhood bully been driven out of every land”) and bigotry (“He’s always on trial for just being born”), of lonely survival and attempts at delegitization (“He’s criticized and condemned for being alive”), of the Osirak bombing, of deserts blooming. The only way to believe how thick the Zionist talking points are laid on is to listen to the whole song, or read the complete lyrics (copied below).
And, although Dylan once claimed that he’d “tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it, and reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it,” he has decided to stand with those who aggress and oppress, with those who starve and deprive, with those who surround and fly-over and bomb hospitals and deny, with those who steal land and resources, with those who reinvent and erase history, with those who criminalize memory and prioritize ethnicity and religion.
By ignoring the call to boycott and by performing in Israel this summer, Dylan is solidifying his reputation as one who – when it counted most – didn’t stand for morality and humanity. Dylan once asked, “how many years can some people exist, before they’re allowed to be free?” It seems that Dylan’s own answer to the Palestinians would be, “A while longer and don’t ask me to help.” He has become his own rhetorical character: the man who turns his head, pretending he just doesn’t see.
So, the questions remain. “How many ears must one man have, before he can hear people cry? How many deaths will it take ’til he knows that too many people have died?” The answers are no longer simply blowing in the wind, however. They are in discourse and education, flash mobs and rallies, sit-ins and walk-outs. The answers are international law and humanitarian justice. The answer is promoting basic morality and common decency. The answer is raising public awareness. The answer is opposing settler-colonialism, military aggression, collective punishment, air strikes and assassinations, drone attacks and white phosphorous, tear gas and torture, ethnic cleansing, diplomatic immunity, war crime impunity, ethnocentrism and supremacism, racism and discrimination, apartheid and occupation. The answer is BDS.
And, as Bob Dylan told us himself, the times they are a-changing’.
Sadly, this time around, however, it seems Dylan does need a weatherman to know which way the wind’s blowing.
Well, the neighborhood bully, he’s just one man
His enemies say he’s on their land
They got him outnumbered about a million to one
He got no place to escape to, no place to run
He’s the neighborhood bully
The neighborhood bully just lives to survive
He’s criticized and condemned for being alive
He’s not supposed to fight back, he’s supposed to have thick skin
He’s supposed to lay down and die when his door is kicked in
He’s the neighborhood bully
The neighborhood bully been driven out of every land
He’s wandered the earth an exiled man
Seen his family scattered, his people hounded and torn
He’s always on trial for just being born
He’s the neighborhood bully
Well, he knocked out a lynch mob, he was criticized
Old women condemned him, said he should apologize.
Then he destroyed a bomb factory, nobody was glad
The bombs were meant for him. He was supposed to feel bad
He’s the neighborhood bully
Well, the chances are against it and the odds are slim
That he’ll live by the rules that the world makes for him
’Cause there’s a noose at his neck and a gun at his back
And a license to kill him is given out to every maniac
He’s the neighborhood bully
He got no allies to really speak of
What he gets he must pay for, he don’t get it out of love
He buys obsolete weapons and he won’t be denied
But no one sends flesh and blood to fight by his side
He’s the neighborhood bully
Well, he’s surrounded by pacifists who all want peace
They pray for it nightly that the bloodshed must cease
Now, they wouldn’t hurt a fly. To hurt one they would weep
They lay and they wait for this bully to fall asleep
He’s the neighborhood bully
Every empire that’s enslaved him is gone
Egypt and Rome, even the great Babylon
He’s made a garden of paradise in the desert sand
In bed with nobody, under no one’s command
He’s the neighborhood bully
Now his holiest books have been trampled upon
No contract he signed was worth what it was written on
He took the crumbs of the world and he turned it into wealth
Took sickness and disease and he turned it into health
He’s the neighborhood bully
What’s anybody indebted to him for?
Nothin’, they say. He just likes to cause war
Pride and prejudice and superstition indeed
They wait for this bully like a dog waits to feed
He’s the neighborhood bully
What has he done to wear so many scars?
Does he change the course of rivers? Does he pollute the moon and stars?
Neighborhood bully, standing on the hill
Running out the clock, time standing still
Neighborhood bully
The British government is finally being forced to reveal the atrocities its predecessors committed during the Mau Mau war in Kenya in the 1950s.
The High Court in London launched proceedings to investigate a case brought up by four Kenyans who claimed they are victims of torture and assault at the hands of British colonial authorities during the Mau Mau uprising between 1952 and 1961.
Three men and one woman, in their 70s and 80s have come a distance 4,000 kilometers to give witness in the High Court in a session being held to unveil one of the black chapters in the British colonial history.
They have finally succeeded in forcing the British government to release documents, which reveal the true horror of atrocities which the UK colonial system committed against the revolutionaries during the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in the 1950s and 60s.
Previously hidden documents contain 2,000 boxes of papers of which 300 are related to Kenya and of those 30 are directly relevant to the Mau Mau war of independence.
The papers show how much British colonial officers have been involved in employing the most cruel torture techniques against the Kenyans including beating and roasting the revolutionaries alive as well as severe sexual assaults and castration which they used as common and routine torture techniques.
Not all the revelations are new. The extensive torture and killing of Mau Mau fighters and detainees was documented by two historians, Caroline Elkins from Harvard and Oxford University’s David Lee Anderson in their 2005 books, Britain’s Gulag and Histories of the Hanged.
Prof Elkins’ book in particular gives a vivid account of the shocking crimes committed by the British, which, ironically, came only seven years after the end of the Second World War in which the British and their allies set out to end the torture and mass killings in Nazi Germany and occupied countries.
Prof Elkins says: “Hundreds of thousands were detained in squalid camps fenced off with barbed wire and subjected to horrific torture.”
The torture of some was as much psychological as it was physical. In one passage, Prof Elkins quotes a witness recalling the result of a colonial soldiers’ sweep through their village.
“At one point the villagers were ordered to remove every article of clothing and remain stark naked. You cannot start to imagine the shame and embarrassment we felt when … we were told to arrange ourselves in two rows, one for the men and the other for the women, old and young alike. To everyone’s horror we were ordered at gunpoint to embrace each other, man with a woman, regardless of whether the man happened to be your father, father-in-law or brother. It was all so humiliating that one woman hanged herself later, as she felt that she could not continue to live with the humiliating experience of having been forced to embrace her son-in-law while both of them were naked. In (Kikuyu) custom that is a curse.”
Now, five decades after these wicked and shameful incidents happened in Kenya, an infamous name from among mountains of documents is catching the eyes of Bahraini revolutionaries whom, themselves, have been victimized by his inhumane and vile measures.
Ian Henderson who served as the British Colonial Officer in Kenya, and was nicknamed “torturer in chief” in the African country moved to Bahrain in the late 1960s and acted as the country’s security chief for some 30 years.
Henderson established one of the most notorious security systems in Bahrain, by which thousands of activists have allegedly been detained and tortured in the most brutal ways.
George Galloway, the former British parliamentarian has described Henderson’s cooperation with al-Khalifa regime in Bahrain as follows.
“Henderson had gathered around him the kind of British dogs of war and mercenaries whose guns and electric shock equipment were for hire to anyone who will pay the price”, he said.
At the same time that the High Court in London investigates the case brought up by the Kenyan victims, Bahraini revolutionaries’ efforts to bring Henderson to justice have so far led to nowhere.
This is while Queen Elizabeth has honored the butcher of Bahrain and the Kenyan torturer-in-chief with the Knight medal as well as the Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
Now, the question remains whether these four old Kenyan nationals will be able to achieve their rights while British politicians “only” claim that they are supporting human rights? The question will be answered in future.
“…the story was written and edited in Israel by Matti Friedman, a journalist who may have family ties to the Israeli military.”
Tonight I was examining AP’s recent reports on Israel-Palestine and noted additional articles by Matti Friedman. Since they all seem to contain such distinctly pro-Israel bias I decided to look into Friedman more to see what I could learn about his/her background.
It turns out that Friedman is male, grew up in Canada, and at the age of 16 won a “Bronfman Youth Fellowship” for an all-expense-paid five-week summer trip to Israel for Jewish high school students from North America to “encounter the land and people of Israel [and] study Judaism and major issues in contemporary Jewish life.”
The next year he moved to Israel, where he settled and has lived since 1995. And yes, he served in the Israeli military.
“Military service, with its trials, frustrations, and hard-won personal victories, is nearly always a formative experience for those who undergo it… The experience remains seared into the memory of the Amitim and Bronfman Fellows who have spent time in uniform, long after they return to civilian life.”
Now Friedman works as a correspondent for AP’s control bureau for Israel-Palestine, where he writes news articles that are consistently Israeli-centric in their wording and focus and, especially, in which information they include and which facts they leave out. Perhaps it’s not surprising that he consistently mentions Israeli injuries and deaths while rarely mentioning Palestinian ones, even though the latter occur far more often.
It may not be surprising human behavior, but it is unacceptable journalism.
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For more articles on journalists covering Israel-Palestine who have ties to the Israeli military see:
Last night I went to Columbia University to see Omar Barghouti discuss his new book, “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights.” For those who don’t know, Barghouti is one of the BDS movement’s most effective strategists and promoters, basing his advocacy on a platform of human rights and international law while explicitly rejecting arcane ideology. His book offers the most in-depth and accessible analysis to date of the movement, its history, and why it is gaining so much momentum. Read an excerpt here.
During his talk, Barghouti mentioned that he had approached J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami about arranging a debate on BDS. The response from Ben-Ami was as follows, according to Barghouti: “We want to keep this debate inside the Jewish community. So we won’t participate in a debate with any Palestinians.”
Barghouti joked, “Why would BDS have anything to do with Palestinians?” He went on to describe Ben-Ami’s policy as racist.
Last December, I debated the issue of BDS against the director of J Street U, Daniel May. My debate partner was Rebecca Vilkomerson of Jewish Voice for Peace. Daniel May’s partner was a Jewish student from Princeton also named Daniel May. Everyone involved in the debate was an Ashkenazi Jew, yet we were debating a movement founded and controlled by Palestinian civil society. If I had known at the time that J Street had an alleged policy of refusing to debate with non-Jews, especially Palestinians, I would not have participated at all. […]
Last week, the Columbia University chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) responded to a demand by the campus Hillel house for a “dialogue session” by requesting a debate instead. SJP’s leadership told Hillel’s director that he could choose the topic, time and place of the debate. Hillel refused the proposal. Besides international law and human rights, what do they have to be afraid of?
“The CPRs [Communities of Popular Resistance] exist because the army has forced us to resist. We carry with us the scraps of bombs and bullets that you tried to kill us with. (…)You know very well that we are not guerrillas, but rather peasants, civilians; you know well how you have fired on our huts, which you’ve burned many times before (…) You have bombarded our communities, kidnapped thousands of our brothers; you have also ordered civilian patrols to stop us from setting up businesses (…). The Constitution gives us the right to resist when you place yourself above the reproach of civil society, when you persecute us, when you kidnap us illegally, when you have poisoned our rivers and tried to kill us by starvation.” ~ Message to the Guatemalan Army from the CPRs.
At first sight, CPR-Salvador Farjado (Petén) seems like any other community in Guatemala. A few small shops, a school, and houses made of wooden boards, out of which one can catch always smell that wafting, warm perfume—firewood being burnt in preparation for dinner.
About 400 families—hailing from Cobán, Santa Rosa, Alta Verapaz, Huehuetenango and Chimaltenango—now live in Salvador Fajardo, a meager human community carved out of a small portion of the Petén jungle. There, I got to know Ms. Elvira, who told me of her past and of the community’s history, which reflect the extreme extent of violence that Guatemala had seen until 1996.
The Guatemalan state has always been characterized as authoritarian, militarized, and managed by the ruling classes to serve their own interests. In the ’60s, various guerilla groups began to form as state violence and repression increased. These groups joined together as the URNG (Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity) in 1982.
The tension between guerrillas and the army intensified between ’78 and ’83: but the atrocious “scorched earth politics” advanced by the ‘Kaibiles‘ special operations unit, the PACs (Civilian Self Defense Patrols), and various paramilitary groups, showed clearly that the growing counter-insurgency effort was, without a doubt, disproportionately brutal.
According to the Historical Clarification Commission of Guatemala, the total sum of both dead and ‘disappeared’ during the conflict in Guatemala is over 200,000, 83% of which are indigenous Mayans. In their report, the Commission writes: “The great majority of these human rights violations were carried out viciously and in public. […] Assassinating defenseless boys and girls, on many occasions by throwing them against walls or tossing them into ditches alive, only later to be buried by the corpses of adults; the traumatic amputation or removing of limbs; assassination by being burned alive; disembowelment of still-living victims with others looking on; the internment of victims who had already been fatally tortured, and keeping them alive deliberately in a state of constant agony; the cutting open of pregnant womens’ stomachs. Extreme cruelty was consciously utilized as a technique to create a climate of terror in the population. The vast majority of victims of the State’s actions were not guerrilla combatants, but rather civilians.”
It is estimated that in the early ’80s, between 500,000 and 1 and a half million people were forced to flee from Guatemala because of the violence: of these, around 150,000 took refuge in Mexico, while the rest were condemned to continual, internal displacement within the country. Some of these internally displaced persons [IDPs] formed the CPRs: in Ixcán, in the high plateaus of Quiché (CPR Sierra), and in the Petén jungle. These then became the preferred target of military operations.
The CPR-Petén hid in the impenetrable snare that is the Lacandon Jungle, in a strip of Guatemalan land that borders the Eastern frontier of Chiapas. Ms. Elvira, who was originally displaced from the Santa Rosa District, lived there for 12 years. She gladly recounted her experience there, in what has come to be known as “the mountain” in Salvador Fajardo.
Back then, military incursions were so frequent that every morning the families of the CPR-Petén packed up the few things that they had so that they would be ready to flee at any moment. “We always had lookouts at four different points”, Ms. Elvira told me. “When the army arrived, a shot fired into the air was the signal that it was time to grab your suitcase and go. And the army would make incursions continually: sometimes every four days, at the very least every month. When they came, we had to escape, to go to some other part of the mountains—if we didn’t have enough time to take our things, they would just destroy everything. So we would set up camp somewhere else, because the army already knew where we’d settled and would check to see if we came back—that’s why you would never return to the same encampment.”
Ms. Elvira told me about the difficulties she faced in those years, of the constant fear, of a solidarity of both the community and hunger. One ate what the jungle gave you: roots, plants, and fruits. Some managed to get into Mexico to get food—“a bit limited”, Ms. Elvira emphasizes. “Sometimes when community members walked around they would come across milpas [small crop fields] and they would steal a little bit of corn to feed their children…there were a lot of children in the mountain. We cooked what little bit of corn they took: we would walk around with a mill and a pot, and wherever you came across corn you would grind it right there. We would make little balls of dough out of it and then wrap it in leaves. Then we would go look for a place to eat safely, each person with their own portion tucked away in their bag, but you couldn’t light a fire in the daytime, because there was always a plane hovering over the mountain—if it detected the smoke from a campfire, it would drop bombs on the whole encampment. So we would cook at night.”
After the final offensive in 1992, the displaced families of CPR-Petén realised that the army would no longer be as vigilant of their presence, and that they had the possibility to settle down in the Lacandon Jungle. There they founded four communities: Fajardo, Esmeralda, Virgilio, and Albeño, where they sowed milpa fields and vegetable gardens. They also decided to begin pressuring the government to award them a finca [agricultural plot of land] so that they could leave the jungle and begin life anew.
It was in 1998 that the CPR-Petén founded a community in memory of Salvador Fajardo in Santa Rita, after the “Firm and Lasting Peace Agreement” (1996) was signed. Fajardo was a community member who, in the ’80s, after the umpteenth flight to the jungle, offered to return to the encampment to retrieve their pots and pans. When he arrived, he found that the army had already taken all except one pot, which was sitting in the middle of a campfire. When he lifted it up, it exploded—a mine had been planted beneath the firewood.
“When we came here we didn’t bring anything with us, because we had nothing to bring, but after being here for awhile many organizations supported us”, Ms. Elvira told me. “The only governmental institution that gave us a little bit of support was FONAPAZ [National Peace Fund]: they helped by giving us food, but it wasn’t much. Everything we have was possible because of support from international organizations: the preschool and elementary school, the clinic, the radio station, the store. But the government did not fulfill its promises—the only thing it followed up on was building a mechanical well to secure a water supply. And sure, they bore the well; they even bought a bomb to clear it out but in the end it didn’t serve us well: after three months it was completely dry and we were left without water. The municipality didn’t help us either, instead claiming we were guerrillas—they discriminated against us.”
Many have accused members of the CPRs of being part of the UNRG, but they have always responded that they have only ever served as bases of support for the guerrillas, whom they guaranteed a place to eat and rest. In exchange, the UNRG offered an indispensable service to the CPRs: “the guerrillas defended us, because in reality, if the guerrillas were not around, the army would have annihilated us already. They were with us; they knew that there were people, women and children, elders, defenseless people here. It was when they neglected us, when they retreated from the surrounding area, that the army would come in. But as long as they were with us, nothing would happen to us”, said Ms. Elvira—a very special woman indeed.
Al Nuaman is a Palestinian village in southeast Jerusalem. Israel annexed it to Jerusalem in 1967, yet its people weren’t given Jerusalem residency rights. Today, the residents of Al Nuaman continue to fight for the right to remain on their lands.
A Brazilian subsidiary of Israel’s Elbit Systems Ltd. has won an $85 million contract to upgrade eleven Brazilian Air Force F-5 fighter-bomber jets, Elbit announced in a press release on 11 April. The contract will be carried out in 2013.
The subsidiary is AEL Sistemas, a Brazilian company that became part of the Elbit Systems Group in 2001. Elbit Systems Ltd. is one of the world’s largest defense electronics manufacturers and integrators.
In addition to its numerous international contracts, Elbit Systems also provides both Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and other military technology for Israel’s Occupation forces, as well as security systems for the Separation Wall and settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory.
Responding to the new contract, Elbit Systems president and CEO Joseph Ackerman said, “We trust that the new contract will further strengthen the excellent cooperation between AEL, Embraer and the Brazilian Air Force, and we hope that other customers will decide to follow Brazil and select our combat-proven upgrade programs.”
In January of this year Elbit also announced that AEL was awarded a contract to supply Hermes(R) 450 Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) to the Brazilian Air Force.
According to Elbit, the project is part of the Brazilian Air Forces’ objective to establish independent UAS capabilities, allowing for self-reliant operation and development of UAS in Brazil.
AEL is not Elbit’s only subsidiary in Brazi. In January 2011, Elbit announced that it had purchased two more Brazilian companies: Ares Aeroespecial e Defesa, and Periscopio Equipamentos Optronicos.
Elbit also recently announced that a subsidiary of Elbit Systems of America, M7 Aerospace, was awarded a $15.6 million contract with the U.S. Navy for logistics support and maintenance for a mixed fleet of seven C-26 and UC-35 utility aircraft.
In March, the company announced another contract for $9.6M to provide a laser target designator and marker to the United States Marine Corps.
Elbit is a war profiteer and has earned much from Israel’s numerous attacks and assaults on the Palestinian and Lebanese people. Gaza and southern Lebanon in particular serve as testing grounds for Elbit’s weapons and technology, as it continually develops and enhances its products based on the expertise gained by the attacks on the people in this area, according to a profile of the company from War Resisters International.
“Elbit supplies a surveillance system that is part of the separation barrier being built by the Israeli government in the West Bank. The construction of parts of the barrier may be considered to constitute violations of international law, and Elbit, through its supply contract, is thus helping to sustain these violations,” the Council wrote to the Ministry of Finance.
“The Council on Ethics considers the Fund’s investment in Elbit to constitute an unacceptable risk of complicity in serious violations of fundamental ethical norms.”
“When you’re criticized”, what should you do? asks Brian Martin, a scholar of non-violence. His answer: “Assess the way audiences are likely to perceive things.” That is, create the right impression.
Martin has written an article soon to be published in the Journal of Scholarly Publishing about how to respond to criticism, but it seems he also offers a guide to scholars on how to talk to non-scholars in popular forums – particularly those who have been criticized.
Martin may have been inspired to write his article because he has been criticized here and elsewhere for belonging to a dodgy organization that does openly what the CIA used to do covertly, namely, help people in country’s abroad overthrow their governments. That might not be such a bad thing were the successor regimes leftwing and advanced human progress but they’re invariably rightwing and keen to open their doors to US military bases and exploitation by Western capital.
What’s interesting about the advice that Martin delivers is that he seems to be telling scholars to shed their cloaks of dispassionate scholarly contemplation, in favour of a style of attack suited to persuading non-scholars. His advice: Ignore obscure critics who have no profile (otherwise you’ll give them credibility) and reply only to those who can command an audience. And then to do so with short, clear, punchy replies. Few people will read long, detailed, counter-arguments. Brevity and clarity are important.
If your aim is to win as many people to your side as you can, as opposed to say, thrashing out the issues in scholarly debate to arrive at the truth, there could be no better advice. Which makes you wonder why a scholar is recommending tactics more familiar to those who practice the cut and thrust of sharp political debate, than a battle of evidence and reasoned argument. Could it be that he’s a politician at heart?
I think so. The International Center for Nonviolent Conflict, the outfit Martin belongs to as an academic adviser, is an advocacy organization for non-violent direct action, or what is sometimes deceptively called “peace scholarship.” Peace scholars are not at all interested in peace as you and I understand it (say, avoiding unnecessary conflict). Instead, peace studies amount to figuring out how to win in a political conflict without using insurrectionary violence (because it is often ineffective against modern militaries) or traditional military methods (because it is often impractical). Seizing political power through the use of strikes, demonstrations, boycotts and non-violent sabotage – what used to be called destabilization – is what non-violent conflict is all about, according to the ICNC’s principals. Not surprisingly, militaries take a keen interest in peace scholarship. After all, it’s concerned with what militaries have traditionally existed to do, namely, guard political power at home and take it abroad. It’s not by accident that peace scholars sometimes refer to their discipline as the study of non-violent warfare.
Ah, but the phrase “peace scholarship” makes seizing power through destabilization sound leftwing and gosh, peaceful. It couldn’t possibly be a CIA-style thing, right?
Think again. It’s implicitly understood that when peace scholars talk about seizing political power that this is to happen in other countries, and not, God forbid, the United States, where the ICNC’s chiefs are firmly ensconced in the US establishment leading very comfortable lives, thank-you very much. They would hardly want to carry out a people power revolution close to ICNC headquarters.
The ICNC’s defenders say that Ackerman’s connections are irrelevant, and that bringing them up amounts to assigning guilt by association. They have charged one of the ICNC’s most vigorous critics, Michael Barker, with trying to discredit sincere peace activists through a line of attack that amounts to singling out people because “they may have once been in a room with someone who may or may not have worked for the CIA.”
The rhetoric is clear, brief, punchy and memorable – exactly what, one suspects, Martin would recommend. The only problem is that it’s wrong.
And that’s where Martin seems to have taken a wrong turn in his upcoming article. He seems more concerned with impression-making – of the kind that turns a wealthy establishment figure who works at overthrowing the bad boys on the State Department hit list into a left-leaning peacenik — and less with truth-telling. It’s like he’s saying to scholars: “Okay, now let me tell you how successful politicians and PR executives cover up embarrassing revelations.”
Well, one thing politicians, PR experts and other bamboozlers do is to prey on the weaknesses of people’s cognitive heuristics: that is, the ways they deal with complexity and too much information.
How do you tell whether the advice you’re receiving is sound? One way is to evaluate the credentials of the person offering it. For example, who are you going to believe about how you ought to deal with your troubling hernia — a licensed physician, or the local health food fanatic with a certificate in reflexology who peddles hot stone massage and flax seed oil? Evaluating statements about, say nuclear physics or hernia operations, by examining the credentials of the source is a good idea, if you know nothing about nuclear physics or hernias. Cognitive heuristics (that is, mental short-cuts) often work, but sometimes they can lead you astray, especially when unscrupulous people use them to lead you by the hand down the garden path.
One example of using peoples’ mental short-cuts to trip them up is a woman who not too long ago created a huge profile for herself by dispensing tough-love advice to troubled people on the radio. She called herself Dr., lending the impression that she was a psychiatrist or counselling psychologist – a person with credentials to deal with troubled individuals. She was neither. She was, instead, a Ph. D. in physiology. It’s as if your dentist, Dr. Hackensack, masquerades as a physician.
Another example would be a scholar writing a book which he prefaces with a short article by a well-known person who knows nothing about his book. He then presents the book as My Big Ideas, by Dr. X, with a forward by a well-known and admired person. This creates the impression that the well-known person endorses the book, and that the book – and its ideas — must therefore be worth paying attention to. Has this actually happened? Perhaps. Listen to this interview with journalist and science writer Fred Jerome, beginning at the 40 minute mark.
Stephen Zunes, the chief ICNC scholar, makes a habit of letting people know he is a professor with a Ph. D. He often refers to his docent, Ackerman, as Dr. Ackerman, but never as junk bond king Michael Milken’s former right-hand man or “the sniff” as he was known by his colleagues, for plumbing Milken’s proctological depths. Zunes, the sniff’s sniff, also makes sure to refer to critics as Mr. or Ms. even when he hasn’t the slightest idea whether they’re also Ph.D.s, who happen to shun honorific titles and therefore don’t make a big display of their educational attainments. Peacock-like credential displays, with the added intimation that your critics haven’t any, says: “I’m an expert; my critics aren’t. Who are you going to believe?”
Gravitas is related. Noam Chomsky’s gravitas is based on his reputation as a high profile linguist, his connection to MIT, and his prolific book-writing. A short-cut to evaluating whether what he says makes sense is to refer to his credentials. Wow, a guy like this must know what he’s talking about. Astonishingly, someone recently wrote a Z-Net article making a case whose support was largely that his position was based on what Chomsky told him. He was hoping to earn instant credibility by exploiting the cognitive heuristic that makes you deem anything Chomsky says as probably true (or probably wrong if you dislike him) without actually having to do the leg-work to figure it out yourself.
Many people hope that gravitas will unburden them of actually having to produce evidence for what they claim and it appears the hope is not always in vain. They can then make all manner of bold statements and expect to be believed, because, well…they have gravitas. That’s not to say Chomsky does this. But others do.
Here’s an interesting exercise. Read through one of Stephen Zunes’ articles and notice how many statements he makes with complete certitude about matters he couldn’t possibly know to be true. For example, in a recent article he said: “What has been remarkable about the successful civil uprisings against the Tunisian and Egyptian dictatorships, the serious popular challenges to the Yemeni and Bahraini dictatorships and the smaller-scale protests sweeping the region, is that they were completely indigenous and not sullied by foreign intervention.”
To this, I have three replies. First, how could Zunes, or anyone else, possibly know this? Second, what evidence of this does he offer? Answer: Not a speck. And third, if completely indigenous uprisings unsullied by foreign intervention are remarkable, it must be that uprisings that aren’t indigenous and are sullied by foreign intervention are the norm, otherwise how would the indigenous ones be so remarkable? And yet Zunes is always prattling on about how the uprisings in which Uncle Sam and the ICNC have had an obvious hand (e.g., Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, and attempts in Belarus and Iran) were completely or largely indigenous. It seems Zunes just makes it up as he goes.
Through what magic does he get away with it? The answer is in Martin’s upcoming article. Assess the way the audience is likely to perceive things. And then prey on their mental shortcuts. When you’re short on evidence—or the truth is embarrassing–it’s the only way to go.
The Palestinian village of Deir Yassin was one of five Palestinian villages to the west of Jerusalem that were completely cleansed and destroyed during the ethnic cleansing of 1948 (the other four are Qalunia, Sarris, Beit Surek and Biddou), during the creation of the state of Israel.
Original buildings from the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin are now used by the Kfar Shaul Mental Health Centre, constructed on remains of the village
The village is now best known for the massacre that was committed by the Zionist underground paramilitary groups Irgun and Lehi on 9 April1948, during which around 200 Palestinians were assassinated in cold blood by shooting or hand grenades thrown at their homes.
Deir Yassin was located on the western outskirts of Jerusalem. Most of the village remains have since been destroyed. The area is currently known as Givat Shaoul, and is a largely orthodox Jewish neighborhood. It is also home to Kfar Shaul Mental Health Center, Jerusalem’s largest psychiatric facility, which uses some of the remaining village homes in the hospital compound.
At present, the Venezuelan Jewish community is building a luxury apartment complex on the site of the village. The Jerusalem Municipality, upon approving the Venezuelan development, said that it hopes the surrounding neighbourhood will absorb the Venezuelan immigrants into Jerusalem.
The complex has been named Pninat Har Nof. In addition to the luxury apartments, the Pninat Har Nof complex will have a park for children and a common space building that will house a gym, spa, sauna, squash, and a party room, according to the website.
“As long as the $1.2-trillion annual budget for the military-security complex is off limits (to cutting), nothing can be done about the US budget deficit except to renege on obligations to the elderly, confiscate private assets or print enough money to inflate away all debts,” Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Treasury Secretary under President Reagan warns.
In an article titled “Stealing from Social Security to Pay for Wars and Bailouts,” published in the April issue of the “Rock Creek Free Press” of Washington, D.C., Roberts says that Republicans are calling Social Security and Medicare “entitlements”—making them sound like welfare—when, in fact, workers over their lifetimes have contributed 15 percent of all their earnings to the payroll tax that funds these benefits and have every right to them.
And far from Social Security being in the red, between 1984 and 2009, Roberts writes, “the American people contributed $2-trillion…more to Social Security and Medicare in payroll taxes than was paid out in benefits” but “the government stole” that sum to fund wars and pork-barrel projects!
What’s more, under one realistic estimate, far from crashing into the red, “Social Security(OASDI) will have produced surplus revenues of $31.6-trillion by 2085, Roberts says.
Americans, apparently, are unaware of how the federal government’s illegal, foreign wars sap the economy and rob every household. The Iraq war cost alone is 20 percent of the size of last year’s entire U.S. economy. Instead of investing that sum at home, “which would have produced income and jobs growth and solvency for state and local governments, the US government wasted the equivalent of 20% of the economy in 2010 in blowing up infrastructure and people in foreign lands,” Roberts says.
“The US government spent a huge sum of money committing war crimes, while millions of Americans were thrown out of their jobs and foreclosed out of their homes,” he added. Viewed another way, the Pentagon continues to expand and put people to work to modernize its 700-800 bases abroad in order to dominate every corner of the globe while public works and public employment in America are going into the toilet.
“When short-term and long-term discouraged workers are added …the US has an unemployment rate of 22%,” Robert says. A country with that large a percentage out of work “has a shrunken tax base and feeble consumer purchasing power.”
The U.S. media, he claims, is only reporting one-third of the real cost of the wars, leaving out the sums needed for “lifelong care for the wounded and maimed, the cost of lifelong military pensions of those who fought in the wars, the replacement costs of the destroyed equipment, the opportunity cost of the resources wasted in war, and other costs.”
President Obama’s budget, if passed, doesn’t reduce the deficit over the next 10 years by enough to cover the projected deficit in the fiscal year 2012 budget alone, the financial authority writes. “Indeed, the deficits are likely to be substantially larger than forecast,” as the military-industrial complex “is more powerful than ever and shows no inclination to halt the wars for US hegemony,” Roberts says.
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Sherwood Ross heads a public relations firm “for good causes” and also runs the Anti-War News Service. Reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com
On February 13, 1960, France carried out its first nuclear test in Algeria’s southern Reggane region. According to official statistics, 17 nuclear tests were carried out in total over the next 6 years. The area remains affected, and local scientists say that radioactive contamination has caused genetic mutations and irreversibly changed the region.
There are no official statistics on the number of victims. The only figures can be found in the records kept by the French representative of the local church, which lists 42,000 victims of nuclear tests. Three years ago, the French Ministry of Defense issued a statement, putting the number at 27,000 people. The victims include French soldiers as well as local Algerians who lived in the surrounding areas. … continue
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