JPF Notes & Comment

2010-05-17T19:10:00.000-04:00

Andrew Feffer

The White Ribbon: A Film Review

Andrew Feffer is associate professor of history and co-director of film studies at Union College.

The White Ribbon
(Das Weisse Band: Eine Deutsche Kindergeschicte)
Directed and written by Michael Haneke (2009)

A doctor’s horse is tripped by a wire as he gallops into his yard. A farm wife loses her life in a brutal accident at the local baron’s mill. Children are mysteriously abused. A gnawing sense of dark uncertainty hangs over the village in which these events take place. A mystery unfolds.

As in Caché, director Michael Haneke’s other masterpiece on the politics of silence and denial, that mystery never gets fully resolved in The White Ribbon. Instead, Haneke draws from it a subtle and intentionally elusive picture of collective historical responsibility. Caché brought to the door of the urbane and comfortable Parisian middle-class responsibility for the crimes of its deliberately brutal civil servants: the 1961 massacre by Paris police of French Algerian demonstrators, as well as the Algerian war they were protesting. The White Ribbon takes on something much larger.

Audiences and critics have seen in The White Ribbon an explanation for the rise of Nazism. The events of the film are set in a fictional northern German village on the eve of World War I. The children around whom the action centers are of the Hitler generation, born just after the turn of the 20th century, teens and young adults at the time of the 1923 Munich putsch, and the heart of the electorate that voted National Socialism into power in 1933. Haneke, however, is not happy with such a simple historically-bound interpretation. As he has told interviewers, the film is much more broadly about devotion to ideology borne of pain and suffering, and how unflagging and rigid beliefs such as governed villages like the one in the film led and still lead to terrorism of all sorts.

Such a broadly social and psychological approach allows Haneke an uncommon perspective on the historical events that he explores in this brilliant film. Styled as a simple children’s story (it is subtitled in German Eine Deutsche Kindergeschicte) about ordinary life in rural Germany before the First World War, The White Ribbon offers us no hints of the later decadence and decline of the Weimar period, the rootless urban populations of post-Versailles Berlin (as in Rainer Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz and Bob Fosse’s Cabaret), the criminality of the mob stirring up the violence of the masses (to use Hannah Arendt’s well-worn explanation of totalitarian dynamics).

Instead we see just the opposite: a cohesive rural, semi-feudal yet prosperous village of the sort supposedly resistant to the acids of modernity, according to which the historically-minded among us usually explain the rise of fascism. The apparent stability and order of the community even opens up to an early scene of bucolic revelry during a harvest festival, reminiscent of the late medieval paintings of Pieter Breughel the Elder. Wine flows and table boards groan under the bounty of the fields and munificence of the baron, whose estate employs most of the locals at harvesting grain and cutting timber. What could be more idyllic?

Except it is not. The prosperity of the village rests on the grueling labor of peasants, farmers, and transient agricultural workers, the kind of labor that occasionally chews up one of the locals in the gears of the sawmill’s machinery. Civil order depends on the regular application of discipline and punishment, mainly directed at the village children, whose whippings, beatings and humiliations punctuate the story with a kind of muted, barely visible horror. Such punishment, inflicted in one scene by the local Lutheran minister on his two oldest children, is meant not only to prevent violation of rules and norms (they have come home late for dinner), but also to sustain in them a gnawing contemplation of shame, signified by the white ribbons the pastor forces his daughter and son to wear as visible reminders of the purity and innocence they have lost by disobeying their father.

In drawing our attention to the white ribbon, to the children’s shame as a formative influence on their public lives, Haneke moves the dynamics of totalitarianism back into the era before the Great War, the catastrophic event that ends the unresolved mystery that comprises the “children’s story” of the film. We can no longer simply blame the war’s devastation and the subsequent burdens of Versailles for creating the conditions under which the proverbial “rise of Hitler” took place. Rather, to understand the terrible history of the 20th century we have to look at factors deeply engrained in European culture: the clerical authoritarianism of the Reformation, the cynical irresponsibility of modern science (as represented by the village doctor whose evident competence masks a deeply selfish and brutalizing callousness), and the dehumanizing pragmatism of the baron’s political authority, barely hidden behind his paternalistic beneficence.

Each of the village’s most respectable citizens exercises power through the practice of a violence so automatic and naturalized that it does not elicit comment by any of the others, who (with only minor exception) fail not only to take responsibility for what is happening around them, but fail even to recognize that there is a problem for which responsibility must be taken. Until, of course, it is too late, and the violence (along with the shame and humiliation it cultivates) is internalized by the town’s children into mutual brutality and selfishness, visible in their abject postures, averted gazes and stolen glances, and manifest in their actions. Only the teacher (the teller of the tale, whose voice-over puts an unintentionally ironic distance on the events, as if what was so horrible in that year of 1913-14 would be passed through to a less rather than more terrifying era) sustains a remnant of the 19th-century humanism that was destroyed by the mass hysterias of the twentieth.

As in his other films, Haneke relieves this relentless picture of repression and shame with the occasional redemptive moment. A romance that unfolds between the teacher and a much younger nanny seems to be headed toward the kind of inequality and domination that characterizes most of the other relationships in the village. One can imagine a future for the two of them governed by the sort of patriarchal authority that the pastor exercises over his wife and children. Yet as the teacher drives the girl out into the countryside for a picnic and what would seem to be the usual assignation with which a conventional marriage is launched, the relationship suddenly changes. The girl asks to turn back for the sake of her reputation. In a brief exchange of glances we see in the teacher a simple recognition of her needs and respect for her as a person, a kind of reciprocity otherwise squeezed out of village life by its regimes of labor, worship and paternal rule. He turns the carriage around. She smiles, kisses him gently and leans her head on his shoulder.

Other scenes convey the resistance of a farm boy to baronial authority and a midwife’s refusal of the doctor’s humiliation, depicted with the kind of visual subtlety rare among contemporary filmmakers. These moments signify narrow openings toward enlightenment and equality, and so this exceptional film leaves us with some alternatives to the shame and humiliation, the brutality that spread itself so darkly over the continent as the century unfolded. •

— This article appears in April 2010 issue of Shalom: Jewish Peace Letter, the monthly online magazine of Jewish Peace Fellowship [www.jewishpeacefellowship.org].

War Watch: Iran

2007-09-28T09:50:00.000-04:00

With all the fussing and feuding over the “Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Visits Columbia University” sideshow earlier this week, the herd journalists of our national news media largely overlooked a Senate vote three days later that may well serve as a license for military action against Iran’s noxious president and his nation.

David Bromwich provides the background in “Hillary Clinton Votes for War Again,” available at The Huffington Post Web site.

The vote in question was on a revised version of a measure called the Kyl-Lieberman amendment, which passed 76-22.

Bromwich focuses on two troublesome provisions.

The first states “that it should be the policy of the United States to stop inside Iraq the violent activities and destabilizing influence of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, its foreign facilitators such as Lebanese Hezbollah, and its indigenous Iraqi proxies.”

The inclusion of Hezbollah [Bromwich notes] deserves some notice. It is part of a larger attempt, already apparent in the Lebanon war of 2006, to manufacture an “amalgam” of all the enemies of Israel and the United States throughout the region, and to treat them all as one enemy. Those who believe in the amalgam will come to agree that many more wars by the United States and Israel are needed to crush this enemy.

The Kyl-Lieberman amendment’s second troublesome provision, according to Bromwich, is its designation of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard as a “foreign terrorist organization.”

Now, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard is the largest branch of the Iranian military. By granting Vice President Cheney’s wish (a distant dream in 2005) to put the Iranian guard on the U.S. terrorist list, the Senate has classified the army of Iran as an army of terrorists. The president, therefore, as he follows out the Cheney plan has all the support he requires for asserting in his next speech to an army or veterans group that Iran is a nation of terrorists.

The group of senators who voted against the measure consists of 20 Democrats and 2 Republicans:

Biden (D-DE)
Bingaman (D-NM)
Boxer (D-CA)
Brown (D-OH)
Byrd (D-WV)
Cantwell (D-WA)
Dodd (D-CT)
Feingold (D-WI)
Harkin (D-IA)
Inouye (D-HI)
Kennedy (D-MA)
Kerry (D-MA)
Klobuchar (D-MN)
Leahy (D-VT)
Lincoln (D-AR)
McCaskill (D-MO)
Sanders (I-VT)
Tester (D-MT)
Webb (D-VA)
Wyden (D-OR)

Hagel (R-NE)
Lugar (R-IN)

It is worthwhile noting that two of the dissenting Democrats — Biden and Dodd — are currently seeking their party’s presidential nomination.

Of two other Democrats engaged in the same quest, Bromwich has some pointed observations.

On Barak Obama, who was absent from the Senate vote:

In a speech in Iowa on September 12, he addressed by anticipation the matter before the Senate in Kyl-Lieberman: “We hear eerie echoes of the run-up to the war in Iraq in the way that the President and Vice President talk about Iran. They conflate Iran and al Qaeda. They issue veiled threats. They suggest that the time for diplomacy and pressure is running out when we haven’t even tried direct diplomacy. Well George Bush and Dick Cheney must hear — loud and clear — from the American people and the Congress: you don’t have our support, and you don’t have our authorization for another war.”

It is baffling that a man who spoke those words two weeks ago could not find the time or the resolve to cast his vote in a conspicuous test for authorizing war on Iran. This seems to be one more demonstration of Obama’s tendency never to take a step forward without a step to the side. As for his own message about Iran, it has not been “loud and clear,” but muffled, wavering, experimental.

And on Hillary Clinton:

With Hillary Clinton, we know where we stand. [On September 26] she voted to bring the country a serious step closer to war against Iran. And she did so for the same reason that she voted to authorize the war on Iraq. She thinks the next war is going to happen. She hopes the worst of its short-term effects on America will have died down before the election. She suspects the media and voters will show more trust for a candidate who supported than for one who opposed the war. She wants a ponderous establishment of American troops and super-bases to remain in the Middle East for years to come. If she wins the presidency, she will inherit the command of that army and those bases, and she believes she can manage their affairs more prudently than George W. Bush.

Hillary Clinton is consistent. Every move is calculated, her actual intentions are masked, but the total drift is easy to comprehend...

— Barnett Axelrad

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Shtarker Envy

2007-09-16T20:23:00.000-04:00

Norman Podhoretz’s latest book, World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism, was published last week — on September 11, no less.

This blog posted a preview-review based on an article of his in Commentary magazine’s June issue. (See the entry, “Norman Podhoretz’s Big Sandy,” June 16.)

But hats off to Ian Buruma, whose review of the book in the September 27 issue of The New York Review of Books, nails what ails Podhoretz, the most over-the-top militarist since Air Force General Curtis “Bomb ’Em Back to the Stone Age” LeMay, of the good ol’ days of Vietnam and “light at the end of the tunnel.”

Podhoretz’s “Rosebud,” writes Buruma, is his now famous (infamous, to some) 1963 essay, “My Negro Problem — and Ours.”

Calling it an “articulate analysis of the obsession with power and violence,” Buruma notes:

The key to Podhoretz's politics seems to me to lie right there: the longing for power, for toughness, for the Shtarker who doesn't give a damn about anyone or anything, and hatred of the contemptible, cowardly liberals with their pandering ways and their double standards. Since Podhoretz, himself a bookish man, can never be a Shtarker, his government must fill that role, and not give a damn about anyone or anything. And not only the US government, but Israel too. Arik Sharon was a typical Shtarker, and thus much admired. Bibi Netanyahu tries hard to be a Shtarker. The US was enviably tough against the Nazis, and then against the Communists, and is now called to arms once more against the Islamofascists. Since Western Europe seems destined to be "conquered from within by Islamofascism," just as it had been once by Hitler's blitzkrieg, America must go it alone this time, with a little help from the Brits. As in "World War III" against the Soviet Empire, this World War IV against Islamofascism will be "a test of the overall worth of the United States as a nation among nations." The words, quoted by Podhoretz, are George Kennan's, who regretted having said them, because they were interpreted as a call for military action, which is not what he had intended. Podhoretz uses them as though he had.

From there Buruma goes on to dismantle Podhoretz’s hosannas for “our great president,” George W. Bush, whom, he notes, Richard Perle and other neocons seem to have abandoned as an incompetent member of the warrior class — as well as Podhoretz’s McCarthyite smears of virtually anyone who does not share his view.

Even more valuable than his critique of Podhoretz — who by now is a stuck needle on a record blaring Sousa marches, 24/7 — is Buruma’s admonition of former liberal and leftist “tub-thumpers for Bush’s war,” such as Christopher Hitchens and Paul Berman.

Podhoretz’s “judgments are those of a right-wing ideologue,” Buruma writes. “The fact that neoleftists share his judgments is, in my view, foolish. The fact that some of them do so in the name of liberalism betrays the very principles they claim to be defending.”

You can read Ian Buruma’s entire essay by clicking <here>.

— Adam Simms
for JPF

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Let’s Play God

2007-09-12T17:46:00.002-04:00

A federal appeals court ruled earlier this week that a jury foreman’s citations of biblical verses appearing to support capital punishment were not prejudicial in persuading the jury to sentence Stevie Lamar Fields to death.

The Los Angeles Times’ report, excerpted below, is fairly representative of general reporting about the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court’s 9-6 ruling:

Appeals court upholds death sentence
A juror's reciting Bible verses did not taint the verdict for Stevie Lamar Fields, a panel rules.
By Henry Weinstein, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

September 11, 2007

A federal appeals court Monday refused to overturn the death sentence of convicted murderer Stevie Lamar Fields, rejecting claims that the jury foreman had tainted penalty deliberations by reciting Bible verses, including "Eye for eye, tooth for tooth."

Fields was convicted in the 1978 rape, robbery and murder of Rosemary Carr Cobb, a USC student librarian. At the time, he was on parole for a manslaughter conviction.

During penalty deliberations, foreman Rodney White researched and recited for his fellow jurors several biblical passages, among them, "He that killeth any man shall surely be put to death."

Writing for the 9-6 majority, U.S. 9th Circuit Judge Pamela Ann Rymer said that the verses, as well as White's notes listing pros and cons of the death penalty -- including "deterrence" on the pro side and "human fallibility" on the con side -- were "notions of general currency that inform the moral judgment that capital-case jurors are called upon to make."

Rymer said that it clearly was permissible for White to cite the verses from memory. Consequently, she said, "it is difficult to see how sharing notes can be constitutionally infirm if sharing memory isn't."

She said the court did not have to reach the issue of juror misconduct on the foreman's actions. Even assuming White did something wrong, Rymer wrote, "we are persuaded that White's notes had no substantial and injurious effect or influence in determining the jury's verdict."

Monday's ruling reverses one rendered seven years ago by U.S. District Judge Dickran Tevrizian. Although he upheld Fields' conviction, Tevrizian set aside the death sentence, concluding that the jury's consideration of biblical references went against the principle that religion may not play a role in sentencing.

The jury had been deadlocked 7 to 5 in favor of sentencing Fields to life without possibility of parole. But after hearing the foreman, the panel voted unanimously to send Fields to the gas chamber.

It’s only when you dig a little deeper that you begin to wonder about the court majority’s benign view that the jury's foreman merely retailed “notions of general currency that inform the moral judgment that capital-case jurors are called upon to make.”

Anne Reed, a Milwaukee-based attorney, posted the jury foreman’s notes on Capital Defense Weekly's blog site. Here’s Reed’s take:

It’s the sentencing phase of Stevie Fields’s 1979 death penalty murder trial in California. The jury foreman’s name is Rodney White. After the first day of deliberations, White goes home, pulls out his Bible, and starts making notes. The next day, he shares with other jurors the handwritten”For” and “Against” list he has made. “For” death, that is, and against death. His notes list these pros:

• “placate gods”
• “eye for eye”
• “deterrence”
• “Fitting punishment to crime”
• “Rights of victim”
• “Duty of the state to protect citizens”
• “Biblical”
• “Genesis 9:6 ‘Whoso sheddeth man’s blood by man shall his blood be shed,
for in the image of God made He man’ ”
• “Exodus 21:12 ‘He that smiteth a man, so that he dies, shall surely be put to
death’ ”
• “Possibility of Repeated offenses”
• “Murder = a rejection of the values of society”
• “New Test”
• “Romans 13:1-5 ‘Let everyone be subject to the higher authorities, for there
exists no authority except from God, and those who exist have been
appointed by God. Therefore, he who resists the authority, resists the
ordinance of God; and they that resist bring on themselves condemnation
• ‘For rulers are a terror not to the good work but to the evil. Dost thou wish, then, not to fear the authority?
• ‘Do what is good and thou will have praise from it. For it is God[’s] minister to thee for good. But if thou dost what is evil, fear, for not without reason does it carry he sword. For it is God’s minister, an avenger to execute
wrath on him who does evil. Wherefore you must needs be subject, not only
because of the wrath, but also for conscience’s sake.’ ”
• “Luther, Calvin, Aquinas felt this to be supportive of capital punishment” and
• “Per Paul’s letter to Romans: State has power for two reasons — 1. Satisfy
demand’s [sic] of God’s service [and] 2. Protect society by deterring future
crime.”

And these cons:

• “No real deterrent value—mostly because murderers not normal”
• “Question of ‘Just’—There is no simple, ‘just,’ penalty”
• “Discriminatory selection”
• “Human fallibility—Perhaps wrong chap convicted.”
• “Rehabilitation”
• “ ‘Popular’ feelings”

The first thing you’ll notice is that the “pro” list is a lot longer and more fully fleshed out.

The second point to note is that the only “authorities” cited specifically are biblical. If foreman Rodney White ever read a book of sociology, criminology or penology regarding rehabilitation, for example, he didn’t bother to cite the author or title. But he sure had his biblical citations at his fingertips.

The final item to note is that foreman White’s way of handling Scriptural text is almost certainly fundamentalist: What you read is exactly what it means as a prescription for how you are supposed to act. Thinking beyond the literal meaning of the text appears to have been foreign to Mr. White — and to the seven members of the jury who, after White’s presentation, switched their votes from sentencing Fields to life in prison without possibility of parole to death in California’s gas chamber.

White’s reading of the Bible is fundamentalist in another way: While he demonstrated multicultural sensitivity by including two citations from Hebrew Scripture — thus making his list “Judeo-Christian” — there is not an iota of recognition anywhere in those two citations that rabbinical thinking about imposing capital punishment is so hemmed in with caveats and limitations that the Talmud condemns as “a bloody court” a court that imposes a death sentence once in seventy years. (See this blog’s post of June 22, “Tzedek tzedek.”)

And we take note here as well that the Roman Catholic Church has a similarly long tradition of subjecting such biblical passages to further analysis, with the result that the Vatican and the American bishops consistently teach and speak out against capital punishment.

The jury deliberating Fields’ sentencing may have viewed foreman White’s citations as mere “notions of general currency,” as Judge Rymer noted. But those “notions” are especially narrow, their “generality” questionable, and they are certainly not theologically sophisticated or well informed.

Stevie Lamar Fields appears to have committed heinous crimes, of which a jury found him guilty. The justice of the way in which justice has been imposed upon him may still be considered open to question and doubt — at least beyond the walls of the Ninth Circuit Court’s chambers, and the those of the death chamber in California’s prison system.

— Adam Simms

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Where's the Rage?

2007-09-11T16:57:00.000-04:00

. . . asks a blogger named Cliburn in a posting hosted by ProgressiveU.org.

An Iraq veteran currently serving in the US military, Clibrun has had second thoughts about returning to Iraq if his unit is called up again. And he’s considering applying for CO status.

His epiphany came during a recent weekend drill with his unit.

You can read his complete posting by clicking <here>.

Below are excerpts:

Where is the rage?

I had drill this weekend. Drill has been a forever-evolving presence in my life for the past six years. I went from looking forward to drill to hating it to missing it while I was in Iraq and back to looking forward to it when I returned. I used to hate drill, but found myself liking the weekends where I was reunited with those that I spent a year with in Iraq. Over the past few months, that has turned into dread, and I am questioning whether or not I can remain an effective member of the military.

. . .

Someone who had not deployed before asked if we would go again. "In a heartbeat!" one soldier replied. Others assured him that they would have no problem going back. Now, the eyes were on me.

"No, I am not going back to participate in that war."

The look of shock and awe on their faces quickly gave way to a flurry of questions about how I would get out, what I would do, how I could do that to my comrades, why I felt the way I did, what I thought I was proving, and why I thought I could make a difference. The question that got me on a roll, however, was none of the above.

"What are you going to do . . . become a conscientious objector?" one soldier and friend said with a smirk and a chuckle.

"In fact, I just may do that. That's what I am, essentially, isn't it?"

. . .

I thought I could this; I thought I could oppose the war and remain in the military. Change from within, I thought. I realized this weekend that that was a pipe dream, for me at least. I spend half my time in that uniform cringing at exaggerated stories, expressed pleasure in other peoples' pain, and empty, misguided proclamations of honor, integrity, and selfless service.

I am done with the military. I don't know how exactly I will leave the service just yet, but I know that I will. I entered the army in an honorable fashion and I will leave it that way, but leave it I will.

I leave Friday for Washington DC to take part in the September 15th protests in DC with tens of thousands of other concerned Americans, including representatives of Iraq Veterans Against the War, Military Families Speak Out, Gold Star Families, and the ANSWER Coalition. I am taking more and more responsibility within IVAW to end this war, take care of our veterans, and provide reparations for the Iraqi people and it feels right.

I accepted the position of Regional Coordinator-Gulf Coast Region this week and look forward to working with other IVAW Regional Coordinators in the future. I am writing for their newsletter (Sit-Rep), which is being published for the first time this week. If anyone has any questions about the organization or wishes to join, please contact me.

In the meantime, I simply ask, "Where is the rage?!"

* * *

YouTube, the video Web site hosted by Google, is filled with amazing stuff. In addition to the skateboarding bulldog and Star Wars parodies, sometimes it’s even enlightening.

Click on this <link> to see an excerpt of Aimee Allison’s presentation to a national counter-recruiting conference held at the University of California at Berkeley, in October last year.

Allison knows whereof she speaks: Having been recruited and having served in the US military, she’s now a CO and active as a counter-recruiter, helping others not to make her mistake.

— Adam Simms

Why "JPF Notes & Comment" Exists

2007-07-02T16:31:00.000-04:00

Ever wonder why news reports about religion never seem to reflect your point of view?

Then take a look at Media Matters for America’s report, released in May, called Left Behind: The Skewed Representation of Religion in Major News Media. (You can download a copy <here>.)

Left Behind’s basic findings are these:

• While 90% of Americans identify themselves as being religious, only 22% belong to religious groups identified as leading America’s right-wing “culture war” against abortion and gay rights.

• Yet, when Media Matters studied religious leaders quoted, mentioned or interviewed in major newspaper and television reports between November 3, 2004 and December 31, 2006, conservative religious personalities were cited 2.8 times as often as were progressive religious personalities.

• Television networks, cable news channels and Public Broadcasting quoted conservative religious figures 3.8 times as often as progressive religious figures.

• Major newspapers — those in the Nexis database’s “major newspapers” grouping — highlighted conservative religious spokespeople 2.7 times as often as progressive religious spokespeople.

Media Matters’ report concludes:

Despite the fact that most religious Americans are moderate or progressive, in the news media it is overwhelmingly conservative leaders who are presented as the voice of religion. This represents a particularly meaningful distortion since progressive religious leaders tend to focus on different issues and offer an entirely different perspective than their conservative counterparts.

Moreover, the reported noted:

... the distorted picture allows a vocal minority to exercise an outsized influence on the issues and politicians that shape the direction of the country. The second disservice is in the opportunity cost of neglecting to offer a more accurate picture of religiosity and its effects on political views: More than eight in 10 Americans, consistently across every religious tradition, agree that too many leaders use religion to talk about abortion and gay rights, but don't talk about more important things like loving your neighbor and caring for the poor.

— Adam Simms

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Israel’s “Gitmo Lite”

2007-07-01T16:35:00.000-04:00

US Federal courts in recent weeks have finally gotten around to chipping away at President Bush’s most brazen assault on the Constitution: the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention center, where several hundred “enemy combatants” have remained in legal limbo for five years.

The shame about “Gitmo” is not unique to the US, however, as a recent posting by Yesh Gvul, the Israeli support organization for conscientious objectors, demonstrates.

The organization posts on its Web site a monthly “Page of Shame” devoted to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories. June’s page focuses on the Israeli justice system in the territories and its dealings with Palestinians accused of terrorist activities.

Hava Halevi writes of the system:

Very seldom does a genuine trial take place, with witnesses and evidence. Most cases are closed in a plea bargain. A lawyer representing Palestinian prisoners explains: “Of course I can run a trial with evidence, demand that witnesses be brought for counter-examination and so forth; but this will take 2-3 years [during which the defendant remains in prison]. It's better to close a plea bargain. The inmate will sit an extra half-year to a year, and will return home. Even the families press to close a deal as soon as possible.”

In a posting on the Daily Kos Web site regarding the Yesh Gvul report here> , a writer identified as Assaf adds:

“The Occupation ‘justice’ system is interlinked with Israel's ‘legit’ justice system in many ways. For example, the IDF's attorney general during the critical First Intifada years, is currently an Israel Supreme Court justice. Appeals against Occupation policies or military-court decisions can be heard in our Supreme Court. A few liberal decisions, or more often, liberal parts of non-liberal decisions on such appeals, have created the image that our Supreme Court is an excellent check and balance on the Occupation. In fact, the bulk of Supreme Court decisions have upheld the Occupation. Even more disturbingly, when cases against Israeli settlers who attack Palestinians or their property come before Israel's civilian courts, the outcomes are extremely lenient … ”

So much for the principle of “Tzedek tzedek” — do justice justly — at Gitmo and on the West Bank.

— David Gradis

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Iran Watch

2007-06-24T21:30:00.000-04:00

The Jerusalem Post reported on Friday:

The Israeli Air Force (IAF) has been training on long-range flights, including refueling in mid-flight, in preparation for potential strikes against Iranian nuclear targets.
The training program has been taking place for some time but has only been released for publication Friday, the Ma'ariv daily reported.
Intelligence assessments received by the defense establishment concur that once Iran passes the point of no return in its nuclear efforts, the entire Middle East will enter a frantic nuclear armament race. Egypt and Saudi Arabia are expected to take the lead should such a scenario become reality.
At the end of 2007 the US and Israel are expected to hold a joint assessment to ascertain the influence of economic sanctions against Iran.

Read the remainder of the story <here>.

— Barnett Axelrad

Tzedek tzedek

2007-06-22T10:50:00.000-04:00

A Jewish court of sages which executed one person in seven years was called a murderous court. “One in seventy years,” says Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah.

— Mishna Makkot 1:20

First, last week the US Supreme Court ruled, in a 5-4 decision (the majority composed mainly of Bush Sr./Jr. appointees), that a prisoner had lost his right to appeal his sentence because he had missed by three days the deadline for filing an appeal — even though a federal judge had given him the wrong date.

It was a cruel ruling that casts the majority of the high court’s justices as more concerned with narrow procedural detail than in doing justice.

Then, this week the high court refused to hear an appeal by eight Alabama death-row inmates who, in 2001, sued to contest the fact that the state that has condemned them to death is the only state in the Union that does not provide condemned prisoners with legal counsel to challenge their sentences after the first post-sentencing appeal.

Scott Michel, of ABC News’ Law & Justice Unit, notes that these later stages of review, which usually challenge the fairness of a conviction or the sentence meted out, are particularly crucial because these “reviews are often the only way to challenge a death sentence based on newly discovered evidence, such as DNA evidence, a biased jury or … an incompetent trial lawyer.”

Moreover, Michel adds, such post-conviction reviews “have resulted in hundreds of exonerations or reduced sentences nationwide, and every state other than Alabama has opted to provide death row inmates with free lawyers for those appeals.”

Alabama Attorney General Troy King, arguing against the suit, said that the state had no legal obligation to provide legal counsel after an inmate’s initial appeal, and added that, in any event, most inmates have attorneys.

Nonetheless, noted The Birminham News’s Stan Diel, three former Alabama Supreme Court justices, a former appellate judge and three former presidents of the Alabama State Bar filed a brief in favor of the death-row inmates’ suit and urged the US Supreme Court to take up the case.

As matters currently stand, the fates of the eight inmates facing execution rest on their ability to engage volunteer lawyers to conduct their appeals — a dicey prospect, given the costs of conducting investigations, interviews and legal research.

Bryan Stevenson, director of the Equal Justice Initiative of Alabama, who acted as the inmates’ attorney in their petition to the US Supreme Court, told AP reporter Bob Johnson, “We do not have a system that depends on volunteer judges or volunteer prosecutors … We should not have a system that depends on volunteer defense attorneys.”

He added, to Scott Michel: “To say the state doesn’t have to do anything because a volunteer will show up is an abdication of the state’s responsibility.”

— Adam Simms

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CO Watch: Colombia

2007-06-19T15:53:00.000-04:00

The US and Israel aren’t the only countries where Conscientious Objectors face difficulties and hardships in the wake of making known their moral opposition to war and violence.

Janice Gallagher, who left a teaching post at a charter school outside of Boston to join the staff of the Fellowship of Reconciliation’s office in Bogota, Colombia, has posted an insightful article about the travails of Colombian COs as they try to get their government to recognize their right to conscientious objection under international law. (Read her article on her blog, “Pedaling for Peace,” by clicking <here>.)

Caught in the coils of a civil war that is now forty years old, military-age youth in Colombia face forced recruitment by not only their nation’s standing army, but by paramilitary organizations and guerrilla groups, as well.

Gallagher notes that Colombia’s national constitution contains two contradictory provisions that make it difficult for COs to establish their status: Article 18 declares “nobody will be obligated to act against their conscience,” while Article 216 says “All Colombians are obligated to take up arms when the public interest necessitates in order to defend national independence and public institutions.”

The nation’s Constitutional Court, citing the latter provision, holds that there is no right to CO status, which means that Colombian COs are now turning to international law to force their government to recognize its treaty obligations under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Gallagher notes that it international pressure is especially important in the struggle to make Colombia recognize the right to conscientious objection. You can join a petition to secure release of Carlos Andres Hinacapie, a CO who was forcefully recruited into Colombia’s military in August 2006, by contacting FOR’s Bogota office at presenciaparalapaz@yahoo.com.

— Adam Simms

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Norman Podhoretz’s Big Sandy

2007-06-16T11:14:00.000-04:00

John McCain made a fool of himself during a campaign stop not long ago. Asked what to do about Iran’s nuclear development program and its president’s well-publicized desire to “wipe Israel off the map,” the Republican senator channeled the Beach Boys’ hit, “Barbara Ann,” amending the lyrics to chant, “Bomb, bomb, bomb — bomb, bomb Iran.”

If you missed his performance, you can catch it on YouTube by clicking <here>.

McCain may have hoped that this bit of “straight talk” would boost his poll numbers, but he has so far been disappointed. The American electorate, judging from its ever-diminishing support for the Iraq war in public opinion surveys, is unlikely to set aside its misgivings to take on a presidential candidate who wants to take on Iran.

But leave it to Norman Podhoretz to barge in where others tread warily now that neoconservative dreams of “remaking” the Middle East have come a cropper along the shores of the Tigris and Euphrates.

His latest opus, “The Case for Bombing Iran,” appears in the June issue of Commentary magazine, whose previous sponsor, the American Jewish Committee, may be breathing a sigh of relief that it divested itself of bomb-thrower before it unleashed this latest salvo. [Click <here> for the article.]

Originally presented in April as an address “in somewhat different form” at a conference sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies at Queens College, City University of New York, “The Case for Bombing Iran,” amounts to a seal of hechsher — approval that an item is kosher — for ideas (some neoconservative, some plain lunatic) that have been floating around on the Jewish right since before last autumn’s midterm Congressional elections.

On March 22, this blog posted my entry, “Tehran Willies” [read it by clicking <here>], summarizing some choice examples which counseled President Bush that bombing Iran would save the neoconservative movement and/or secure his place in history as “God’s agent.” By then, the Republicans’ loss of the Senate and House, combined with steadily plummeting poll numbers for the president and the Iraq war, appeared to have put a damper on the White Houses’ ability to launch another war of choice.

But neoconservatives pride themselves on disdaining public opinion. True to the Trotskyist origins of many of the movement’s founders, they have never disavowed their belief that they constitute a “vanguard” — if not of the proletariat, then of US foreign and military policy strategists. And though none of their sons and daughters and grandchildren are serving frontline tours in their Iraq debacle, it fazes them not one whit to propose trudging even further into the Big Sandy, where yet more American lives — albeit those of other Americans, as well as unfortunate local inhabitants — will be sacrificed.

“The Case for Bombing Iran” has many classic earmarks of Podhoretz polemic: the portentous assertion that a doomsday clock is about to strike midnight and the fate of Western civilization hanging in the balance if no one pays heed to his warning; the clarion invocation of “American will,” seen as currently flabby and wavering, but which can triumph over any deficits of treasure and materiel that may be hobbling his call to arms; and crocodile tears for the innocents who may happen to be in harm’s way when a “responsible” America finally awakens from its sloth to save them (and civilization) from a fate which he assures us is worse than death itself.

But also on view are signs of a certain calcification of the polemical faculty.

Take, for example, his use of the term “Islamofascism.” We are now, Podhoretz informs us, engaged in World War IV — number III having been the Cold War. And we are told that, as in the forty-year confrontation with the Soviet Union, “the war we are now in has ideological roots, pitting us against Islamofascism, yet another mutation of the totalitarian disease we defeated in the shape of Nazism and fascism and then in the shape of Communism ….”

As I noted in a lengthy essay for the Autumn 2006 issue of the Jewish Peace Fellowship’s newsletter, Shalom [available on this blog by clicking <here>], “Islamofascism” is a term devoid of substantive intellectual content and useless for any serious analysis. Rather, it is an epithet, like “Judeo-Bolshevism,” “imperialist lackey,” “capitalist roader,” etc., designed to short circuit thought by arousing visceral fear and loathing. The French describe this sort of verbiage as la langue de bois — literally, “the wooden tongue”; more felicitously translated as “cant” — and it is disheartening to see Podhoretz’s polemical talents degenerate to this level.

More striking to observe is the atrophy of his reasoning by historical analogy. Renaming the Cold War “World War III” is an interesting rhetorical maneuver. By doing so, Podhoretz evidently means to conjure up images of the national mobilization and sacrifice necessary to confront the challenges he posits the West faces from a nuclear-capable Iran. Moreover, he invokes the legacy of Ronald Reagan who, with “the grace of God [and] the dissidents behind the Iron Curtain … we won” that war.

But before joining Podhoretz to enlist in World War IV, it is instructive to look more closely Reagan’s legacy. Like Bush Jr., the Gipper made a disastrous foray into the Middle East, when in 1983 he sent U.S. troops to Lebanon as peacekeepers. After a Marine barracks was destroyed by a suicide truck bomb, with the loss of 241 American service personnel, Reagan in short order withdrew the remaining military contingent. In our day, right-wing bloviators would call this a policy of “cut and run” — except that it was one of their political heroes who did the cutting and running.

Obscured, too, in Podhoretz’s rendition of Reagan’s conduct of the Cold War is the inconvenient fact that following a thoroughly bollixed proxy war in Nicaragua — during which, at one point, his national security advisor personally hand-delivered a cake to Tehran’s mullahs — Reagan thereafter essentially relied on negotiation in dealing with the Soviet “evil empire.”

If, indeed, Reagan “won” the Cold War, then it ended not with a bang of “shock and awe” cruise-missile barrage on the Kremlin, but rather with a simper of broad smiles and hearty handshakes exchanged with Mikhail Gorbachev. Similarly, Reagan’s predecessor, Richard Nixon, wound down World War III’s Asian front by engaging in much the same strategy (minus the backslapping) with Mao Tse-tung. (There is, of course, the inconvenient matter of 90,000 American and countless Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian lives sacrificed in what is now almost universally regarded as an ill-conceived and unwinnable military conflict that Nixon nonetheless continued even after he “opened China” and bequeathed to his successor to wind up in a flurry of helicopter airlifts from the U.S. embassy in what was then Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City …)

What Podhoretz’s analogy fails to acknowledge is that whereas the first two world wars were conducted as head-on armed contests between competing states, the central opposing powers of “WWIII” did everything in their power to avoid such direct confrontation. He confuses rhetorical preludes to negotiation with battle orders, and he does so with little concern for the price that others might have to pay for his tin ear.

So, too, with Podhoretz’s call to World War IV against Iran.

For the moment, President Bush — though, according to recent reports, not necessarily Vice President Richard Cheney — has stopped rattling his saber and is calling upon Europe, Russia and China to support stiffened sanctions against Iran for refusing to halt its nuclear development program and allow unhindered inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Podhoretz has no use for sanctions. “As it happens,” he writes, “sanctions have rarely worked in the past” — purposefully ignoring the fact that Saddam Hussein dismantled his nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs in response to the sanctions regime imposed on Iraq during the 1990s, which is why no WMD have been found in Iraq during the five years after our invasion.

“Worse yet,” Podhoretz continues, “[sanctions] have usually ended up hurting the hapless people of the target country while leaving the leadership unscathed.” On this, paradoxically, he and elements of the wackadoodle left agree. One need only recall the prewar outcries against the sanctions regime for depriving Iraqi children of medicines, milk and clean water, and unconfirmed (and still unverified) estimates of tens of thousands of resulting deaths. Such arguments hold water only if one considers the death toll from sectarian violence unleashed in the wake of our military overthrow of Saddam’s Ba’athist regime a lesser or worse form of violence than the sanctions regime — as, by inference, Podhoretz evidently does.

However unwilling Podhoretz is to admit that sanctions may have worked in pre-invasion Iraq, he nonetheless circuitously acknowledges that U.S. military action there has seriously undermined this nation’s capacity to confront Iran with an ultimate demonstration of American “will.” He writes:

Since a ground invasion of Iran must be ruled out for many different reasons, the job would have to be done, if it is to be done at all, by a campaign of air strikes. Furthermore, because Iran’s nuclear facilities are dispersed, and because some of them are underground, many sorties and bunker-busting munitions would be required. And because such a campaign is beyond the capabilities of Israel, and the will, let alone the courage, of any of our other allies, it could be carried out only by the United States. Even then, we would probably be unable to get at all the underground facilities, which means that, if Iran were still intent on going nuclear, it would not have to start over again from scratch. But a bombing campaign would without question set back its nuclear program for years to come, and might even lead to the overthrow of the mullahs.

But then again, maybe not.

Acknowledging that “it would be foolish to discount any or all of these scenarios,” Podhoretz concedes — grudgingly — that opponents of his proposed bombing campaign possibly have a point in predicting that “shock and awe” alone might not topple the Iranian regime — any more than it did Saddam Hussein’s.

On the contrary, [opponents of a bombing campaign] are certain that all Iranians, even the democratic dissidents, would be impelled to rally around the flag. And this is only one of the worst-case scenarios they envisage. To wit: Iran would retaliate by increasing the trouble it is already making for us in Iraq. It would attack Israel with missiles armed with non-nuclear warheads but possibly containing biological and/or chemical weapons. There would be a vast increase in the price of oil, with catastrophic consequences for every economy in the world, very much including our own. The worldwide outcry against the inevitable civilian casualties would make the anti-Americanism of today look like a love-fest.

Strip away the rhetorical evasions shot throughout Podhoretz’s essay and here is the train of logic: We shouldn’t apply sanctions because sanctions hurt innocent civilians while leaving the leadership intact. But a bombing campaign brings with it no assurance that Iran’s leadership will be toppled — or that it won’t retaliate in Iraq or against Israel, the U.S. and the world.

Rarely has the difference between an armchair general and a bona fide military strategist been on plainer view. Podhoretz, the hawk, has only entry strategies. There are no exits in his Hobbesian universe. On to Tehran! — even though there can be no guarantee that resorting to violence, with its attendant costs in blood, treasure, chaos and collateral damage, will eventually bring peace.

For Norman Podhoretz, there is only war. There is a word to describe this kind of worldview. That word is madness.

— Adam Simms

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Chicken-Hawk-in-Chief

2007-06-14T19:24:00.000-04:00

The problem with spin-doctors, like White House press spokesperson Tony Snow, is that their hubris compels them to talk — when a simple “No comment” would be better advised.

Thanks to Think Progress for today’s telling tidbit from inside the bubble.

= = =

Snow: President Bush Is ‘On The Frontlines’ Of The Iraq War ‘Every Day’

In today’s White House press briefing, reporter Helen Thomas asked Tony Snow if there are “any members of the Bush family or this administration in this war.” Stunningly, Snow claimed that President Bush is actually on the “frontlines” of the war in Iraq:

Q: Are there any members of the Bush family or this administration in this war?

SNOW: Yeah, the President. The President is in the war every day.

Q: Come on, that isn’t my question –

SNOW: Well, no, if you ask any president who is a commander in chief –

Q: On the frontlines, wherever…

SNOW: The President.

Watch a video of the exchange <here>.

In reality, Bush and his administration have repeatedly shown they are deeply out of touch with the sacrifices and the fighting by U.S. troops and their families. Bush himself acknowledged his detachment during a press conference in February:

I can only tell you what people on the ground, whose judgment — it’s hard for me, living in this beautiful White House, to give you an assessment, firsthand assessment. I haven’t been there; you have, I haven’t.

In April, First Lady Laura Bush tried to claim that “no one suffers more than their President and I do.” When asked by PBS’s Jim Lehrer why he hasn’t called on more Americans to sacrifice for the war, Bush claimed that Americans have had to “sacrifice peace of mind when they see the terrible image of violence on TV every night.”

— Adam Simms

CO Watch: Perry O'Brien

2007-06-14T08:07:00.000-04:00

PERRY O’Brien is a 26-year-old former US Army medic who won Conscientious Objector status after serving a tour in Afghanistan, and was honorably discharged in November 2004 after three years and two months of service.

Emily McNeill portrays O’Brien’s journey from medic to CO in an engaging two-part article posted on Campus Progress. Click <here> and <here> for her profile.

Deployed to Afghanistan in January 2003, McNeill writes, O’Brien’s medical work consisted mainly of tending to Afghan civilians. “It felt,” he told her, “like the Peace Corps with guns.”

The good vibes quickly changed, however, when he discovered that many of the civilians he treated were victims of internecine tribal conflicts and US military bombing campaigns — not the terrorists “Operation Enduring Freedom” was supposed to be counteracting.

Once his Afghan hitch was completed in August 2003 and he returned to the US, O’Brien, still in the military, began reading Buddhist works, particularly those of Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese-born monk and peace activist.

“If the Afghanistan war was wrong — and presumably the Afghanistan war was started for good reasons,” O’Brien told McNeill, “I wondered what other war could be right, could be successful, morally speaking. I came to the conclusion that really wars are never morally successful. They always create more problems than they solve.”

During the course of the final year of his enlistment contract, O’Brien applied for CO status. Unlike many others who apply while in the military, he encountered superior officers who treated his convictions as serious.

O’Brien is currently studying political theory at Cornell University, and plans to apply to MFA programs in creative writing when he graduates next year. In the meantime, he has established a Web site for people considering CO status, and is active with Veterans for Peace and Iraq Veterans Against the War.

quackquack Islamofascism quackquack

2007-06-11T12:45:00.000-04:00

“WHEN I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less,” says Humpty Dumpty to Alice during her adventure in Wonderland.

And as we know, Wonderland is a topsy-turvy universe in large measure because, stripped of commonly accepted definitions, words are bereft of meaning.

The “war on terror” has become a linguistic Wonderland: the USA Patriot Act supposedly protects us by gutting the Fourth Amendment’s protections against warrantless searches and seizures, and President Bush, inflating his nominal title as commander-in-chief of the nation’s armed forces, has unilaterally commandeered authority to intercept domestic telephone and e-mail messages without court orders. And the list of violations of our Constitutional rights and freedoms goes on, explained away in a fog of vague excuses invoking “national security.”

Make no mistake: People are trying to kill us simply because we are Americans and Jews. These are equal-opportunity murderers and their threat is real.

Still, understanding the threat and counteracting it effectively require clear thinking. But like all wars the “war on terror” has bred hysteria. Emotion has taken over, pundits now traffic in sound bites, and clear thought is suspect in many quarters as evidence of “softness” or, worse, “material aid” to the “enemy.”

Take, for example, the notion of “Islamo-fascism.”

President Bush has been trotting out the term for nearly two years now to bolster support for his “war on terror.” In October 2005 he described “Islamo-fascism” to the National Endowment for Democracy as “a clear and focused ideology, a set of beliefs and goals that are evil, but not insane… [T]his ideology is very different from the religion of Islam.”

A few months later, in March 2006, he described America’s continued military action in Iraq as a theater in his “war on terror,” declaring: “There’s no question that if we were to prematurely withdraw and the march to democracy were to fail, the [sic] al Qaeda would be emboldened; terrorist groups would be emboldened; the Islamo-fascists would be emboldened.”

Not surprisingly, partisans of the president’s “war on terror” have wholeheartedly embraced the term. Former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, who served as chair of the Senate’s Republican Conference, is one. In July 2006, he invoked “Islamic fascism” — a variant — no less than twenty times during a widely reported address to Washington’s National Press Club.

“Islamic fascism is the greatest test of this generation,” he exclaimed, identifying it as the motive force behind Iraq’s insurgency, Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons, Hezbollah’s and Hamas’ missile attacks on Israel, 9/11, the terrorist bombing in Bali, Osama bin Laden, and al Qaeda. He also cited it as justification for renewal of the Patriot Act and the president’s authority to eavesdrop on domestic telephone conversations without judicial approval or oversight.

* * *

RIGHT-WING talk-radio info-tainers and Fox News bloviators, along with countless “get-me-rewrite” bloggers, have picked up the term, lending credence to the notion that the right somehow owns or can claim paternity to the concept of “Islamic fascism.” It is the sort of verbal jujitsu associated with partisan spinmeisters such as Karl Rove, skilled at adopting a word or phrase previously common in left-liberal discourse and turning it around to disparage any criticism of the right’s agenda.

Credit for coining the term has been variously attributed to European scholars Malise Ruthven and Maxime Rodinson, and, most recently, been claimed by a convert to Islam named Stephen Schwartz. But its entry into American political discourse rests with a small set of public intellectuals known as “liberal hawks,” whose claim to media attention is their stance as left-wing critics of the left and who support the U.S. invasion of Iraq as a worthy attempt to liberate and bring democracy to the Middle East and the Arab/Muslim world.

Moreover, the most prominent among them have no difficulty identifying themselves as Jews and with Israel, or with the assertion that Israel is an outpost of Western values in a Muslim region and that its defense is tied with that of the West, now under assault by totalitarian forces inspired by an Islamic worldview.

Christopher Hitchens appears to have been among the first to brandish the term. In “Against Rationalization,” an essay published in The Nation three weeks after the attack on New York’s World Trade Center, he declared that “the bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there’s no point in any euphemism about it.”

A talented polemicist who knows better than to linger too long lest he lose his readers’ attention, Hitchens avoided defining ways in which the perpetrators of 9/11 were “fascists.” His closest approach to an explanation was negative, stating that the bombers and their ilk “abominate about ‘the West’” and that what “Western liberals … do like about it and must defend … [are] its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state.”

Whether Islam objects to these propositions is a matter of profound disagreement and debate within many segments of the Muslim world, but none of them is specifically, inherently or uniquely “fascist.”

* * *

AT about the same time that Hitchens’ piece was reaching newsstands, Paul Berman was completing an essay entitled “Terror and Liberalism” for The American Prospect, which describes itself as an “authoritative magazine of liberal ideas.” Far less a controversialist than Hitchens, Berman attempted to sketch a broader historical perspective within which to situate the challenge posed to the liberal West by the attack on the World Trade Center.

Liberalism, he wrote, is founded on the assumption that rationality, order and modernity provide the basis for developing the good society. But the conflicts of the twentieth century — two world wars and a cold war — demonstrated that not everyone agreed with this vision. Powerful antiliberal movements on both the left and the right — communism in Russia, Nazism in Germany, fascism in Italy, and “the Spanish crusade to re-establish the Reign of Christ the King” — had arisen to contest liberalism’s assumptions. Each of these movements had aimed to establish “a new society purged of alien elements — a healthy society no longer subject to the vibrations of change and evolution, a society with a single blocklike structure, solid and eternal.”

Berman’s essay was to serve as the basis for a greatly expanded inquiry, published two years later under the same title. There was, however, a significant difference: The essay was cautious about attributing any direct link between the ideology presumed to have motivated the 9/11 attackers and Western antiliberal movements. “The present conflict,” he wrote there, “seems to me to be following the twentieth-century pattern exactly, with one variation: The antiliberal side right now, instead of Communist, Nazi, Catholic, or Fascist, happens to be radical Arab nationalist and Islamic fundamentalist.” Fascism was listed only in order to be excluded.

In its book-length iteration, however, fascism reappeared as a source in the formation of contemporary Islamic fundamentalist thought. During the course of two early chapters, followed by frequent references throughout the remainder of the book, Berman describes the intellectual world of Sayyid Qutb, whose works he believes provide much of the ideological foundation for the current Islamic challenge to Western liberal society. Until Berman’s book appeared, Qutb was an obscure figure in the West, and it is fair to say that most post-9/11 Western commentaries about Qutb’s role in shaping radical strands of Islamic thought owe a debt to Berman’s analysis.

Qutb was born in Egypt in 1906. He received a classical religious education and later began a career with the Ministry of Education. During 1948-1950 he studied at a teacher’s college in Colorado, where he earned a master’s degree and apparently developed a dim view of American society, especially its secularism. After returning to his homeland in 1951, he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, became its leading theoretician and served as editor of its official journal.

In those roles, he elaborated a vision of an Islam that stood in opposition to Western liberal values. Most of his writing was done in prison. In 1952, Gamal Abdel Nasser staged a military coup, which the Brotherhood supported. Two years later Nasser turned against the organization and banned it. Qutb was imprisoned and except for two brief respites remained behind bars for the next twelve years. He was executed in 1966.

In Berman’s exegesis of what he had been able to read of Qutb’s works in translation, he notes that the only Western author quoted in Islam: The Religion of the Future is Alexis Carrel. (In fact, Qutb quoted Carrel in several other works Berman does not cite — one quotation extending for more than twelve pages.) Any number of commentators have latched onto this observation as evidence of a link between Islamic fundamentalism and fascism. But the connection collapses upon examination.

Alexis Carrel is perhaps only a shade less obscure than Qutb in twentieth-century intellectual and political history. Born in France in 1873, he earned a medical degree and settled in the United States in 1905 to work at the Rockefeller Institute. There he developed a procedure to suture blood vessels, which earned him a Nobel prize in medicine in 1912. He also developed with Charles Lindbergh — the Charles Lindbergh, of trans-Atlantic flight fame and America First notoriety — an early prototype of a mechanical artificial heart.

In 1935, with the publication of his book, Man, This Unknown, Carrel emerged as an advocate of eugenics and state-sanctioned euthanasia by means of poison gas. He returned to France in 1939, and joined the PPF, an extreme right-wing political party led by Jacques Doriot, a former communist. Following France’s defeat and occupation by the Germans in 1940, the Vichy regime appointed Carrel regent of a well-funded French Foundation for the Study of Human Problems, which focused on demographics, nutrition and public opinion polling. (A number of postwar scholars assert that the foundation put Carrel’s theories of eugenics into practice, resulting in the of deaths of thousands of mentally ill patients during the war years.) After France’s liberation in 1944, Carrel was placed under investigation as a collaborationist, but died in November, before he could be brought to trial.

Such sensational details as captured in even this brief outline of Carrel’s career appear even more so when his name is coupled to Qutb’s to link Islamic fundamentalism with European fascist thought. The problem, however, is that none of the passages Qutb quotes from Carrel’s Man, This Unknown have any connection to eugenics, euthanasia or mass murder. Indeed, most consist of vague, rather gaseous speculations about the inability of science to explain human nature and about the disintegrating effects of materialism on the human spirit — the sort of speculations found in the writings of all of the world’s major religions. Indeed, Berman notes that what Qutb seems to have found of interest in Carrel was “his condemnation of modern materialism … and not Carrel’s … proposed scientific solutions.” Berman continues:

The racist parties and movements that had arisen in the twentieth century — “all nationalistic and chauvinistic ideologies which have appeared in modern times, and all the movements and theories which have derived from them” — had been proven wrong. They had “lost their vitality.”

Moreover, Carrel’s influence on Qutb’s thought appears to have been, at best, highly selective and idiosyncratic on Qutb’s part since Carrel, a devout Roman Catholic, made only one reference to Islam in Man, This Unknown, and that was to remark that Western Christian civilization had, “[a]t the cost of immense efforts … succeeded in thrusting back the sleep of Islamism.”

And yet the equations of Qutb and Carrel, Islamic fundamentalism and fascism continue to be made.

* * *

GEORGE Orwell knew more about facism than most political writers of his generation, having taken up arms against it during the Spanish civil war where he received a bullet through his throat while standing guard duty with a Republican army detachment. But in 1944, while the Allies were still confronting the threat posed by Hitler and Mussolini (though not Franco, who kept Spain neutral in the fight against his sponsors), Orwell concluded that the term “fascism” had lost any useful semblance of meaning.

“I have heard it applied,” he wrote in the Independent Labour Party’s newspaper Tribune,

to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, [J.B.] Priestley’s broadcasts [over the BBC], Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else … All we can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.

Six years later, racing against the tuberculosis that would finally kill him, Orwell completed his masterwork, Nineteen Eighty-four, the novel in which he summarized everything he believed he had learned about the antiliberal passions of his age. In an early chapter his hero, Winston Smith, is sitting in a Ministry of Truth cafeteria, drinking a mug of coffee:

At the table to his left the man with the strident voice was talking remorselessly away…. It was just a noise, a quack-quack-quacking … It was not the man’s brain that was speaking, it was his larynx. The stuff coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense; it was noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck.

A colleague then informs Smith that there’s a term for such noise in the language invented by the totalitarian regime under which they live, a language designed to limit the capacity to think clearly (and to rise up in revolt) by constricting the vocabulary available for thought: “ ‘There’s a word in Newspeak,’ said Syme, ‘I don’t know whether you know it: duckspeak, to quack like a duck.’ ” Syme then explains that “duckspeak” has two opposite meanings: “ ‘Applied to an opponent, it is abuse; applied to someone you agree with, it is praise.’ ”

The term “Islamo-fascism” is duckspeak, a mindless epithet, useless as an analytical tool and, worse, profoundly dysfunctional for mounting an effective defense of Western liberal society and its values against the onslaught of religious fundamentalism.

Paul Berman had it right in his first draft of Terror and Liberalism: The challenge may take political form, but its energy and inspiration are religious. Long before there was fascism or communism or the concept of totalitarianism, religion provided the wellspring for the impulse to establish “a blocklike, unchanging society, freed of inner corruption.”

With God on their side, Joshua conquered Canaan, Torquemada secured Iberia for Roman Catholic Christianity, Puritan divines expelled Quakers and hanged those who would not leave the Plymouth Bay colony. In our own day, George W. Bush plays to his religiously-inspired political base and vetoes funding of stem cell research on grounds that such scientific inquiry offends a particular theological interpretation as to whether a pinhead-sized cluster of embryonic cells floating in a Petri dish constitutes human life.

Liberals betray weakness in the face of fundamentalist challenges partly because they tend to view most matters effecting society through a political screen. Liberals are further weakened because most are uncomfortable and unconversant with religious terminology and frameworks — their own as well as others’. Ever since Voltaire launched his battle cry “Écrasez l’infâme!” liberals have been more comfortable marshaling political power to circumscribe and marginalize the role of religion per se in public life rather than engaging and empowering religious ideas, spokesmen and institutions that are fully supportive of rationality, order and modernity as the basis upon which to build a pluralist, tolerant, thriving — and dare we say, secular — society.

Hebrew scripture describes Joshua’s conquest of Canaan and there are a great number of Jews in modern Israel who invoke his warrior model when continuing to demand that not one square inch of the West Bank be relinquished to Palestinians, even were such reversion be accompanied with ironclad guarantees of peace. They derive their justification from a fundamentalist reading of scripture, positing “It says right here that God gave it to us. It’s ours — forever — and it is a sin to give it up!”

But this is a minority view among both the world’s — and even Israel’s — Jews. Fundamentalism may hold the levers of power in Israel regarding determinations as to what constitutes officially recognized Jewish religious practice; but, again, the majority of Israel’s Jews, as well as those in the United States, tacitly or explicitly accept the Enlightenment’s proposition that there is no inherent conflict between reason and religion, and every day they demonstrate their adherence to that proposition by following the dictates of their consciences in all manner of ethical decisions.

The same is true with respect to matters of peace with the Palestinians: Until Hamas and Hezbollah started lobbing rockets into Sderot and Kiryat Shmona, a majority of Israelis agreed with their government’s proposals to withdraw troops and settlers from all of Gaza and most of the West Bank. It took nearly forty years, but liberal rationalism — in the form of enlightened Judaism’s vision of shalom as their faith’s highest ethical value — prevailed among a majority of Israel’s Jews, and Jewish fundamentalism’s warrior caste was defeated.

There are voices, too, among Muslims and Islamic scholars — Dalil Boubakeur, rector of the Mosque of Paris and president of the French Council of the Muslim Faith; Shirin Ebadi, Iran’s first female judge and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, and Morocco’s King Mohammed VI, who instituted sweeping family legislation that protects the rights of his nation’s women — who have no fundamental quarrel with Western liberal values, and who need and ought to be encouraged to take forceful stands against their fundamentalists.

President Bush has occasionally observed from his bully pulpit that it is not Islam that is the West’s enemy. But quacking about “Islamo-fascism” — tarring an entire faith with an epithet that has no discernible analytical meaning — defeats his, and liberal society’s, purposes. Not that the president or Fox News’ bloviators much care about liberal society — which is why the liberal hawks’ use of the term is doubly damning, and why members of a faith who know what happens when phrases like “Judeo-Bolshevism” get tossed around should know better than to engage in “duckspeak.”

— Adam Simms

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CO Watch: Hadas Amit Wins Her Exemption

2007-06-09T08:21:00.000-04:00

We reported on March 4 (click <here>) about Israeli Conscientious Objector Hadas Amit’s campaign to be exempted from military service in the Israel Defense Forces.

After serving five terms in prison for conscientious objection to war and military service, Tal Hayoun, of New Profile, reports that on May 28 Amit finally received her official exemption on grounds of “unsuitability.”

— Adam Simms

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The Longest Seventh Day

2007-06-08T12:24:00.000-04:00

Earlier this week, Harry Shearer posted a short, rueful note on the Huffington Post blog (click <here>) to the effect that Paris Hilton's DUI jail time and the release forty years ago of the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper” album had gotten more attention in the news media than the fortieth anniversary of Israel’s Six-Day War.

As satirists are wont to do, Shearer exaggerated — but not much.

As attention spans erode with briefer and briefer cable and Internet news cycles, the role of serious magazine journalism grows ever more important by providing middle-ground perspectives that remind us what is really significant in our world.

So three cheers for The New Yorker and its editor, David Remnick.

If you missed his book review-essay in the May 28 issue, entitled “The Seventh Day: Why the Six-Day War is still being fought,” click <here> to read it. It is one of the most compact, cogent appraisals of how (to paraphrase Remnick’s paraphrase of the Duke of Wellington) a great victory for Israel turned into a great defeat.

Especially noteworthy are the sources Remnick relies upon for coming to this conclusion: Israeli historians — Tom Segev, Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappe, Shlomo Ben-Ami, Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez, Gershom Gorenberg, and others.

The American Jewish Establishment would have us all believe that all Jews speak with one voice — theirs and that of whatever government is in power in Israel — and that it is the voice of Divine Providence.

The truth, however, as Remnick’s review demonstrates, is that Israelis have always been far more mature and intellectually honest about their “situation” than our Establishment has been or is ever likely to be.

— Adam Simms

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Martha Nussbaum: The Clash Within

2007-05-20T10:04:00.000-04:00

“The clash of civilizations.”

That phrase, first coined by Arabist Bernard Lewis in his 1990 book The Roots of Muslim Rage, and subsequently popularized by Samuel Huntington in a 1993 article for the journal Foreign Affairs, has led to no end of mischief and tragedy post 9/11.

University of Chicago polymath Martha C. Nussbaum — who holds professorships in its law and divinity schools, as well as its philosophy department and college — deftly lays bear the oversimplifications of the Lewis-Huntington humbug in The Chronicle of Higher Education’s May 18 issue. Her article is entitled “Fears for Democracy in India.”

With American (and much of European) attention focused on the war in Iraq, where the Bush administration is prosecuting a nebulous “war on terror” to “defend” Western civilization against radical Islamic nihilism, the rise of Hindu nationalism in India, particularly in the province of Gujarat, and its attendant terrorism against that nation’s Muslim minority, receives only sporadic attention in US news media.

Nussbaum, after having studied the Indian situation for several years, skewers the nationalists’ claims, observing that much of their founding ideology was imported from European fascist sources during the 1930s.

“The real ‘clash of civilizations,’ ” she writes

is not between “Islam” and “the West,” but instead within virtually all modern nations — between people who are prepared to live on terms of equal respect with others who are different, and those who seek the protection of homogeneity and the domination of a single “pure” religious and ethnic tradition. At a deeper level, as Gandhi claimed, it is a clash within the individual self, between the urge to dominate and defile the other and a willingness to live respectfully on terms of compassion and equality, with all the vulnerability that such a life entails.

This argument about India suggests a way to see America, which is also torn between two different pictures of itself. One shows the country as good and pure, its enemies as an external “axis of evil.” The other picture, the fruit of internal self-criticism, shows America as complex and flawed, torn between forces bent on control and hierarchy and forces that promote democratic equality. At what I've called the Gandhian level, the argument about India shows Americans to themselves as individuals, each of whom is capable of both respect and aggression, both democratic mutuality and anxious domination. Americans have a great deal to gain by learning more about India and pondering the ideas of some of her most significant political thinkers, such as Sir Rabindranath Tagore and Mohandas Gandhi, whose ruminations about nationalism and the roots of violence are intensely pertinent to today's conflicts.

And she concludes:

It is comforting for Americans to talk about a clash of civilizations. That thesis tells us that evil is outside, distant, other, and that we are perfectly all right as we are. All we need do is to remain ourselves and fight the good fight. But the case of Gujarat shows us that the world is very different. The forces that assail democracy are internal to many, if not most, democratic nations, and they are not foreign: They are our own ideas and voices, meaning the voices of aggressive European nationalism, refracted back against the original aggressor with the extra bile of resentment born of a long experience of domination and humiliation.

There is much more fascinating detail and analysis in the complete article, available at The Chronicle of Higher Education Web site by clicking <here>.

— Adam Simms

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“War Is Hell”

2007-04-30T21:06:00.000-04:00

A research team at the University of Haifa has concluded that “Over the course of their military service, combat soldiers become less right wing, adopt more dovish political views and are more open to compromise on security matters.”

At first glance, this finding may appear to be counterintuitive. But on reflection, it makes sense: After all, it was Civil War Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman — and not armchair warrior Dick Cheney, who had “other priorities” than serving in the military during the Vietnam war — who said, “War is hell.”

Since there is no Web site address for the University of Haifa report, a press release digesting the study is reprinted in its entirety, below.

— Adam Simms

Press Release

Research at the University of Haifa examined the influence of military service on political stance: Combat soldiers adopt dovish political views Women soldiers become more hawkish

Over the course of their military service, combat soldiers become less right wing, adopt more dovish political views and are more open to comprise on security issues - according to research completed in the School for Political Science at the University of Haifa by IDF Reserve Colonel Dr. Zvika Barkai who served as Commander of the Haifa region and head of the Operations Branch of the Home Front Command. Additional parameters that effect change in political views include the specific unit served in, gender and service as an officer. "In the opposite of what would be expected, military service does not cause adopting militaristic views," said Dr. Barkai.

The research was conducted over three and a half years, under the direction of Prof. Avraham Brichta, Dr. Daphna Canetti-Nisim and Dr. Ami Pedahzur, surveyed 490 male and female soldiers of every rank and in every branch of the IDF. Soldiers were asked to respond to the same series of questions at three different times, before induction, six months into their service and immediately following their release. The goal of the research was to evaluate whether the army is in actuality the politically neutral institution that it purports to be and whether it has any effect on soldiers' political views. "It's a problem when the public is convinced that soldiers are coerced into adapting specific political views, sometimes against their will, and to act accordingly. Such a public belief could limit the ability of the government to use the army for nationalist missions," remarked Dr. Barkai.

The research did indeed find that soldiers' political views change over the course of their service, and that the type of service, length of service, rank, and gender influence the change. The initial interviews found that a large percentage of the soldiers began their service with clear right wing views. Six months into their military service they were more right wing, but after completing their service they took on more dovish views and were more willing to compromise on security issues. In addition, these soldiers adopted more conciliatory views towards minorities in general, and more specifically towards the Arab minority, and experienced a greater change in their views about human rights than soldiers who began their service with less extreme views. Over all, when political views did change during military service, they reverted back to the original views after release, with the exception of combat soldiers who maintained more dovish views following their release.

Within the different types of army units, soldiers who served in field units underwent the greatest change in their political views. The research reveals that no only combat soldiers in these units undergo a change; all of the soldiers in field units undergo a change in their political views. Those with hawkish views adopted more moderate views and a raised consciousness for minority rights.

Those who served as officers also underwent a substantial change in their political views. Officers adopted much less right wing and more pragmatic views than enlisted soldiers. In addition, they underwent a greater change in espousing strongly democratic values, adherence to the rule of law and minority rights.

Women, on the other hand, underwent a change in political views - and became more rightwing and hawkish. At the same time, they increased their support for regulation of non-conventional weapons more than male soldiers did. Women soldiers experienced a greater change in their support of democratic values while men underwent a greater change in the attitude towards human rights and minority relations. "It is important to note that although men underwent a greater change, their values were almost identical to women's in terms of concern for human rights at the end of their service, as they began with more extreme views," explains Dr. Barkai.

While army service did not affect the level of religious observance among the soldiers, it did improve understandings between religious and non-religious soldiers and increase willingness to compromise on religious issues.

According to Dr. Barkai, the research findings demonstrate that military service does influence political views; therefore civilian authorities need to oversee the values and messages that the army espouses to ascertain that the military works to assimilate only universal, accepted values. Only then will the military be an effective agent for the integration and assimilation of positive values and an agent for bridging and narrowing existing conflicts.

The study results lead the researcher to recommend that minorities and marginalized populations be encouraged to serve in the military. He recommends a large-scale draft of Arabs, increased participation of Druze and Bedouins, ultra-orthodox Jews and religious women and designing special programs for marginalized youth (who are often excused from military service). "Even taking into account that expanding the draft to include the abovementioned groups may have a marginal or even negative effect on the country's security, the latent national gains should be weighed against the security issues - not necessarily by the military," summarized Dr. Barkai.

Amir Gilat, Ph.D.
Communication and Media Relations
University of Haifa
Tel: +972-4-8240092/4
Cell: +972-52-6178200

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Bill Moyers’ “Buying the War”

2007-04-30T20:37:00.000-04:00

Four years ago, W. declared “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq.

And if, as I did, you missed Bill Moyers’ PBS documentary, “Buying the War,” don’t despair. You can watch the complete program online by clicking here.

Thanks to FAIR for posting this reminder. Its Web site also provides links to some of its own postings about reporters who've gotten the Iraq story right, and those who’ve played stenographers to the Bush White House and Pentagon. Click here.

— Adam Simms

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“America’s Moral Menopause”

2007-04-30T20:30:00.000-04:00

That’s the title of an article in the April 19 on-line edition of al-Ahram, Egypt’s leading daily newspaper.

The article starts off:

For almost 200 years, the US has claimed the moral high ground in world affairs. As it prospered, it looked on a wretched global scene of war, poverty, dictatorship, conquest, exploitation, colonial rule and the denial of human rights. Imbued with a new sense of global power following allied victories in World War I and World War II, the US soon changed from the acclaimed position of moral guru to that of the scion of imperial power. When the US withdraws from Iraq in defeat it will leave the Middle East/Gulf region in a state of unparalleled chaos and instability, a political vacuum remaining that not even massive US military presence in the region could fill. It has unleashed forces it cannot control and is trying to contain them by maintaining a decrepit status quo. The short-lived American empire is inexorably entering its period of political and moral menopause. It would do the US, and the turbulent world it has created, well if it retreated from its failed ideology of neo-conservatism into an era of neo- isolationism.

I never thought I’d find in al-Ahram with which to agree. But that’s what six years of George W. Bush can do to you.

The entire article is here.

— David Gradis

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Jaw-Jaw — or War-War?

2007-04-13T08:16:00.000-04:00

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi took a lot of heat from the Bush administration and its flaks over her visit to Syria.

Some critics took her to task for having her own foreign policy, as opposed to the “official” one set by the president.

Others decried the fact that she traveled to a country that is on the State Department’s list of countries that sponsor terrorism.

To the first set of critics, M.J. Rosenberg, director of Israel Policy Forum’s Washington Policy Center, provided a pointed rejoinder in his April 6 column:

Heaven forefend! Things are going so swimmingly in the Middle East that the last thing anyone needs is for the 3rd highest official in the United States trying to resuscitate diplomacy.

But it makes no sense to refuse categorically to talk with your “enemies.” After all, it’s your “enemies” with whom you ultimately have to make peace — not your friends.

Few of Pelosi’s critics, Rosenberg noted, can rationally have any qualms about what she reportedly said to Syria’s President Bashar Assad:

that he should stop making trouble in Iraq and Lebanon, that the Israeli government is ready for negotiations, that Israel has no bellicose intentions toward Syria and that Syria should use its influence to free Israeli prisoners.

All in all, Rosenberg concluded, Pelosi’s trip was “a gutsy move”: It “strengthened America’s position in the region, and likely helped Israel on prisoners, on Hezbollah, and in its effort to avoid another war like last summer’s.”

Claude Salhani, UPI’s international editor, stuck it to Pelosi’s second set of critics by recapping a few highlights of times when the US has deemed it necessary and useful to hold talks with nations or groups with which it was engaged in hostilities:

• At the height of the Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union established a “hot line” telephone link between Washington and Moscow so that their leaders could “communicate and ... avoid having a crisis grow into a reason for a major confrontation.”

• During the Vietnam War, US officials held talks with both North Vietnamese and Vietcong representatives.

• In Iraq, US officials have negotiated with Sunni “insurgents,” even as Sunni groups engage US troops in combat.

The Bush administration’s fixation with channeling John Wayne-like “strong, silent type” movie machismo demonstrates that it would rather have conflict than resolve conflict.

At some point, you’ve got to talk with your “enemies.” After all, it’s your “enemies” with whom you’ve got to make peace — not your friends.

— Adam Simms

Kurt Vonnegut, RIP

2007-04-12T14:42:00.000-04:00

Kurt Vonnegut, who died on April 11, at the age of 84, was a World War II U.S. Army veteran. Captured and held by the Germans as a prisoner of war in Dresden, he was one of the few survivors of the Allied carpet bombing that destroyed the city in reprisal for the German bombing of Coventry, England.

The experience marked him forever and was the basis for his novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. So far as Vonnegut was concerned, there were no “good wars.”

With his trademark wit that melded humor, perplexity and despair at human folly, Vonnegut wrote in his preface to The Franklin Library's edition of that memorable work:

The Dresden atrocity, tremendously expensive and meticulously planned, was so meaningless, finally, that only one person on the entire planet got any benefit from it. I am that person. I wrote this book, which earned a lot of money for me in royalties and made my reputation, such as it is. One way or another, I got two or three dollars for every person killed. Some business I'm in.

May Kurt Vonnegut finally rest in peace.

— Adam Simms

Dissent in the Ranks

2007-04-09T11:31:00.000-04:00

San Francisco Chronicle reporter Joe Garofoli filed an article on April 7 about active duty troops in the U.S. military who are speaking out about the war in Iraq.

In addition to his portraits of "the few, the proud, the disillusioned," Garofoli also lists two interesting ways in which the Web is being used to organize in-the-ranks dissent.

One is an on-line petition drive, called Appeal for Redress.

The petition is brief:

As a patriotic American proud to serve the nation in uniform, I respectfully urge my political leaders in Congress to support the prompt withdrawal of all American military forces and bases from Iraq. Staying in Iraq will not work and is not worth the effort.

Appeal for Redress's Web site also cites military regulations that both provide protection for and limit the ways in which military personnel are free to express opinions on political and military matters.

More freewheeling is G.I. Special, an on-line "near-daily news bulletin for service members," with annotated reprints of newspaper clips and wire service photos dealing with the war and military experiences in Iraq.

At the end of every issue is a reminder to military personnel: "If printed out, this newsletter is your personal property and cannot legally be confiscated from you 'Possession of unauthorized material may not be prohibited.' DoD Directive 1325.6 Section 3.5.1.2."

— Barnett Axelrad

The Ides of April: “Hang Up on War”

2007-04-08T17:48:00.000-04:00

Procrastinators — rejoice!

If you’re still waiting to file this year’s federal income tax returns, you’re just in time to strike a personal blow against funding the Iraq war.

Best of all, it’s legal — and the Internal Revenue Service will help you do it.

Amy Goodman, a columnist and host of Democracy Now!, a nationally syndicated radio news program, provides details — and a Web site link — in her April 5 posting on alternet.org. Click here to read it.

Briefly, the deal is this:

Back in 1898 — yes, 1898 — the federal government slapped a tax of one percent (later raised to three percent) on telephone calls as a way to fund the Spanish-American War. Say what you will about William McKinley, but he was one Republican who evidently had no compunction about taxing the wealthy — the only ones in those days who could afford telephones.

Soon after the “splendid little war” ended, the U.S. annexed Puerto Rico and the Philippines — and forgot all about the phone tax, which it kept collecting.

Then came the Vietnam War.

War tax resisters started targeting the phone tax by refusing to pay it.

The IRS, with Javert-like tenacity, prosecuted a number of tax resisters for their refusal, but eventually concluded it wasn’t worth its time and money.

And so, notes Goodman, in 2006 the IRS decided to offer a “retroactive rebate for phone taxes paid between March 1, 2003 and July 31, 2006. Typical refunds will be between $30 and $60.”

“While Congress and President Bush trade barbs over war funding,” Goodman concludes, “with a simple check mark on your tax return you can help defund the war. Claim your telephone tax rebate. Let the Pentagon hold a bake sale.”

— Adam Simms

CO Watch: Marine lance corporal wins discharge

2007-04-07T10:59:00.000-04:00

Marine lance corporal Robert Zabala has been declared a conscientious objector by a U.S. District Court judge — four years after Zabala joined the corps, and three years after applying for CO status.

Zabala, who recently graduated from the University of California-Santa Cruz, joined the marines in 2003, hoping he would “find security” in the wake of his grandmother’s death.

Given his family tradition, that thought is not as surprising as it might seem: A grandfather served in Vietnam, his parents and uncles served in the navy, a cousin is in the air force, and another is a marine.

Boot camp training in June 2003 — especially exercises intended to desensitize recruits to violence — awakened Zabala to his ethical objection to killing other people.

Two months into boot camp, a fellow recruit committed suicide on a rifle range. The recruits’ commander, a Capt. Sanchez, derided the dead trainee, saying “f*** him, f*** his parents for raising him, and f*** the girl who dumped him.”

Two military chaplains and a clinical psychologist found Zabala’s moral objections were legitimate and recommended that he be granted a discharge.

However, the discharge was held up by his platoon commander, Maj. R. D. Doherty, who contended Zabala was “insincere,” citing that Zabala did not file for CO status until almost a year after his boot camp training.

Court papers quoted Doherty as having told Zabala: “What did you think you were joining, the Peace Corps? I don’t know how anyone who joins the Marine Corps cannot know that it involves killing.”

Nonetheless, officers who reviewed Zabala’s CO application recommended his request’s approval. It was then rejected by a general, on grounds that Zabala’s objection to war was not based on religious devotion.

(Zabala follows some Buddhist-based traditions, but was not a practicing Buddhist when he enlisted.)

In overturning the Marine Corps’ rejection of Zabala’s application, Federal District Court Judge James Ware, who served 13 years in the U.S. Army reserves, said he was convinced that Zabala was sincere when he said he had struggled to “reconcile the demands of duty with the demands of conscience.”

Santa Cruz’s Resource Center for Nonviolence, for which Zabala did volunteer work while awaiting the court’s ruling, provided legal assistance through its G.I. Rights Counseling Project.

(Our thanks to Stefan Merken for bringing this story to our attention.)

— Adam Simms

Iran Watch: Tehran Willies

2007-03-22T11:03:00.000-04:00

George W. Bush may have gotten a thumpin’ in November’s midterm elections, but there are signs that the Bourbons in and around the White House have forgotten nothing and learned nothing from their Iraq quagmire, and have now set their sights on Iran. Chief among this clueless crowd are their cheerleaders among our domestic neocons and their extreme hard-right Israeli acolytes who are now beating their war drums for the U.S. to make the same mistake all over again.

Exhibit A. Joshua Muravchik’s article in the November/December issue of Foreign Policy entitled “Operation Comeback,” which is cast in the form of a memo “To: My Fellow Neoconservatives” about “How to Save the Neocons.”

Early on, Muravchik, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, acknowledges that both the Bush administration and the neocons “were glib about how Iraqis would greet liberation.” But nothing, it seems, is capable of defeating neocon hubris. Rather than finding that experience a reason to display greater humility — much less to call for scaling back or pulling out of Iraq — he’s off to launch the next war.

“Make no mistake,” Muravchik half prophesies, half prescribes, “President Bush will need to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities before leaving office . . . Even if things in Iraq get better, a nuclear-armed Iran will negate any progress there.” And what role should neoconservatism’s armchair generals play in preparing for Armageddon? Enlist their sons and daughters in the military? Nah. Cheerlead from the sidelines, as they have always done, of course: “We need to pave the way intellectually now and be prepared to defend the action when it comes.”

Neocons pride themselves on being “realists,” no matter how cold-blooded and crackpot their so-called “realism” may be, and so Muravchik seems almost rational when compared with his Israeli counterparts. Take for example Exhibit B: Michael Freund, an aide to former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose essay, “A Faith-Based Appeal to President Bush,” appeared in New York’s Jewish Press on Nov. 1.

Writing to the Decider as “one man of faith to another,” Freund apparently figures that an administration given to faith-based science and faith-based economics might just as easily adopt a faith-based foreign policy, too.

“I appeal to you now . . . ,” Freund wrote, “please strike Iran hard with military force, and dismantle their nuclear weapons program before it is too late.

“I know you believe, as I do, that God guides the destiny of men and of nations. And I know you believe, just as I do, that He raised you up to the helms of power precisely at this critical period, to serve as His agent and His instrument in this world.”

After advising “God’s agent” not to pay attention to “the opinion-mongers at The New York Times,” Freund reassures “His instrument”: “The one and only verdict — the one that really, truly counts — is the one penned in Heaven, by He Who gave each of us life. It is to Him, and Him alone, that we will all have to answer. . .

“Remember the promise that God made to Abraham in Genesis chap. 12: ‘I will bless those that bless you, and those that curse you I shall curse.’

“Note that when it comes to standing with Israel and the Jewish people, there is no middle ground. God delineates two categories and two categories only: those who bless Israel and those who curse it.”

Freund, however, need not worry — if Seymour Hersh’s article, “The Next Act,” in The New Yorker’s Nov. 17 issue is accurate. Heeding the adage that God helps those who help themselves, Israel apparently is up to its elbows in “helping” the Bush administration with Iran.
Item: Hersh reports that Israel is providing a Kurdish resistance group with “equipment and training” to make undercover raids into Iran (though, he notes, Jerusalem denies any involvement).

Item: Israeli personnel have cooperated with U.S. counterparts to station radiation-detection equipment close to Iranian sites suspected of producing nuclear-weapons components (though no appreciable radioactivity has been detected).

Item: Last summer Israel passed along a report that its agents operating in Iran had determined that the Iranians had produced and tested a device to trigger a nuclear explosion.
A former U.S. intelligence officer told Hersh that the Israeli tip, though sensational, was unverifiable: “We don’t know who the Israeli source is . . . there are no diagrams, no significant facts. Where is the test site?”

Nonetheless, the former official noted, hardliners within the White House latched onto the Israeli report as proving “the White House’s theory that the Iranians are on track” in developing a nuclear weapon.

But by far the most revealing insight contained in Hersh’s article is a quote from Ephraim Sneh, Israel’s deputy defense minister, who in November acknowledged to the Jerusalem Post that the greatest threat Israel faces at the moment is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s mouth, rather than Iran’s nuclear development program. Said Sneh (quoting from Hersh):

“The danger isn’t so much Ahmadinejad’s deciding to launch an attack but Israel’s living under a cloud of fear from a leader committed to its destruction. . . . Most Israelis would prefer not to live here; most Jews would prefer not to come here with families, and Israelis who can live abroad will . . . I am afraid Ahmadinejad will be able to kill the Zionist dream without pushing a button. That’s why we must prevent this regime from obtaining nuclear capability at all costs.”

In 2003, the Bush administration stampeded Congress and compliant mainstream news media into going to war with Iraq after Colin Powell flashed photos of “mobile WMD laboratories” to the UN General Assembly. When the US military finally caught up with those “laboratories,” they turned out to be trailers — the kind that could have been shipped back to the States and retrofitted to provide housing in New Orleans for homeless refugees from Hurricane Katrina.

What the Bush administration, the neocons and jittery Israelis will never acknowledge, and what all too many American seem only vaguely to remember, is that there were no weapons of mass destruction in those trailers because Saddam Hussein had dismantled whatever WMD programs he’d had under the grinding pressure of a decade of internationally imposed economic sanctions.
True, the sanctions regime was porous, subject to corruption on the part of many of those nations that signed on to restrict or forbid trade with Iraq, and took a heavy toll on ordinary Iraqis. But it worked. Neocons and Israeli hardliners will never acknowledge this last fact because their worldviews are at once simplistic and apocalyptic.

If Iran produces a bomb, it could be a real danger to regional and world peace, given the regime currently ruling that nation. But before the U.S. or anyone else decides to launch another war in order to respond to that possibility, we would do well to remember — and to remind the White House and Congress — that nonviolence, in the form of sanctions, made it unnecessary to go to war with Iraq to dismantle its weapons program. And that the only thing we have accomplished by going to war in Iraq is to make this troubled world a more dangerous place.

— Adam Simms

Passover 5767: JPF Dares to Dream

2007-03-22T10:04:00.000-04:00

The miracles that are recounted in the book of Exodus cannot be understated. I’m not talking about the plagues and the walls of water. Rather, as the book opens, the very idea of an Israelite people mobilized to leave Egyptian bondage seems like a laughable long shot.

After all, everybody is actively working against Heaven’s plan. Pharaoh struts easily across the world stage, believing himself divine. Moses the prophet is blocked in speech and in spirit, refusing his mantle of leadership. And the Israelites suffer that most dread of maladies, the “slave mentality.” They have given up hope of ever being anything than what they believe themselves to be — born slaves.

In a few chapters, though, everything is turned upside-down. As Passover approaches, it is vital for us to remember that the Exodus is a defining moment in history not just for Jews, but for the universe. It demonstrates that any and all present realities can be overturned and overcome. It stands as an eternal reminder that the way things are is not the way they must remain.

To the lowly Hebrew slaves, Egyptian power — with its technological prowess and military might — must have looked insurmountable. But slowly, the doubt and reluctance that had previously characterized the house of Israel dissipate. The established order crumbles.
So too with us. Dismayed by misery created by our government in two countries, with an assault threatened on a third, it may seem hopeless to us to work for peace. As with the doubtful and cynical Israelites, those of who look for liberation from violence are often demonized by our own people, condemned for daring to dream of liberation.

Still, today, the JPF dares to dream.

I have been asked to help the leaders of this storied organization move into the future as co-chair. I am humbled to stand on the shoulders of giants. But the time is short.

We must come together, bound by our belief in redemption. Your continued support of JPF is vital. Despite our spirit, our financial needs remain great. Among them:

• JPF is in need of an updated computer system. This is a substantial investment for our humble organization.

• We need a Moses or two. JPF cannot exist long-term without organizers. These should be paid, professional staff persons.

• We are taught that those who enter the Promised Land are the young, those who are born as free people in the wilderness. JPF must engage college students, who possess the passion and energy to do this holy work. Campus initiatives, too, need funding.

If you wish that your contributions be earmarked for one or more of these tasks, please direct us to do so. Alternately, I ask you: What else do we need to get out of the bondage of perpetual war and violence? I look to our members, old and new, to be part of this vital discussion. Please contact me to discuss your ideas, passions, hopes and wishes for the JPF.

May we make this miraculous vision a reality. And may we, together, cross the sea on dry land, marching arm-in-arm.

— Rabbi Michael Rothbaum

Obama’s “AIPAC problem”

2007-03-16T12:57:00.000-04:00

The title of a Mar. 13 post on Ben Smith’s Politico blog caught our eye: “Obama’s Jewish Problem.”

And just what is Barak Obama’s “Jewish problem”?

It turns out that if the junior US senator from Illinois has one, it is with AIPAC — the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — and not with American Jews in general.

According to Smith, David Adelman, a Des Moines attorney — and AIPAC member — released a letter to the senator in which he said that he found it “deeply troubling” that Obama, a Democratic presidential nomination hopeful, was reported to have told the Des Moines Register’s editorial board, in the course of describing his support for measures to loosen restrictions on US humanitarian aid to the Palestinians, that “nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people.”

And — surprise! surprise! — AIPAC just happens to have adopted a measure at its annual policy conclave this week that calls on the Senate to stiffen sanctions against the Palestinian Authority.

Ben Smith, savvy blogger though he may be, does neither his readers nor American political discourse any favors when he conflates “AIPAC” with “Jewish.”

Yes, AIPAC’s support base consists mainly of American Jews (though note that Pastor John Hagee, an evangelical Protestant minister in San Antonio and head of Christians United for Israel, was one of its conclave’s headliners).

But no, AIPAC does not by any means represent or speak for the opinions and preferences of American Jews.

That was made clear the following day — but only if you were paying close attention — when JTA reported that the liberal Zionist group Ameinu (formerly, the Labor Zionist Alliance) had blasted AIPAC for adopting “radically hawkish positions” at its gathering.

And Ameinu can’t be dismissed as some fringe element on the American Jewish scene: it is a member organization that has a representative on AIPAC’s executive committee.

Ameinu’s president Kenneth Bob outlined his organization’s critique:

“AIPAC, which presents itself as ‘THE pro-Israel lobby’ representing the entire American Jewish community, has now adopted highly partisan new policies on the pursuit of Palestinian-Israeli peace,” Bob said. “The new approach aligns AIPAC more closely with neoconservatives, placing it in sharp opposition both to the Bush administration and the Israeli government.”

Nor is Ameinu alone among organizations representing American Jews whose analyses of Middle East matters don’t toe AIPAC’s neocon line.

Americans for Peace Now (APN) has launched an action alert urging supporters to contact US senators and ask them to refuse to sign a letter being circulated by AIPAC that calls for a continued US boycott of the Palestinian Authority until it meets a set of preconditions: renouncing terrorism, recognizing Israel and accepting past agreements with the Jewish state.

On the face of it, AIPAC’s call appears reasonable. But as APN’s alert notes:

This cleverly-crafted “ask” is not about maintaining the current U.S. policy, but rather expanding it in a manner that is clearly inconsistent with the best interests of both Israel and the United States.

With this “ask,” Senators will be on the record urging the Administration to cut off all contact with President Abbas and any other Fatah members (or independents) that become part of a future Palestinian national unity government. Once Members of Congress are “on record” with this demand, they will find it difficult to oppose efforts to turn this non-binding letter into law.

At a time when there is growing recognition in Congress that engagement — even with imperfect or objectionable partners — is vital to U.S. national security interests in the Middle East and around the world, it makes no sense for the Senate to urge a wholesale U.S. boycott of contacts with longtime Palestinian interlocutors who recognize Israel, reject violence and terror, and are clearly committed to trying to achieve Israeli-Palestinian peace based on two states living side by side in peace and with security.

So when Ben Smith and other political observers write about “Obama’s Jewish Problem,” they’ve got it wrong. Obama doesn’t have a “Jewish” problem — he has an AIPAC problem.

And so do the vast majority of American Jews who, despite more than 30 years of seeing their mainstream organizations hijacked by neocon hardliners, steadfastly continue their refusal to fall in line and remain steadfast liberals.

— David Gradis

Cheney mugs AIPAC — and American Jews

2007-03-15T21:21:00.000-04:00

A Gallup poll released last month found that 77 percent of American Jews believe US military involvement in Iraq was a mistake from the get-go. (See our post of Feb. 28, “US Jews toughest foes of Iraq war.”)

Those findings, set against events emanating from this week’s annual policy conclave of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in Washington, DC, throw into stark relief the radical disconnect between American Jews and the people who claim to be our “leaders.”

And a strange style of “leadership” it is, too — one that “leads” by toadying to powers-that-be.

For those who play the game, it is exhilarating to hobnob with the real movers and shakers, bask in their reflected glory and delude yourself that, in a democracy, they do your bidding. Until, that is, they demand that you do their bidding.

So it was that AIPAC invited Vice President Richard Cheney to lend some luster to their Monday session. To all outward appearances, it probably looked to the AIPACers like a perfect fit: AIPAC favors a hard line toward the Palestinians and Iran, and the vice president is the hardest of hardliners in the Bush administration.

AIPAC undoubtedly expected a love fest. What it got instead was a dose of the veep’s well-practiced menace.

“It is simply not consistent,” he intoned, “for anyone to demand aggressive action against the menace that is posed by the Iranian regime while at the same time acquiescing in a retreat from Iraq that would leave Israel’s best friend, the United States, dangerously weakened.”

Translation: You want us to protect Israel from Iran? Fine. Quid pro quo: support us on Iraq.

An editorial in the Forward’s March 16 edition clearly and forcefully dissects the threats inherent in Cheney’s message:

… Cheney was telling the Jewish community that the war in Iraq had been launched and fought in considerable measure for their benefit and Israel’s. That’s precisely the message that Israel’s worst enemies have been peddling for the past four years as America’s blood and treasure have been poured wastefully down the sinkhole of a misconceived and unwinnable war. It was a lie then, and it is a lie now. And now he seems to be casting Iran in the same light: as the Jews’ war.

…

… It is not the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq that threatens disaster to the United States and the entire Middle East. The disaster is already here; it was precipitated by the entry of American troops into Iraq. The American-led invasion turned Iraq from a dreary dictatorship into a maelstrom of communal violence and a breeding ground of terrorism. The toppling of the tin-pot tyrant Saddam Hussein removed Iran’s worst enemy, unleashing the Islamic Republic as a regional superpower. The continuing presence of American troops as unwanted occupiers in the fabled city of Baghdad is inflaming rage in the streets throughout the Muslim world, putting Americans and Israelis alike at greater risk than ever.

The burning question for America and its allies in the region, Muslim and Jewish alike, is how to end the nightmare of the Iraq quagmire as quickly as possible, with the least damage to the torn fabric of civilization.

— David Gradis

JPF joins March 19 Seattle march to end Iraq war

2007-03-11T23:49:00.000-04:00

Greetings!

Jewish Peace Fellowship is one of 60+ organizations endorsing activities taking place in Seattle, Wash., on March 19, in conjunction with other local activities around the fourth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq.

It is many years since the JPF banner has been seen in Seattle. This is momentous for Jewish activists here, who want to be known as Jews in pursuit of peace and justice, and all the more so with reference to the Iraq War, since so many Jewish organizations both locally and nationally have not joined in public opposition to this war.

I look forward to being more active with JPF locally, as I am sure do many others. I think it would be of interest to other members of JPF to know more about other local JPF activities.

For justice and reconciliation,
Shulamit Decktor

= • = • = • =

ENDING THE WAR BEGINS AT HOME!

The results of this war

• Over 600,000 Iraqis dead.

• More than 3,000 U.S. service people killed.

• A world unable to marshal its resources to address pressing issues such as poverty, hunger and disease, or to face up to the imminent threat of global warming.

• Over $10.4 billion has been diverted from Washington State
(this means less for education, health care, housing and social services).

• Almost one billion dollars has been diverted from Seattle.

Looking for a different future

With resources from the people of Seattle that have been expended on this war, we could have provided four years of free health coverage for every uninsured child in the state, and granted a four-year university scholarship to every student who has graduated from a Seattle high school since the war began, and paid four years of salary for 1,500 additional public school teachers, and had money left over to provide 1,500 affordable housing units to deserving families.

Redirect war funding! Let's spend these next four years preparing a better future!

From the ground up…

Help convince the Seattle City Council and King County Council to pass anti-war resolutions that recognize the devastating effects war has had on our local communities. We are asking the City and County Council in turn to pressure our representatives in Congress to end the war in Iraq and bring the troops home.

Join us —3 PM, March 19

At the Federal Courthouse, 700 Stewart St

We will be marching to City Hall, where an anti-war resolution is under consideration, then on to the Federal Building, joining others in condemnation of the war and demanding an end to war funding.

info at www.wsjwj.org, or phone 789-2684

Partial List of endorsers: Allyship, American Federation of Government Employees Local 3937, American Friends Service Committee, American Muslims of Puget Sound, Capitol Hill Neighbors for Peace and Justice, Cedar Tree Architects, Cloud City Construction, Church Council of Greater Seattle, El Comite Pro Amnistia General y Justica Social, Freedom Socialist Party, Green Party of Seattle, IBU Puget Sound Region, IBU R.37, International Socialist Organization, Jewish Peace Fellowship, L.D. Brown Framing, Legacy of Equality Leadership and Organizing, Lutheran Peace Fellowship, Lutheran Public Policy Office of Washington State, Mothers for Police Accountability, Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration Committee, MLK Jr. County Labor Council, North Seattle Neighbors for Peace and Justice, Northwest Artisans, Not a Number Cards and Gifts, Okanogan Highlands Bottling Company, Peace Action, Peace and Justice Resource Center, Pride at Work (AFL-CIO), Radical Women, Rauschenbusch Center for Spirit and Action, Reclaim the Media, Seattle Fellowship of Reconciliation, Seattle Gay News, Seattle Peace Heathens, Seattle Women in Black, Seattle Young People's Project, SNOWFremont, Sound Nonviolent Opponents of War, Southend Neighbors for Peace and Justice, Thirty-sixth District Democrats, Trikkon NW, Troops Home Now Coalition, United Indians of all Tribes Foundation, University Unitarian Church, Urban Press, US Women and Cuba Collaboration, Veterans for Peace Chapter 92, Washington Association of Churches, Washington State Jobs with Justice, West Seattle Neighbors for Peace and Justice, Western Washington Fellowship of Reconciliation.

Is Syria next for Bush’s WMD treatment?

2007-03-11T09:04:00.000-04:00

The following item is circulating care of something called Middle East Newsline. This excerpt from an undated dispatch was forwarded by Middle East Web.

Given the U.S. Department of Defense's recent history of “piping” and “cherry-picking” intelligence to support outcomes the Bush administration desires, perhaps it deserves to be treated with skepticism — a case of the boy who cried “Wolfowitz.”

SYRIA DEVELOPS BIO-WEAPONS

WASHINGTON [MENL] — Syria has advanced in efforts to produce biological missile warheads.

The U.S. intelligence community has determined that the regime of President Bashar Assad was developing an infrastructure for biological weapons production. Officials said Assad has advanced the BW program through help from China and North Korea.

“Syria’s biotechnical infrastructure is capable of supporting limited biological agent development,” Defense Intelligence Agency director Michael Maples said. “DIA assesses Syria has a program to develop select biological agents.”

Maples said Syria has sought to install biological and chemical warheads on its missile arsenal. He said the programs were meant to deter Israel’s conventional force superiority.

— Barnett Axelrad

Iraq War: Profiles in timidity

2007-03-10T21:14:00.000-05:00

While the Union for Reform Judaism’s leadership is proposing to take a stand against the Iraq war (see the post below), the rest of American Jewry’s mainstream organizations are having a hard time finding their tongues — much less their nether parts.

The Jewish Council on Public Affairs [JCPA] held its annual policymaking plenary session in Washington, D.C. from Feb. 24–27, and managed to discuss Iran and Syria. But somehow the delegates — who represent the major synagogue movements, the major “defense” organizations, and 122 local Jewish federation community-relations councils — never got around to addressing the war in Iraq.

Oh, wait. We take that back.

The Forward’s Nathan Gutman, reporting in the March 2 edition (click {here} to read his article), noted that there was a debate on Iraq — a rump session that began after midnight, in the early hours of Feb. 27:

Of the hundreds of delegates that filled the room Monday for the lengthy debates and votes on resolutions earlier in the evening, fewer than 20 remained to discuss the Iraq War. Sitting around empty tables with half-full coffee cups and leftover doughnuts scattered on them, the few delegates with an interest in the issue attempted to conduct a late-night debate.

“This room was filled with people voting on nonsense, and then they all walked out,” yelled 79-year-old Robert Zweiman of the Jewish War Veterans organization when he stepped up to the microphone. Looking around at the empty hall, Zweiman asked: “Does that give you an indication of how important this is?”

The JCPA's executive director, Rabbi Steve Gutow, perplexed: “It is very odd that the organizations have not taken stands on Iraq.”

Where is Maimonides when you really need him?

— Barnett Axelrad

Iraq War: RJC vs. URJ = Pee Wee vs. Arnold

2007-03-10T20:33:00.000-05:00

On Monday, the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) leadership meets to consider a resolution calling for a “timetable for the phased and expeditious withdrawal of United States troops from Iraq” and comes down against the Bush administration’s “escalation” of U.S. troop strength there. The policy statement, however, doesn’t demand that Congress cut off funding for the war. [For more details, see our post of March 6.]

Nonetheless, the Republican Jewish Coalition [RJC] is shocked — shocked! — writes James D. Besser in the March 9 edition of the New York Jewish Week. (Click {here} to read his article.)

According to Besser, an RJC spokesman sputtered that the Reform movement is being “hijacked by politically motivated efforts to undermine the war on terrorism.”

But Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, isn’t fazed. Recent polls, he notes, show American Jews overwhelmingly oppose the war [see our post of Feb. 28.], and two-thirds of non-Democratic Jews currently line up against the war.

Ira Forman, director of the NJC’s counterpart, the National Jewish Democratic Council, gets the prize for pith. “I don’t get it,” he says.

If you read the polls these guys don’t even represent the views of most Republican Jews. Now they are picking a fight with the largest Jewish denomination in America — it’s like Pee Wee Herman trying to pick a fist fight with Arnold Schwarzenegger.”

— Barnett Axelrad

Pundits on parade

2007-03-09T13:34:00.000-05:00

Ha’aretz correspondent Shmuel Rosner writes a monthly column in which Israel’s pundits sound off about “whom the consider to be the best [US] candidate for Israel.”

But quite rightly M. J. Rosenberg, director of the Israel Policy Forum’s Washington office, finds this offensive.

“[I]t smacks,” he writes in his March 9 on-line column — click {here} to read it in its entirety — “of a bunch of non-Americans telling Americans how to vote.”

Moreover, as Rosenberg points out, Rosner's pundit panel is wildly out of touch with American Jews’ political sentiments:

The flaws in Rosner’s poll come through loud and clear in his most recent results. The three candidates deemed “best for Israel” are Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Newt Gingrich. All the Democratic contenders rate well below this top tier. Newt Gingrich! Newt is a significant political figure but I doubt that 5% of American Jews would choose him for President.

And, if history is any guide, when the November 2008 election comes around, American Jews are going to vote overwhelmingly Democratic for President, no matter which Democrat or Republican is the respective party’s nominee.

We know that because since 1928, Jewish voters have chosen the Democratic candidate, usually with at least 75% of the total vote. This is not because they believe Democrats to be more pro-Israel but because, on the wide array of issues facing the American people, they have been more comfortable with the Democrats than with the Republicans.

“Candidates who address American Jews as if their only concern is Israel are out of line,” Rosenberg concludes:

In fact, they cross the line between pandering and out-and-out insulting the Jewish community.

We do care about Israel, and deeply so. That is why we want to see Israel living at peace with the Palestinians. Those who think they will win our support by offering policies that promise Israel nothing but more war – while assuming that their positions on domestic issues are less important to us – will soon learn otherwise. This community has been called many things. “Stupid” is not among them.

— Posted by Adam Simms

Union for Reform Judaism considers a resolution on the war in Iraq

2007-03-06T23:49:00.000-05:00

The Union for Reform Judaism’s Executive Committee has circulated to congregational rabbis and presidents an advance copy of a proposed resolution on the U.S. war in Iraq, which is scheduled to be considered on March 14. (A copy can be downloaded in the form of a Microsoft Word .doc file by clicking here.)

Though the URJ does not take a pacifist position with regard to war, the resolution's discussion of “Jewish Values Regarding Rules for War” provides persuasive ethical considerations for determining that U.S. military action in Iraq has been misbegotten from its start.

Here are some highlights of the resolution:

Noting that its reading of Jewish tradition “offers ethical analysis as to the causes justifying the use of force (‘just cause’),” the resolution notes:

Nonetheless, just because a government has a right to do something does not make what it does right — or wise. Further, meeting one just war norm does not justify the violation of others.

. . .

The halachah is clear about the need to pursue vigorously peaceful options before the use of force could be justified (Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Melachim 6:1). This was a requirement that the 2002 URJ Executive committee decision called for and one that the 9/11 Commission found we had failed to achieve.

. . .

In conclusion, our failure to pursue all reasonable alternatives to war, to mobilize the kind of broad-based international cooperation we had in the first Gulf War, the array of faulty justifications for war offered, the woeful lack of planning for the aftermath of the traditional warfare component of the war, the disgraceful failure to protect the civilian infrastructure (bal tashchit), the abuses of prisoners, the alarming devastation wrought on civilians — all these and more raise significant abuses and failures of Jewish just war standards.

The URJ’s proposed statement concludes with the following resolutions to:

1. Reaffirm the principles stated in the 2005 Resolution on the War in Iraq, particularly:

A. Commending our service women and men (and their families) who have answered duty's call and served our nations honorably…and support generous benefits for them;

B. Encouraging the involvement and support of the international community towards a working democratic Iraqi government and rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure;

C. Ensuring the United States government provides sufficient armor, supplies, and security for our troops through the completion of phased withdrawal;

D. Providing diligent congressional oversight of the war and related expenditures;

E. Ensuring that the financial burden of the war falls not just on the poor and on future generations, but be shared equitably;

F. Immediately begin the process of phased withdrawal of our troops from Iraq now that Iraqi Parliamentary elections have occurred; and

2. Call on President Bush to:

A. Clearly set and announce a timetable for the phased and expeditious withdrawal of United States troops from Iraq;

B. Include the estimated cost of the war in the annual budget request and not through emergency supplemental bills; and

3. Oppose an escalation in troop strength; and

4. Call upon the United States and Canadian governments and the international community to:

A. Encourage Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Malaki to resume reconciliation talks with the full range of Iraq's political leaders;

B. Actively support a dialogue between Iraq and all its neighbors, especially in regards to helping to stop civil strife and terrorism and helping finance Iraqi job programs and reconstruction.

— Posted by Adam Simms

“I am not prepared to ... set aside my convictions and fundamental approach to life”

2007-03-06T23:01:00.000-05:00

Ruth Hiller, of the Israeli organization New Profile, has kindly forwarded the text of Hadas Amit's request for exemption from military service on grounds of conscience — a statement that is as eloquent as it is plainspoken.

Israel makes no provision for conscientious objection to military service. As noted in our previous post of March 4 (below), Hadas Amit was recently sentenced to her fifth term in prison for refusing to serve in the armed forces.

Hadas Amit

October 2006

Re: Request for an exemption from military service on grounds of conscience

Dear Sir/Madam

By writing you this letter I want to let you know that I request an exemption from military service. I state hereby that I am not prepared to serve in any military organization and set aside my convictions and fundamental approach to life. Below is a signed statement, in compliance with your regulations.

If I were to be drafted into military service this would stand in absolute and total contradiction with my beliefs and my way of living which do not tolerate killing, violence, nationalism and destruction. I am not prepared to wear the uniform of an organization which is responsible for death and destruction and which acts in ways that are damaging to its surroundings. All countries, including Israel, should act in peaceful ways only, and when under attack they should refrain from returning fire. It is wrong, under any circumstances, those of Israel included, for a state to maintain an army which is trained for war and killing. Such an approach runs totally counter to any striving for peace and co-existence with our neighbors in the Middle East.

I am aware that I am writing this at a late stage. My enlistment date is 24 October, 2006. There are several reasons for my lateness, which I shall explain below. But this delay should not give you the wrong impression: I have objected to violence and to military activities from the very start. –even if, to begin with, I didn’t find the right words to express my thoughts.

No aim, under any circumstance, justifies acting harmfully toward human beings. Even when I was very young, I understood that violence is of no use and that the only solution is peace with those who surround you. I have always tried to be helpful and constructive, and I have never taken part in any violent activity.

I hope there is no need for me to explain why it isn’t right to use violence. After all, that’s a general and absolute principle: those who don’t believe in it should open their history books, or just get out into the street to see for themselves. Isn’t it obvious that violence is a base and barbaric way of behaving? That someone who lashes out does so from fear or weakness? That a healthy society is a society without violence? In no case, at no point in time, and in no language, is violence the way to solve a problem. Instead, it in fact creates problems and entrenches those that already existed more deeply.

I appeared for my first call-up towards enlistment in spite of my opposition to the very essence of the military. Even at that early stage, I expressed a deep lack of motivation, undermining the whole process repeatedly, so that they eventually arranged for me to see the mental health officer. My main dilemma, at the time, was whether it would be right for me not to serve in the army while all my friends did: wasn’t it my duty as an Israeli citizen?

This question preoccupied me for a long time, but eventually I began to see how things should be tackled. I understood that what I owe society is nothing like joining any sort of military venture, even though that’s what the law says. Nor is any other person bound to do so. I understood that there is no such thing as military “defense” forces and that soldiers who have been trained to kill cannot defend a state. I also saw that if a country were seriously interested in defending itself, it would have to opt for radical change in its own approach. I saw that it is a fearful, neglected and tense society that hides behind an army. And even the strongest and best trained army cannot defend a society, for only a thriving society does not need defense and is secure.

No society, including that of Israel, can hope to entertain untroubled relations with its neighbors if it suffers from illness and disorder within. If we look at the world at large, we see many weak spots with suffering, poverty and violence almost everywhere, we see disempowered populations and repressed societies, marginal groups and minorities who are deprived of their rights as human beings and as citizens, and a sick environment that pollutes those who live in it. If a state wants to be secure, it must first look after its citizens and land and reconstruct itself on a just and equal basis.

I have understood that my true duty to the state is the same as my duty towards all the citizens of the world. I must make my contribution in truthfulness and with a pure heart towards social change and improvement and to heal the above mentioned ills.

Once the state is healthy, when all citizens lend each other a hand, there will be no need to worry about defense. This will then take care of itself. For when a state does not harm anyone, then no one in turn will want to harm it. And a country which treats other countries justly and considerately creates its own natural defense as other countries, surely, will only wish it well.

I believe in this wholeheartedly and act accordingly.

In recent years I have volunteered for the community in a number of places, and participated in many social and environmental struggles. I took part, for instance, in a big project of the Hashomer Hatsair youth movement, setting up five summer camps in five deprived neighborhoods all over the country. We took care of the funding and then volunteered as counselors. This is moreover the 15th month of my voluntary based, full time “community service year” (shnat sherut) at Kfar Rafael, a rehabilitation village for cognitively disabled adults.

I would also like to mention here that I am quite determined to do two years of civic “national service” beyond my “community service year”, as a way of expressing my values and ideals, and to fulfil my obligation to Israeli society.

The chaos and violence in society find direct and painful expression in our way of treating our environment, which itself, in turn, is no doubt violent too. Just like no person has the right to harm his or her fellow human being, no human being has the right to harm her or his environment, because nature is not our property. In all this, armies and wars play a major role, killing the environment in the name of the murder of other humans. The ecological damage caused by the army cannot be justified: the use of natural resources through ongoing depletion, and unrecyclable waste production caused by the arms industry, the destruction of nature for the sake of military exercises.

Ecology is a crucial issue for me and has a central place in my life. So far I have always tried as best I can to preserve and maintain the environment. I worked as an environmental coordinator at the High School for Ecological Education at Ben Gurion College, where I studied.

Unlike civic service, military service causes damage and destruction. If I have to serve in the army, regardless in what role, I will not be able to live according to my convictions – worse, this will clash completely with my principles.

I will not change my mind, even if the army offers me a function that seems to reflect my values, like community or environmental activity. Because I would still be doing the job as part of the same organization which operates against my above mentioned principles, and for what I believe is a despicable purpose – and this I am not prepared to support. I won’t fight as a soldier, and nor will I support a disabled person as a soldier. I do this work right now, and I will continue doing it in the future, but as a civilian.

Also, I don’t think soldiers should be part of community activity, because in this way the army presents itself as if it were a healthy thing for society and an organization that is friendly towards people, when the opposite is the case. Most emphatically, soldiers should not be involved in educational work with children. When a child receives educational support from a soldier, the child will be grateful to the soldier, unable to separate the person from his or her uniform. Even a soldier who does not wear a uniform will have this effect. The presence of soldiers teaches the child to admire the army, because the child has not yet gained the ability to think critically for her or himself.

I went through many initial doubts, I drew my conclusions and made my decisions – as I have described above – and finally I began writing this letter as a first step.

In fact, I already made up my mind about military service about one year ago, but didn’t yet write this letter due to practical reasons. One of them is the very demanding work load at Kfar Rafael: about 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, with very brief breaks only, once every few months. This intensely demanding work got in the way of formulating a letter. Often I was simply exhausted. Or else, there was no time. I would like to add that I officially completed my community service in August, but because of staff shortages they did not find a replacement for me, and because people are dependent on me for doing their most basic daily things, I chose not to leave. I continued my voluntary work full time, after the official end of my community service.

This is why this request is submitted at such a late stage. Nothing in this delay should be taken to cast doubt on the genuine nature of my conscientious beliefs (on the contrary – my late writing is the result of my dedication to these beliefs, as I just explained), and it should not affect my right to refuse to enlist for military service on grounds of conscience. However, because time is short, I would like to ask you to consider my request as soon as possible, and to allow me to appear before an exemption committee, before my official enlistment date. If this is not possible, I would like hereby to request a postponement of my enlistment date until a final decision has been made regarding my appearance before the exemption committee (or an appeals committee).

Israeli Conscientious Objector Hadas Amit sentenced to 5th term in prison

2007-03-04T10:44:00.000-05:00

(Note to readers: This is a long posting. Please bear with us.)

Tal Hayoun, of the Israeli peace organization New Profile, reported on Feb. 27 that Israeli Conscientious Objector Hadas Amit was sentenced on Feb. 18 to 21 more days in military prison.

This is the fifth prison term for Hadas.

However, she was sent home because the prison was full, and had to return to the military Induction Base several times, and sent home for the same reason. On Thurs., Feb. 22 she was sent home, and then called back on the same day to be imprisoned. She had to spend the night at the Induction Base and then was sent to prison on Friday (Feb. 23).

Imprisonment of conscientious objectors such as Hadas Amit is a violation of international law and of basic human rights. Repeated imprisonment of conscientious objectors is an especially grave offence, as it means sentencing a person more than once for the same offence, and has been judged by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention to constitute a clear case arbitrary detention.

In a letter to the military authorities, announcing her refusal to perform military service, Hadas wrote:

"If I were to be recruited into the army, this would absolutely and in all respects contradict my convictions and my way in life, since violence, killing, nationalism and vandalism are not part of them. I am not willing to wear the uniform of an organisation responsible for killing and destruction, acting in a way detrimental to its environment. Every State, the State of Israel included, should act by peaceful means alone, and even if attached, not to respond with fire. In any situation, Israel's case included, it is wrong to sustain a military force trained for war and killing -- this is altogether contrary to the pursuit of peace and coexistence with our neighbours in the Middle East."

Hadas appeared before the military Conscience Committee in November 2006, but was rejected. Hadas reported that during her hearing she was constantly interrupted and had to suffer degrading and disrespectful comments. A member of the committee demonstratively left the room, and two other members were exchanging notes, with her sitting between them, while she was trying to answer questions directed to her.

In a statement made on the eve of imprisonment Hadas wrote:

“I refuse to enlist in the IDF [Israel Defence Forces], as the D of ‘IDF’ symbolises nothing but killing to me. Who is it that decided that I am not seeking peace, and put me with my back to the wall? I could either lie or pay the price of my principles. It is for morality and justice and the love of humankind that I shall be sitting in prison.”

War Resisters International notes that since early 2005, women COs in Israel are referred to the same internal military Conscience Committee as male COs (despite official legal recognition of women’s right to CO), and there is no right of appeal on the Committee’s decisions. Accumulating evidence strongly suggests that the military Conscience Committee is fundamentally biased against women. It seems difficult for the members of this committee (four men and one woman; all but one of the men are military career officers) to perceive a woman as a person with principles, with a conscientious stance, and with commitment to this stance. As a result (although official figures are not released), the committee rejects a far higher percentage of applications by women than by men, and many of the women applicants describe their committee hearings as a degrading experience.

Letters of support to Hadas are extremely important to help her maintain her morale.

Letters of support to Israeli government and military officials, as well as news media, will alert them that there is international awareness of this fundamental violation of the right to conscience.

Hadas Amit’s prison address is:

Hadas Amit

Military ID 6175691

Military Prison No. 400

Military Postal Code 02447, IDF

Israel

Fax: ++972-3-9579348

Prison authorities block some of her mail from reaching her. Therefore, letters of support and encouragement can also be sent to Hadas via e-mail to amitdrch@gmail.com. These will be printed out and delivered to her on a family visit.

Here is a model letter (suggested by New Profile) that may be adapted for transmittal to Israeli officials and news media outlets. (Fax numbers and e-mail addresses are noted below.):

Dear Sir/Madam,

It has come to my attention that Hadas Amit, Military ID 6175691, a conscientious objector, has been imprisoned again for her refusal to perform military service, and is held in Military Prison No. 400.

The imprisonment of conscientious objectors such as Hadas Amit is a violation of international law, of basic human rights and of plain morals. The repeated imprisonment of conscientious objectors is an especially grave offence, as it means sentencing a person more than once for the same offence, and has been judged by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention to constitute a clear case arbitrary detention.

Moreover, Hadas Amit's imprisonment comes after she had to undergo a degrading and unfair hearing procedure by a military committee, naturally biased against her as a conscientious objector, and doubly biased against her as a woman conscientious objector. Enacting such a procedure is in its own right a violation of the basic standards of fairness.

I therefore call for the immediate and unconditional release from prison of Hadas Amit, without threat of further imprisonment in the future, and urge you and the system you are heading to respect the dignity and person of conscientious objectors, indeed of all human beings, in the future.

Sincerely,

Letters to Israeli government officials may be sent (preferably by fax, because Israeli officials tend to ignore their e-mail boxes, and e-mail often bounce; a letter sent by fax would probably be more effective.) to:

Mr. Amir Peretz

Minister of Defence

Ministry of Defence

37 Kaplan St.

Tel-Aviv 61909

Israel

E-mail: sar@mod.gov.il or pniot@mod.gov.il

Fax: ++972-3-696-27-57 / ++972-3-691-69-40 / ++972-3-691-79-15

In addition, War Resisters International has set up a web-based mailing service through which a standard e-mail letter (with added comments) may be sent to the Israeli Minister of Defence on Hadas' behalf. The form is available on the WRI website at: http://www.wri-irg.org/co/alerts/20061218a.html.

Copies of letters should also be sent to the commander of the military prison at:

Commander of Military Prison No. 400

Military Prison No. 400

Military postal number 02447, IDF

Israel

Fax: ++972-3-9579389

Copies should also be sent to the Military Attorney General:

Avichai Mandelblit,

Chief Military Attorney

Military postal code 9605, IDF

Israel

Fax: ++972-3-569-43-70

In addition, it will be useful to send copies of letters to the Commander of the Induction Base in Tel-HaShomer. It is this officer who ultimately decides whether an objector is to be exempted from military service or sent to another round in prison, and it is the same officer who is ultimately in charge of the military Conscience Committee:

Amir Rogowski

Commander of Induction Base

Meitav, Tel-HaShomer

Military Postal Code 02718, IDF

Israel

Fax: ++972-3-737-60-52

Letters to media in Israel and in other countries will be useful in pressuring the military authorities to let release conscientious objectors, as well as bringing their plight and their cause to public attention.

Here is contact information for the main media outlets in Israel:

Ma'ariv

2 Karlibach St.

Tel-Aviv 67132

Israel

Fax: +972-3-561-06-14

e-mail: editor@maariv.co.il

Yedioth Aharonoth

2 Moses St.

Tel-Aviv

Israel

Fax: +972-3-608-25-46

Ha'aretz (Hebrew)

21 Schocken St.

Tel-Aviv, 61001

Israel

Fax: +972-3-681-00-12

Ha'aretz (English edition)

21 Schocken St.

Tel-Aviv, 61001

Israel

Fax: +972-3-512-11-56

e-mail: letters@haaretz.co.il

Jerusalem Post

P.O. Box 81

Jerusalem 91000

Israel

Fax: +972-2-538-95-27

e-mail: news@jpost.co.il or letters@jpost.co.il

Radio (fax numbers)

Kol-Israel

+972-2-531-33-15 and +972-3-694-47-09

Galei Zahal

+972-3-512-67-20

Television (fax numbers):

Channel 1 +972-2-530-15-36

Channel 2 +972-2-533-98-09

Updates about Hadas Amit and other Israeli COs may be found on New Profile’s Web site (www.newprofile.org).

-- Posted by Adam Simms

US Jews toughest foes of Iraq war

2007-02-28T17:39:00.000-05:00

By Haviv Rettig, Jerusalem Post 2/27/07
Read the full article here.

Jews are more strongly opposed to the Iraq War - and have been since before it began - than any other American religious group, according to an analysis of Gallup polls conducted since 2005 that was released over the weekend by The Gallup Organization.

Asked if "the United States made a mistake in sending troops to Iraq," 77 percent of American Jews said it had, while only 21% believed the deployment was not a mistake.

This figure is in marked contrast to the American average, where only 52% indicated opposition to the war and 46% indicated support.

The Jewish opposition to the war, according to Gallup figures, is not new, and preceded most Americans turning against the war. In the first two years of the war (2003 and 2004), when 52% of Americans supported the war, 61% of Jews opposed it. Even before the beginning of hostilities in 2002 and early 2003, US Jews supported the war by just 49% to 48%. Americans generally supported it by 57% to 37%.

The Gallup figures also show that Jewish opposition to the war is not explainable by the high Democratic Party affiliation among Jews. Even within the Democratic Party, Jewish opposition to the war was greater than that expressed by non-Jewish Democrats. In polls taken from 2005 to 2007, 89% of Jewish Democrats opposed the war and just 8% supported it, while non-Jewish Democrats opposed the war by 78% to 20%.

The Gallup Organization itself noted that "these data show that the average American Jew - even those who are Republicans and may support the Bush administration on other matters - opposes the war."

The study also found that, though Protestants as a whole were evenly divided on the war (49% for and 48% against), African-American Protestants (who were grouped with other Protestants because the study divided according to religions) opposed the war in equal measure to the Jews, with 78% opposing the war and 18% supporting.

The Jews even outpaced Americans with "no religious affiliation," who took second-place with 66% opposed and 33% in favor. Catholics came in third with 53% opposed and 46% in favor. Mormons, meanwhile, were most supportive of the war, with 72% in favor and 27% against.

-- Posted by Barnett Axelrad

Under martial law, every soldier is a king

2007-02-28T12:18:00.000-05:00

"Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s recent promise to ease restrictions at West Bank checkpoints was honored for a day or two. And then it was business as usual," writes J. Zel Lurie.

Under martial law, which has prevailed on the West Bank since June 1967, every soldier is a king.

Some of them act like King Antiochus of Persia before he crowned Queen Esther. Take this incident at a checkpoint witnessed by the Jewish women of Machsom Watch.

A soldier examining a Palestinian driver noticed a daily paper sitting on the windshield. The soldier asked to look at the headlines. The Palestinian driver refused. He said he was in a hurry. The soldier ordered him to stand aside.

A little while later the commander appeared. He explained to the Palestinian: “Here the soldier is the law. If he asks you for your underwear you give it to him. Now go.”

The driver was lucky that the Machsom women were present. They witnessed the soldier’s action and called the commander.

Machsom Watch is a group of about 400 middle-class Jewish women who go out to about 40 permanent checkpoints in the West Bank twice a day in the early morning and the late afternoon. There are over 500 permanent and flying checkpoints in the West Bank,

Their reports are digested and edited and sent by email once a week to interested parties.

The latest report for February 11 to 17 shows that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s recent promise to ease restrictions at West Bank checkpoints was honored for a day or two. And then it was business as usual. The full reign of the Army replete with confused orders that changed from day to day was completely restored.

At the Huwwara checkpoint a few minutes from Nablus on Sunday February 11 at 3:30 p.m., the Machsom Watch women report that men and women age 15 to 35 from Nablus are not allowed to pass. Residents of the Tulkarim and Jenin districts are not allowed at the Huwwars and must go through Bait Ibo. “Great confusion among both soldiers and Palestinians,” the women report.

“A 33-year-old resident of Deir Balut with his 25-year-old wife were turned back to Nablus,” the report continues. Deir Balut is 20 minutes from Nablus through Huwwara. It is four hours away over bad roads through Beit Iba. The Arabs claimed they had a sick mother at home. No dice.

In the name of security the couple made the long ride home.

On the same day at the Beit Furiq checkpoint a Nablus doctor who spends one day a week at the Beit Furiq clinic was turned back to Nablus. He kept repeating in English. “I am a doctor. Doctors have an international status. That is the way it is all over the world.” But not in Beit Furiq on February 11. He was from Nablus and he was sent back. The sick in Beit Furiq will have to wait until next week for treatment.

The next day, some people from Nablus with medical problems or permits to work in East Jerusalem found a way to get through to Qalandia, the main entrance to Jerusalem from the North. On Monday, February 12, Machsom Watch women tried in vain to help men from Nablus with permits to work in East Jerusalem. They were turned away.

Four women with sick children who held one-day permits to East Jerusalem hospitals were held up because they came from Nablus. Here the Machsom women were able to help. “Our intervention succeeded,” the women reported. “The soldiers had misunderstood the orders.” the women were told.

What exactly were the orders? Why the discrimination against Nablus residents? No one knows. No ordinary Israeli, certainly no Palestinian is allowed to question Army security. The soldier is king and he has been king for almost 40 years.

What is true for the soldiers is true for the Border Patrol. Machsom Watch reports that the BP has been carrying on a feud with village of Huwwara.

For weeks BP jeeps hung out in the courtyard of the girls high school. This stopped when three of the older girls filed a complaint. But then harassment of the whole village began. The residents say that the BP’s objective is to pressure them to withdraw the complaint.

On Sunday February 11, the women report on the testimony of the girls who made the complaint and on a conversation with the BP commander as to why his men on the roof of a residential building were keeping fearful women and children awake all night.

“They are there for road surveillance,” said the commander. To the women’s query why can’t they survey from the roofs of commercial buildings where no one sleeps he answered: “We mustn’t interfere with security considerations. It is our right to climb on any roof we choose.”

At 4 p.m. that day a curfew was enforced by the BP. All shops in Huwarra village were shut. The excuse was that some kids through stones at a BP jeep.

Two days later at 4:40 p.m. Machsom Watch women in Huwwara village observed about 10 men standing in the rain. They had been ordered out of their workshop by the BP while their papers were examined.

The feud continues. The power is with the army. The villagers are steadfast.

J. Zel Lurie, a veteran journalist, was editor of Hadassah Magazine.

War Watch

2007-02-27T23:55:00.000-05:00

Seymour Hersh reports on planning to bomb Iran

Reuters (2/25/07) reports that “Despite the Bush administration's insistence it has no plans to go to war with Iran, a Pentagon panel has been created to plan a bombing attack that could be implemented within 24 hours of getting the go-ahead from President George W. Bush, The New Yorker magazine reported in its latest issue.”

Click here to read Hersh’s article.

Dissension in the (Highest) Ranks?

The Sunday Times of London (2/25/07) reports that “Some of America’s most senior military commanders are prepared to resign if the White House orders a military strike against Iran, according to highly placed defence and intelligence sources.

“Tension in the Gulf region has raised fears that an attack on Iran is becoming increasingly likely before President George Bush leaves office. The Sunday Times has learnt that up to five generals and admirals are willing to resign rather than approve what they consider would be a reckless attack.”

Click here to read the full story.

How Good Is US Intelligence on Iran? Not Very.

The San Francisco Chronicle (2/25/07) reports from Vienna that “Despite growing international concern about Iran's nuclear program and its regional ambitions, most U.S. intelligence shared with the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency has proved inaccurate, and none has led to significant discoveries inside Iran, diplomats here said.

“The officials said the CIA and other Western spy services have provided sensitive information to the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency at least since 2002, when Iran's long-secret nuclear program was exposed. But none of the tips about supposed secret weapons sites provided clear evidence that the Islamic republic is developing illicit weapons.”

Read the Chronicle’s full report here.

Hans Blix: Will the US Attack Iraq?

“In the case of North Korea the US seems able to sit down for talks without demanding that the production of plutonium be stopped prior to the talks and even to indicate that an agreement could comprise the opening of diplomatic relations and guarantees against attacks in return for denuclearization … Why not in Iran, too?”

Hans Blix is the former Foreign Minister of Sweden and former head of the UN’s weapons inspection team in Iraq. Click here to read his essay of Feb. 19 at MaximNews.com.

-- Posted by Barnett Axelrad

News Caravan - Stories You Might Have Missed

2007-02-25T20:15:00.000-05:00

IRAN

Nuclear Watch

Eric Hundman of the Center for Defense Information, writing on the Wire Blog Network’s Danger Room – What’s Next in National Security blog, reported 2/23/07 that the International Atomic Energy Association reported the previous day that despite a UN Security Council resolution, Iran continues its uranium enrichment program.

However, Hundman noted, the IAEA also reported:

First, Iran has only enriched uranium up to 4.2% U-235, just about the level required to fuel a proliferation-resistant light-water reactor. This is still far below the threshold required to make nuclear weapons (20% U-235 is the minimum required to make a weapon, but most use about 90%). Unfortunately, just because Iran hasn’t enriched further doesn’t mean they can’t; the report says nothing about possible technical problems.

Second, the IAEA’s inventory of nuclear material at the Natanz pilot plant is “consistent with” the inventory supplied by the Iranians themselves. This gives some assurance that nuclear material is not being diverted to secret facilities. However, the main (underground) enrichment facility is not mentioned.

Third, while Iran has “declined to agree at this stage” to the use of remote monitoring, in the interim it has allowed “frequent inspector access” to the main underground enrichment plant at Natanz – the IAEA has eyes there, occasionally at least. This agreement will satisfy the IAEA only until the number of centrifuges reaches 500.

Fourth, there seem to be only about 500 fully installed centrifuges at Natanz – if all of them were running at full speed it would take about six years to produce enough highly enriched uranium for a bomb. However, Iran claims it has roughly 350 more “in final stages of installation;” this seems to be happening sooner than many experts expected.

Fifth, the IAEA has found no indications that spent fuel is being reprocessed for plutonium, at any of Iran’s declared nuclear facilities. However, construction continues at Iran’s planned heavy-water reactor, which could produce fuel for nuclear weapons. These are some pretty dim glimmers of hope, but they do indicate that some time remains before Iran will even have enough material to build a nuclear weapon. Given some hints that sanctions and financial pressure might be starting to work, who knows -- there might even be enough time to reach some sort of agreement.

War Watch

Haaretz 2/24/07 quoted Britain’s Daily Telegraph's report that “Israel is negotiating with the United States over permission for an ‘air corridor’ over Iraq should an attack on that country's nuclear facilities become necessary.”

Israel’s Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh denied Saturday that Israel was conducting such negotiations.

Meanwhile, The Times of London 2/24/07 reported that Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair said “publicly for the first time that it would be wrong to take military action against Iran.” Blair was quoted in a BBC interview on Thursday as saying: “I can’t think that it would be right to take military action against Iran . . . What is important is to pursue the political, diplomatic channel. I think it is the only way that we are going to get a sensible solution to the Iranian issue.”

The Times also reported that U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates “who has previously called for direct talks with Tehran, is said to be totally opposed to military action.” In addition, it reported that “Condoleeza Rice, the Secretary of State, is also opposed to using force, while Steve Hadley, the President’s National Security Adviser, is said to be deeply sceptical."

IRAQ

US Casualties Watch

The Huffington Post reported via Associated Press correspondent Michelle Roberts’ story of 2/23/07 that:

...nearly 800 civilians working under contract to the Pentagon have been killed and more than 3,300 hurt doing jobs normally handled by the U.S. military, according to figures gathered by The Associated Press.

Exactly how many of these employees doing the Pentagon's work are Americans is uncertain. But the casualty figures make it clear that the Defense Department's count of more than 3,100 U.S. military dead does not tell the whole story.

. . .

Employees of defense contractors such as Halliburton, Blackwater and Wackenhut cook meals, do laundry, repair infrastructure, translate documents, analyze intelligence, guard prisoners, protect military convoys, deliver water in the heavily fortified Green Zone and stand sentry at buildings -- often highly dangerous duties almost identical to those performed by many U.S. troops.

Speak-Up Watch

JTA reported 2/20/07:

The Union of Reform Judaism’s executive committee, due to meet March 12, is considering a resolution to oppose Bush’s troop surge in blunt terms. Reform leaders will raise the issue during the Jewish Council for Public Affairs plenum that begins Feb. 25.

The URJ draft resolves to “oppose an escalation in troop strength.” “Escalation” is a word the White House has said is loaded and has urged others to avoid in describing the additional 21,000 troops Bush has assigned to the region.

. . .

A resolution opposing the war, passed overwhelmingly at the Reform movement´s biennial general assembly in late 2005 was less confrontational, calling for the United States to begin considering a withdrawal.

ISRAEL

Settlement Watch

Peace Now in Israel (Shalom Achshav) 2/21/07 reported that the number of settlements did not grow during 2006. However, Interior Ministry figures put the number of settlers at 268,000, a growth of 5% during the last year. Peace Now noted that growth in the settler population remains steady.

The number of outposts stands at 102. No new outposts were established during the previous year, and 1 was dismantled. Approximately 2,000 settlers currently live in outposts. Peace Now stated that despite the government's commitment to delimitate six outposts, they did not stop growing in 2006 and they are now building permanent housing units. In May 2006, in response to a petition filed by Peace Now with the Supreme Court, the government promised to present an overall outpost evacuation plan. The court is scheduled to discuss the petition again in March.

Click here to read the full report.

-- Posted by Barnett Axelrad

Yesterday's News Tomorrow

2007-02-25T08:36:00.000-05:00

A few years ago, Luke Ford self-published a series of interviews with a number of past and present fellow toilers in the vineyards of Jewish journalism. His tome is entitled Yesterday’s News Tomorrow. You get the idea.

Most Jewish newspapers are owned by local Jewish federations, which makes them bland. Investigative reporting is a no-no (heaven forefend, it might hurt the fund-raising campaign), and comment about Israel is by and large reflexive and unreflective (i.e., supportive of whatever the current government in Jerusalem wants).

Ford’s title was meant to be ironic and dismissive, but when I read Rob Eshman’s column in the Feb. 16 edition of the Los Angeles Jewish Journal (which, it is worth noting, is not owned or operated by the Los Angeles Jewish federation) entitled “Shutting Jewish Mouths,” the phrase took on a different, positive light.

Eshman, the Journal’s editor-in-chief, considered the heresy (at least so far as some of his ink-stained counterparts are concerned) that a Jewish community shorn of its left wing will, like a wounded bird, find itself flying in circles.

Eshman’s reflections were sparked by a peevish and sullen little pamphlet penned by Alvin H. Rosenfeld called “Progressive” Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism, issued in December by the American Jewish Committee. Had The New York Times not given it major play at the end of January, the screed would probably have disappeared down the memory hole.

In Rosenfeld’s crabbed view, progressive Jews are fomenting a “new anti-Semitism,” which he defined as making statements which challenge Israel’s “legitimacy and right to an ongoing future.” Among his targets are Tony Judt, director of the Remarque Institute at New York University, and Angels in America playwright Tony Kushner.

Eshman opens his essay by recalling an Americans for Peace Now rally he organized 20 years ago in Beverly Hills, at which actor Richard Dreyfuss was confronted by an enraged mob of Jewish onlookers who drove him from the stage. His “crime”: calling for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

What was heresy 20 years ago, Eshman notes, is today Israeli government policy, and to forget that lesson is to deny a “crucial dynamics of Jewish history”:

From the biblical prophets down through modern times, we are a people who have canonized those who scold and chastise the established order, who envision a different world…

The tradition of sharp criticism turned on one's own people still lives -- in Hebrew. The Israeli press has always been far more contentious toward Israel than American Jewry. Nothing Judt or Kushner has proposed hasn't already been written in Israel…

By squashing left-wing criticism, the mainstream makes the world safe for opinions far to the right. Has the AJCommittee taken a stand against Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli minister who has called for the forced expulsion of Israeli Arabs from their towns? No, it has not; though one could argue Lieberman's opinions endanger a democratic Jewish state at least as much as Kushner's.

But from where I sit, the most insidious effect of the AJCommittee is the message it sends to the majority of Jews, and non-Jews, who support Israel but don't always agree with its policies. That message is: there's only one way to show you care for the Jewish state -- our way.

Given that choice, the silent majority of Jews drift away, and the mainstream organizations then bemoan the fact that most Jews, especially Jewish youth, aren't involved on behalf of Israel.

It's very hard to sell smart people on the idea that the best way to support the strongest democracy in the Middle East is to shut up.

-- Posted by Adam Simms

Genocide and the Sound of Silence

2007-02-23T09:09:00.000-05:00

Momentum is building in the U.S. House of Representatives for a resolution that officially recognizes as genocide the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians during the First World War.

And this time around, if and when the resolution comes to a vote, American Jewry’s mainline organizations may sit on their hands rather than – as they have done in the past – side with the Turkish government, which opposes such measures and obstinately denies that an episode viewed by many historians as a dress rehearsal for the Holocaust was, indeed, genocide.

Nathan Guttman, writing in today’s issue of The Forward, reports that representatives of eight Jewish organizations – the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, the Anti-Defamation League, B’nai B’rith, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, the Orthodox Union, Chabad, and United Jewish Communities – met two weeks ago with Turkey’s Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul.

Gul asked their support in lobbying against the resolution, introduced by California Democrat Adam Schiff and supported by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

When similar resolutions came up in the past, Jewish organizations generally supported Turkey’s opposition, citing a desire not to complicate Israel’s military and economic relationships with Turkey and/or concerns about the safety of Turkey’s Jewish community.

As Guttman tells it, the organizations’ response to Gul’s pitch was tepid – more out a desire not to buck the newly-elected House speaker, and out of a desire not to be held as responsible by the Turkish government should the organizations opposed and fail to stop a measure that appears to have a strong chance of passage.

It would be nice to be able to say that the organizations rejected Turkey’s blandisments with public statements that the Armenian genocide was just that: genocide.

But at least they don’t take the position that it’s debatable whether genocide occurred.

That role was left to Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert.

Reports Guttman:

When asked at a press conference if Israel would convince Jewish organizations in the United States to take action against the resolution, Olmert said it was a matter for members of Congress to decide. But he added, “It will be better if independent experts come together and look into the matter.”

Olmert’s statement echoed Turkey’s assertion that what happed to the Armenians at the time of the Ottoman Empire is a matter for historians, not politicians.

Olmert’s statement is both astounding and appalling, given the historical record to be found in openly available diplomatic and church mission archives in the U.S., Great Britain and Germany.

If today a head of government in Germany, Austria or Poland were to make a similar declaration regarding the historicity of the Holocaust, American Jewish organizations would be denouncing him or her as a “denier.”

Wait! What’s that deafening sound we hear issuing from computer keyboards and fax machines at the Committee, Congress, ADL, JINSA et al.?

???

???

???

Ah, yes. It’s the sound of silence.

-- Posted by Adam Simms

Taking Aim at Jr. ROTC

2007-02-20T19:47:00.000-05:00

Parents, students and teachers in Los Angeles are putting a dent in recruiting high schoolers for the Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps (JROTC), Sonia Nazario reported in the Feb. 19 edition of the Los Angeles Times.

JROTC, a program sponsored by the Department of Defense, functions like a school club, enlisting high school students and offering uniforms and special class activities, including phys. ed., map reading, target practice, marching drill, financial planning and how to make PowerPoint presentations.

Like ROTC, its college-level counterpart, JROTC’s attraction is that students who join the military after finishing the program can start off with higher pay and have a leg up in joining the armed forces’ officer corps.

Such perks are usually thought to be a powerful attraction to kids in the nation’s less advantaged areas, where a military career has long been seen as a route to social and economic mobility.

“Nationally,” Nazario noted, “59.9% of JROTC participants are students of color,” citing research conducted by California State University at Northridge. And, she continued, this is how JROTC’s numbers play out in Los Angeles. The program “is in nearly half of the city’s high schools, but none on the affluent Westside.”

Nonetheless, enrollment in JROTC has been dropping in Los Angeles –- despite increases elsewhere, and a massive infusion of funding from the DoD –- due to effective opposition by a grassroots group, the Coalition Against Militarism in Our Schools, that now operates in 50 of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s 61 high schools.

Bolstered by a 1986 decision rendered by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which Nazario notes, “requires public schools that allow [military] recruiters on campus to give counter-recruiters a shot at addressing students,” the Coalition has been effective in getting students and parents to recognize that military life consists of not just guns and glory, but also coffins and educational budget cuts.

Among the points made by JROTC opponents at Roosevelt High School, in L.A.’s Boyle Heights, Nazario wrote, is that the program

drains resources from more important courses. Although the Defense Department pays half of JROTC instructors’ salaries, L.A. Unified pays the rest, as well as benefits, for a total of $3.1 million this school year. That money … should instead be spent adding more of the 15 academic courses students need to go to college.

That point was succinctly summed up on a T-shirt one teacher wore to class: “A War Budget Leaves Every Child Behind.”

There are other statistics in the L.A. Times account, however, that should make people stop and wonder about the extent to which JROTC –- like much of the rest of the U.S. military budget –- is simply a waste of money:

• Only “40% of students who graduated from high school with two or more years of JROTC ended up in the military,” according to a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in 1999, the last time a comprehensive study of the program was undertaken.

• First Sgt. Otto Harrington, senior teacher for Roosevelt High’s JROTC program, told Nazario that few of his students join the military. Moreover, “Only 5% of his cadets would even qualify to enlist … because the rest are in the country illegally, couldn’t pass the military aptitude test, are in trouble with the law or are overweight.”

As it turns out, Sgt. Harrington doesn’t need a map reading course to decipher the lay of the land at Roosevelt High, Nazario writes at the end of her account. During the past three years, only three of the sergeant’s JROTC cadets have enlisted in the military. And he plans to leave both the high school and JROTC when the school year ends.

You can read the complete text of Sonia Nazario’s article in the Los Angeles Times, entitled “Junior ROTC takes a hit in L.A.,” at the Los Angeles Times' Web site: www.latimes.com.

-- Posted by Adam Simms

Daniel Pipes, Armchair Warrior

2007-02-18T20:26:00.000-05:00

M.J. Rosenberg, director of the Israel Policy Forum's Washington office, distributes a weekly opinion column via e-mail called "IPF Friday." IPF is one of a handful of peace-oriented pro-Israel organizations active on Capitol Hill, and Rosenberg's pieces are thoughtful, insightful and worth reading.

His Feb. 16 entry, "Kangaroo Congressional Hearing," is noteworthy for its portrait of the difficulties the American Jewish peace camp faces in moving the U.S. foreign-policy apparatus -- Congress and the Executive branch -- to resume the role of honest broker between Israelis and Palestinians.

IPF's board was in Washington during the week of Feb. 12-16 to meet with Senators and House members, and Rosenberg notes that the sessions generally went well from IPF's perspective.

The downer, however occurred when Rosenberg learned that IPF's peace-camp views were not the only ones being circulated on the Hill that week. On the 14th -- Valentine Day, ironically -- the House Committee on Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Middle East held a hearing on "Next Steps in the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process."

Only witnesses identified with Israel were invited to provide testimony. No Arab American institutions or individuals were invited. "This was a hearing," Rosenberg observes,

about two sides of a conflict where only one side was allowed to speak. It was a throwback to the bad old days when Congress held hearings on racism with only whites invited to testify.

Rosenberg's analogy is apt, given excerpts he provides of testimony offered by Daniel Pipes, director of an outfit called the Middle East Forum.

"Pipes," Rosenberg writes,

...is essentially a crank. He is a prolific writer who repeatedly sounds one note: that the Palestinians are bad people with whom negotiations are impossible. As for Muslims in general, "Western European societies are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene...All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most.

Rosenberg continues:

He [Pipes] doesnt have much use for the Israelis either. In his testimony he trashed the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and current Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for "their ennui with fighting." He called Israelis "an exhausted people, confused and without direction."

Let's stop for a moment and consider the armchair warrior Pipes' use of the word "ennui" to describe Israelis eager for peace rather than more are. According to the dictionary, ennui means "listlessness and dissatisfaction resulting from lack of interest, boredom." In other words, Israelis are tired of fighting the way a teenager might be bored by another Saturday at the mall.

Rabin, the greatest military hero in Israel's history, gave up on war because he was feeling listless. What should he have done? What should Olmert do now?

Echoing General MacArthur (but with no military background, of course), Pipes argues for total victory. "Victory consists of imposing one's will on the enemy by compelling him to give up his war goals. Wars usually end when one side gives up its hope of winning, when its will to fight has been crushed."

In other words, Israelis should fight Palestinians until the end of time.

Imagine. This guy spouted this loathsome nonsense at an official hearing of the United States Congress. (He's just lucky that two of the Senators we met with were not in the room. James Webb and Chuck Hagel, two military heroes who hate war as only those who have experienced it can, would have torn him to shreds.)

Still, Rosenberg concludes that Pipes and this particular House committee session look to be an anomaly:

...there is a real sense in Washington that things are changing on Capitol Hill. Senators and House members -- especially the up-and-comers and freshmen -- are determined that America resume its role of leadership in seeking an end to a conflict that does so much damage both to us, to the Palestinians, and to Israel. And they understand that America cannot do any good for anyone in the Middle East if we are seen as hostile to 99% of the people who live in that region.

You can read M.J. Rosenberg's weekly columns at www.ipforum.org. You can also obtain an e-mail subscription by sending an e-mail to: ipfdc@ipforumdc.org.

-- Posted by Adam Simms