There goes that crazy anti-Semite, self hating Jew, and former head of Mossad, Ephraim Halevy, yapping it up again about how Hamas would be willing to accept the borders of 1967. How can Joe Kaufman, Robert Spencer, Daniel Pipes, Steven Emerson, and other patriotic Israelis tolerate his insolence? How can Israel continue to defend itself in the press when one of its own continues to tell the truth about its actions? He must be silenced!
The true story behind this war is not the one Israel is telling
by Johann Hari
The world isn't just watching the Israeli government commit a crime in Gaza; we are watching it self-harm. This morning, and tomorrow morning, and every morning until this punishment beating ends, the young people of the Gaza Strip are going to be more filled with hate, and more determined to fight back, with stones or suicide vests or rockets. Israeli leaders have convinced themselves that the harder you beat the Palestinians, the softer they will become. But when this is over, the rage against Israelis will have hardened, and the same old compromises will still be waiting by the roadside of history, untended and unmade.
To understand how frightening it is to be a Gazan this morning, you need to have stood in that small slab of concrete by the Mediterranean and smelled the claustrophobia. The Gaza Strip is smaller than the Isle of Wight but it is crammed with 1.5 million people who can never leave. They live out their lives on top of each other, jobless and hungry, in vast, sagging tower blocks. From the top floor, you can often see the borders of their world: the Mediterranean, and Israeli barbed wire. When bombs begin to fall – as they are doing now with more deadly force than at any time since 1967 – there is nowhere to hide.
There will now be a war over the story of this war. The Israeli government says, "We withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and in return we got Hamas and Qassam rockets being rained on our cities. Sixteen civilians have been murdered. How many more are we supposed to sacrifice?" It is a plausible narrative, and there are shards of truth in it, but it is also filled with holes. If we want to understand the reality and really stop the rockets, we need to rewind a few years and view the run-up to this war dispassionately.
The Israeli government did indeed withdraw from the Gaza Strip in 2005 – in order to be able to intensify control of the West Bank. Ariel Sharon's senior adviser, Dov Weisglass, was unequivocal about this, explaining: "The disengagement [from Gaza] is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians... this whole package that is called the Palestinian state has been removed from our agenda indefinitely."
Ordinary Palestinians were horrified by this, and by the fetid corruption of their own Fatah leaders, so they voted for Hamas. It certainly wouldn't have been my choice – an Islamist party is antithetical to all my convictions - but we have to be honest. It was a free and democratic election, and it was not a rejection of a two-state solution. The most detailed polling of Palestinians, by the University of Maryland, found that 72 per cent want a two-state solution on the 1967 borders, while fewer than 20 per cent want to reclaim the whole of historic Palestine. So, partly in response to this pressure, Hamas offered Israel a long, long ceasefire and a de facto acceptance of two states, if only Israel would return to its legal borders.
Rather than seize this opportunity and test Hamas's sincerity, the Israeli government reacted by punishing the entire civilian population. It announced that it was blockading the Gaza Strip in order to "pressure" its people to reverse the democratic process. The Israelis surrounded the Strip and refused to let anyone or anything out. They let in a small trickle of food, fuel and medicine – but not enough for survival. Weisglass quipped that the Gazans were being "put on a diet". According to Oxfam, only 137 trucks of food were allowed into Gaza last month to feed 1.5 million people. The United Nations says poverty has reached an "unprecedented level." When I was last in besieged Gaza, I saw hospitals turning away the sick because their machinery and medicine was running out. I met hungry children stumbling around the streets, scavenging for food.
It was in this context – under a collective punishment designed to topple a democracy – that some forces within Gaza did something immoral: they fired Qassam rockets indiscriminately at Israeli cities. These rockets have killed 16 Israeli citizens. This is abhorrent: targeting civilians is always murder. But it is hypocritical for the Israeli government to claim now to speak out for the safety of civilians when it has been terrorising civilians as a matter of state policy.
The American and European governments are responding with a lop-sidedness that ignores these realities. They say that Israel cannot be expected to negotiate while under rocket fire, but they demand that the Palestinians do so under siege in Gaza and violent military occupation in the West Bank.
Before it falls down the memory hole, we should remember that last week, Hamas offered a ceasefire in return for basic and achievable compromises. Don't take my word for it. According to the Israeli press, Yuval Diskin, the current head of the Israeli security service Shin Bet, "told the Israeli cabinet [on 23 December] that Hamas is interested in continuing the truce, but wants to improve its terms." Diskin explained that Hamas was requesting two things: an end to the blockade, and an Israeli ceasefire on the West Bank. The cabinet – high with election fever and eager to appear tough – rejected these terms.
The core of the situation has been starkly laid out by Ephraim Halevy, the former head of Mossad. He says that while Hamas militants – like much of the Israeli right-wing – dream of driving their opponents away, "they have recognised this ideological goal is not attainable and will not be in the foreseeable future." Instead, "they are ready and willing to see the establishment of a Palestinian state in the temporary borders of 1967." They are aware that this means they "will have to adopt a path that could lead them far from their original goals" – and towards a long-term peace based on compromise.
The rejectionists on both sides – from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran to Bibi Netanyahu of Israel – would then be marginalised. It is the only path that could yet end in peace but it is the Israeli government that refuses to choose it. Halevy explains: "Israel, for reasons of its own, did not want to turn the ceasefire into the start of a diplomatic process with Hamas."
Why would Israel act this way? The Israeli government wants peace, but only one imposed on its own terms, based on the acceptance of defeat by the Palestinians. It means the Israelis can keep the slabs of the West Bank on "their" side of the wall. It means they keep the largest settlements and control the water supply. And it means a divided Palestine, with responsibility for Gaza hived off to Egypt, and the broken-up West Bank standing alone. Negotiations threaten this vision: they would require Israel to give up more than it wants to. But an imposed peace will be no peace at all: it will not stop the rockets or the rage. For real safety, Israel will have to talk to the people it is blockading and bombing today, and compromise with them.
The sound of Gaza burning should be drowned out by the words of the Israeli writer Larry Derfner. He says: "Israel's war with Gaza has to be the most one-sided on earth... If the point is to end it, or at least begin to end it, the ball is not in Hamas's court – it is in ours."
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
The story Israel is not telling the world
Monday, December 29, 2008
Sports Experts
Now Dilfer is picking the Ravens to beat the Fins at home. If their past picks mean anything then I hope King also picks the Ravens.
As Dan LeBatard has demonstrated on his radio show repeatedly over the years, these so-called experts are nothing but morons who have as much of an idea of who will win each week as I have a chance of beating D-Wade one on one. AFC East Champs, baby!
The American Political Class' Consensus on Israel
Marty Peretz and the American political consensus on Israel
(updated below - Update II)
Opinions about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute are so entrenched that any single outbreak of violence is automatically evaluated through a pre-existing lens, shaped by one's typically immovable beliefs about which side bears most of the blame for the conflict generally or "who started it." Still, any minimally decent human being -- even those who view the world through the most blindingly pro-Israeli lens possible, the ones who justify anything and everything Israel does, and who discuss these events with a bottomless emphasis on the primitive (though dangerous) rockets lobbed by Hamas into Southern Israel but without even mentioning the ongoing four-decades brutal occupation or the recent, grotesquely inhumane blockade of Gaza -- would find the slaughter of scores of innocent Palestinians to be a horrible and deeply lamentable event.
But not The New Republic's Marty Peretz. Here is his uniquely despicable view of the events of the last couple of days:
So at 11:30 on Saturday morning, according to both the Jerusalem Post and Ha'aretz, as well as the New York Times, 50 fighter jets and attack helicopters demolished some 40 to 50 sites in just about three minutes, maybe five. Message: do not fuck with the Jews.
"Do not fuck with the Jews." And what of the several hundred Palestinian dead -- including numerous children -- and many hundreds more seriously wounded?
Israeli intelligence reported 225 people dead, mostly Hamas military leaders with some functionaries, besides, and perhaps 400 wounded. The Palestinians announced 300 dead, probably as a reflex in order to begin their whining about disproportionate Israeli acts of war. And 600 wounded.
Objections to the Israeli attack are just "whining." Those are the words of a psychopath. And what to do now?
Frankly, I am up to my gullet with this reflex criticism of Israel as going beyond proportionality in its responses to war waged against its population with the undisguised intention of putting an end to the political expression of the Jewish nation. . . .
The current warfare will go on a bit longer. If there is a pause and if I were giving advice to the Israelis, this is what I would say to Hamas and to the people of Gaza: "If a rocket or missile is launched against us, if you take captive one of our soldiers (as you have held one for two and a half years), if you raise a new Intifada against us, there will be an immediate response. And it will be very disproportionate. Proportion does not work."
This super-tough-guy warrior -- whose prime accomplishment in life was marrying an heiress and then using her family's money to buy himself The New Republic -- beats his chest and threatens that even a single Palestinian act in response to this bombing campaign will provoke still more massive retaliation in the form of collective punishment (which, not that anyone cares, happens to be a clear violation of the Geneva Conventions, as are Hamas' far less harmful rocket attacks on Israeli civilians).
It may be true that, as Eric Alterman put it in his seminal article on Marty Pertez (quoting Ezra Klein), "Peretz is rarely held to account, largely because there's an odd, tacit understanding that he's a cartoonish character and everyone knows it." But how unusual are Peretz's views, revolting as they are, in the American political mainstream? He certainly expresses anti-Arab hatred and bigotry more bluntly than most, but this reflexive support for anything and everything Israel does is anything but unique in our political debates.
Here, as but one illustrative example, is Caroline Kennedy -- who, in order to win her Senate seat, is self-consciously trying to turn herself into a Barack Obama clone -- responding recently to a question about Israel from Politico:
QUESTION 8: Do you think Israel should negotiate with Hamas? Do you agree with Israel's Gaza Strip embargo? Would you support an Israeli airstrike on Iran if they felt Tehran's nuclear program represented a threat to their survival?
ANSWER: "Caroline Kennedy strongly supports a safe and secure Israel. She believe Israel's security decisions should be left to Israel."
What could be more absurd than that? Apparently, not only should we continue to feed Israel billions of dollars a year of American taxpayer money and massive amounts of weapons -- thereby ensuring that the world, quite accurately, perceives their actions as American actions -- but we should then take the position that they are free to do anything they want with it, no matter how extreme or destructive to our interests, and our only view on all of it should be that we blindly support whatever they do. Or, as Clinton aide Ann Lewis put it during the primaries, in response to Obama's observation that he needn't have a "Likud view in order to be pro-Israel":
The role of the president of the United States is to support the decisions that are made by the people of Israel. It is not up to us to pick and choose from among the political parties.
Yesterday, the Bush administration applied this mindset, naturally, by expressing unequivocal support for Israel and heaped all blame on Hamas. And, needless to say, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi echoed the administration's view:
Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi issued a statement concerning the Israeli operation in Gaza in which she wrote that "When Israel is attacked, the United States must continue to stand strongly with its friend and democratic ally."
According to Pelosi, "Peace between Israelis and Palestinians cannot result from daily barrages of rocket and mortar fire from Hamas-controlled Gaza. Hamas and its supporters must understand that Gaza cannot and will not be allowed to be a sanctuary for attacks on Israel."
Not a word of condemnation of the Israeli blockade -- which has caused extreme suffering and deprivation in Gaza -- or of the massively disproportionate response or the ongoing and ever-expanding Israeli occupation. It is all one-sided support for whatever Israel does from our political class, and one-sided condemnation of Israel's enemies (who are, ipso facto, American enemies) -- all of it, as usual, sharply divergent from the consensus in much of the rest of the world.
It would be nice if U.S. citizens weren't connected to and responsible for every Israeli military action, so that we really could and should take the attitude that what the Israeli Government does -- or what is done to it -- is not our responsibility. That's how it should be.
Instead, since we fund a huge bulk of it and supply the weapons used for much of it and use our veto power at the U.N. to enable all of it, we are connected to it -- intimately -- and bear responsibility for all of Israel's various wars, including the current overwhelming assault on Gaza, as much as Israelis themselves. Blind support for whatever they do -- the consensus view in American political life in both parties -- is therefore a total abdication of our responsibility.
It remains to be seen if Barack Obama intends to deviate even a small amount from what has been decades of excessively loyal U.S. support for Israel -- which, over the last eight years, transformed into truly blind and absolute support for anything they do. It's impossible to know for sure until Obama is inaugurated, but the bipartisan, purely "pro-Israel" statements issued by his allies -- such as Caroline Kennedy and Nancy Pelosi -- don't bode well, nor do the statements which Obama himself made during the campaign, as compiled yesterday by Salon's Mark Schone:
The first job of any nation state is to protect its citizens. And so I can assure you that if -- I don't even care if I was a politician -- if somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing.
Can't the exact same mentality be deployed to justify everything Hamas has done and is doing, to wit: "if a foreign power were brutally occupying my country for four decades -- or blockading my country and denying my children medical needs and nutrition and the ability even to exit -- I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Palestinians to do the same thing"? But the last thing that our political class ever extends is reciprocal, two-sided analysis to this dispute.
The suffocating bipartisan orthodoxies in the U.S. regarding Israel thus make virtually impossible what the new Jewish-American group, J Street -- in condemning the attack (even while calling it "justifiable") because it "will deepen the cycle of violence in the region" -- urges: "immediate, strong diplomatic intervention by the United States, the Quartet and allies in the region to negotiate a resumption of the ceasefire." Most of our political elites know enough to avoid the ugly language of Marty Peretz, but the ultimate policy positions aren't much different.
UPDATE: Without necessarily endorsing all of it, I want to recommend very highly this column by Israeli Gideon Levy in Haaretz, entitled "The neighborhood bully strikes again." What's most striking about it is that this scathing criticism of Israel's behavior can -- and does -- appear in one of Israel's leading newspapers, but not a paragraph of it could ever be uttered by any American politician, in either party, of any national prominence.
UPDATE II: Here's Rep. Howard Berman, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and a Democrat, echoing Nancy Pelosi, George Bush and virtually every other key American political official:
Israel has a right, indeed a duty, to defend itself in response to the hundreds of rockets and mortars fired from Gaza over the past week. No government in the world would sit by and allow its citizens to be subjected to this kind of indiscriminate bombardment. The loss of innocent life is a terrible tragedy, and the blame for that tragedy lies with Hamas.
Turks Apologize for Armenian Genocide
Turkish Apology
by Khatchig Mouradian
On December 15, around 200 intellectuals in Turkey launched an Internet petition1 apologizing for the Armenian Genocide. Soon thereafter, hell broke loose.
Although there is a wide consensus among genocide and Holocaust scholars that the Armenian Genocide took place, the Turkish state continues to vehemently deny that a state-sponsored campaign took the lives of approximately 1.5 million Armenians during World War I. The Armenians, the official Turkish argument goes, were victims of ethnic strife, or war and starvation, just like many Muslims living in the Ottoman Empire. Turkey invests millions of dollars in the United States to lobby against resolutions recognizing the Armenian Genocide and to produce denialist literature. Moreover, many Turkish intellectual who have spoken against the denial have been charged for "insulting Turkishness" under Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code.
The fact that the text of the apology2 didn't employ the term "genocide" but opted for "Great Catastrophe" did not stave off condemnation. A barrage of criticism and attacks followed almost immediately. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish army, many members of the parliament, and practically the entire Turkish establishment instigated and encouraged a public outcry against the apology. Threats and insults flew from left and right, and counter-petitions were launched from Turks demanding the Armenians to apologize.
Yet despite the wave of condemnation, thousands of ordinary Turks from all walks of life added their names to the petition. After breaking the taboo against talking about the Armenian Genocide, Turkish scholars, writers and journalists had made apologizing for the Armenian Genocide an issue of public discourse. The petition did not simply recognize the suffering of the Armenians; rather, it went beyond and offered an apology, which was crucial for the initiators of the campaign. "I think two words moved the people: Ozur Dileriz (‘We apologize')," said the drafter of the petition, Prof. Baskin Oran when I asked him about the wording of the petition. "These are the very two words that kept thousands of Turks from signing it. But they were imperative. I don't feel responsible for the butchery done by the Ittihadists [the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the organizers of the Genocide] but we had to say these words. There is something called a ‘collective conscience,'" he added.
Some criticized the text because it avoided using the term "genocide." The former head of the Istanbul branch of the Human Rights Association, lawyer Eren Keskin, said, "I do not accept compromise when it comes to the use of the term genocide. Even though the word genocide was not used in the petition, I signed it, because I believe any change in a country or in a system can take place if there is an ‘internal' demand. I believe that the Republic of Turkey is a continuation of the Ittihadist tradition—the tradition of the perpetrators of the Genocide. The majority of the founding members of the Turkish Republic, including the leaders, were members of the CUP." An apology is an obligation, Keskin told me. "Just as the Republic of Turkey took over the financial obligations of the Ottomans under the Lausanne Treaty, it should take over the obligation to apologize for the Genocide. I believe it is first and foremost the obligation of the Republic of Turkey to apologize. The individuals who internalize the official ideology, who do not question it, who ignore the fact that a genocide has been committed and who give their approval by remaining silent also owe an apology to Armenians," she said. "I signed the statement because I think this is an initiative that will normalize, in the eyes of the Turkish public, the concept of and the obligation to apologize to Armenians."
Amberin Zaman, Turkey's correspondent for The Economist and a columnist for the Turkish newspaper Taraf, said that regardless of the criticism about the wording, the petition initiative was a turning point. "When we look back at this campaign several years from now, I think there can be no doubt that it will be viewed as a turning point—not just for Armenian-Turkish reconciliation, but more importantly in terms of getting modern Turkey to come to terms with one of the darkest chapters of its recent past," she said. "Whether people agree, condemn or quibble with the wording of the text, in the end [the petition] has unleashed an unprecedented debate about the fate of the Ottoman Armenians. It has also sent a very strong signal that rapprochement efforts between our mutual governments [Armenia and Turkey] is far surpassed by the very real desire at a societal level to heal the wounds and move on," she added. "The genie is now well and truly out of the bottle."
Poet Ron Margulies considers the petition a first step. "It does something which should have been done decades ago and tells Armenians that many Turks share and understand their pain, sorrow and grief. This apology and expression of empathy is the first step without which nothing else can follow," he said. "But there is also a second reason which, for me, is as important as the first, and it has to do with Turkish politics rather than the Armenian issue in particular. In recent years, many unmentionables have become mentionable and are frequently mentioned in Turkey. These include the existence and rights of the Kurds, the issue of the other minorities, the role of the armed forces in the political life of the country, the competence of the armed forces and of the chiefs of staff, the issue of Islam, the right to wear a headscarf in public offices, etc. Once out of the bottle, these genies refuse to go back in. And they all deal serious blows to Kemalism, to nationalism, to the official ideology of the Turkish state. This petition, and the fact that 8,000 people signed it within the first day-and-a-half, is another such blow. We must continue raining blows on the edifice of the Kemalist state," he added.
For these reasons, Margulies notes, the wording of the petition was not so important to him. "Every text can be improved upon. But that is not the point. The petition has already had a phenomenal impact—because of its content and its spirit, not because of the specific wording," he explained.
When I asked why she signed the petition, author and journalist Ece Temelkuran spoke about the massacres, but more importantly, about the dispossession. "Since writing my book [The Deep Mountain], the conflict, which was already profoundly emotional for most of us after [Turkish-Armenian journalist] Hrant Dink's death, became a personal issue to me. The petition was a way of telling my Armenian friends that I share their long lasting pain and that I understand. As far as I observed among the Armenians in the Diaspora and in Armenia, the deepest and the most vital pain is the homelessness they feel. Besides the pain of being massacred, Armenians today, all over the world, feel homeless. With the petition, I just wanted to tell the Armenians that people still living in Anatolia didn't forget what happened and that they still feel the absence of their Armenian brothers and sisters."
1 http://www.ozurdiliyoruz.com
2 The apology read: "My conscience does not accept the insensitivity showed to and the denial of the Great Catastrophe that the Ottoman Armenians were subjected to in 1915. I reject this injustice and for my share, I empathize with the feelings and pain of my Armenian brothers and sisters. I apologize to them."
Sunday, December 28, 2008
So who started it?
A four-month ceasefire between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza was in jeopardy today after Israeli troops killed six Hamas gunmen in a raid into the territory.
Hamas responded by firing a wave of rockets into southern Israel, although no one was injured. The violence represented the most serious break in a ceasefire agreed in mid-June, yet both sides suggested they wanted to return to atmosphere of calm.
Israeli troops crossed into the Gaza Strip late last night near the town of Deir al-Balah. The Israeli military said the target of the raid was a tunnel that they said Hamas was planning to use to capture Israeli soldiers positioned on the border fence 250m away. Four Israeli soldiers were injured in the operation, two moderately and two lightly, the military said.
One Hamas gunman was killed and Palestinians launched a volley of mortars at the Israeli military. An Israeli air strike then killed five more Hamas fighters. In response, Hamas launched 35 rockets into southern Israel, one reaching the city of Ashkelon.
"This was a pinpoint operation intended to prevent an immediate threat," the Israeli military said in a statement. "There is no intention to disrupt the ceasefire, rather the purpose of the operation was to remove an immediate and dangerous threat posted by the Hamas terror organisation."
In Gaza, a Hamas spokesman, Fawzi Barhoum, said the group had fired rockets out of Gaza as a "response to Israel's massive breach of the truce".
"The Israelis began this tension and they must pay an expensive price. They cannot leave us drowning in blood while they sleep soundly in their beds," he said.
The attack comes shortly before a key meeting this Sunday in Cairo when Hamas and its political rival Fatah will hold talks on reconciling their differences and creating a single, unified government. It will be the first time the two sides have met at this level since fighting a near civil war more than a year ago.
Until now it had appeared both Israel and Hamas, which seized full control of Gaza last summer, had an interest in maintaining the ceasefire. For Israel it has meant an end to the daily barrage of rockets landing in southern towns, particularly Sderot. For Gazans it has meant an end to the regular Israeli military raids that have caused hundreds of casualties, many of them civilian, in the past year. Israel, however, has maintained its economic blockade on the strip, severely limiting imports and preventing all exports from Gaza.
Ehud Barak, the Israeli defence minister, had personally approved the Gaza raid, the Associated Press said. The Israeli military concluded that Hamas was likely to want to continue the ceasefire despite the raid, it said. The ceasefire was due to run for six months and it is still unclear whether it will stretch beyond that limit.
Hamas has declared that it will look to resume suicide missions into Israel in light of Israel's assault on Gaza yesterday. These, again, are the actions of madmen, not of men who truly want peace. Actions like suicide bombings are morally reprehensible, not to mention Islamically forbidden. The men in charge of Hamas need to realize that their cause, the cause for a Palestinian homeland, is a cause of justice, but actions like suicide bombings will bring them no sympathy where the world has every reason to sympathize with them. Let us hope they find a more sensible and moral plan to carry out than joining the Israeli government in destruction and terror.
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Crime in Gaza
How can keeping food and medicine from the people of Gaza protect the people of Israel? How can the impoverishment and suffering of Gaza’s children – more than 50 per cent of the population – benefit anyone? International law as well as human decency demands their protection. If Gaza falls, the West Bank will be next.
Greenwald on 2008's Big Political Stories
Politico's media reporter, Michael Calderone, does an unintentionally superb job of conveying the vapid, wretched soul of the American political media, with his list of what he calls -- without any irony at all -- "The Top Ten Political Scoops of 2008":
(1) Katie Couric's interview of Sarah Palin (CBS)
(2) McCain can't say how many homes he owns (Politico)
(3) Obama's "bitter" comment (Huffington Post)
(4) Sarah Palin's shopping spree (Politico)
(5) Turmoil in the Clinton camp (Washington Post and Atlantic -- "The behind-the-scenes tension was captured by the reporters in one memorable exchange: '[Expletive] you!' Ickes shouted. '[Expletive] you!' Penn replied. '[Expletive] you!' Ickes shouted again.")
(6) Jeremiah Wright tapes (ABC News)
(7) The Pentagon's military analyst program (NY Times)
(8) Bickering in the McCain camp (NY Times Magazine)
(9) John Edwards' affair (National Enquirer)
(10) Powell endorses Obama (Meet the Press)
It's genuinely disappointing that the intense controversy over Barack Obama's anemic bowling score and lapel pin, the riveting analysis of Hillary Clinton's laugh and her cleavage displays, and Brian Ross' groundbreaking work in analyzing Hillary's White House schedules in order to determine where exactly she was at the moment when Bill was with Monica Lewinsky, failed to at least merit an Honorable Mention by Politico.
Most notably, the only story on Politico's list that actually mattered in any meaningful way and to which one can apply the term "scoop" with a straight face -- namely: David Barstow's superb exposé on the Pentagon's domestic propaganda program -- was the only story of the 10 that didn't receive endless attention from our nation's television journalists. To the contrary, it was blackballed entirely. There's the central axiom driving coverage by our American media: the more significant a matter it is, the less attention it receives (if one wants to be generous, one could also include the Couric-Palin interview as a marginally meaningful story).
Having assembled this soap-opera-worthy list of "journalistic scoops," Calderone can barely suppress his giddy excitement over the last twelve months and, more perversely still, can barely contain how impressed he is with the probing diligence of his journalistic colleagues:
As the curtain comes down on 2008, it’s hard to let go. Political junkies couldn’t have asked for a better year — even news veteran David Broder dubbed the 2008 election the best he ever covered.
Indeed. For a politically engaged person, it is truly difficult to conceive of how any year could ever be more satisfying than one marked by riveting scandals over shopping sprees, bickering among campaign operatives, and an extramarital affair of someone who, at the time of disclosure, held no political office and was running for absolutely nothing. Anyone surveying this mountain-high pile of Pulitzer-worthy investigations can do nothing more than echo the observation of Newsweek's legendary Senior White House Correspondent, Richard Wolffe, who famously gushed: "the press here does a fantastic job of adhering to journalistic standards and covering politics in general." Who could review Calderone's glorious list of the year's top "scoops" and disagree with that?
In fairness to Calderone and his comrades in the political press, our media currently covers a country that has very few substantial problems and an administration that is renown around the world for being competent, honest, conventional and quite uncontroversial. In general, countries which enjoy great tranquility, prosperity, and stability -- such as the U.S. today -- can afford the luxury of fixating on the types of fun and trivial stories which comprise the list of top "scoops" heralded by Politico. I made a similar point in defense of our political media last April, when I criticized those tiresome, humorless scolds who -- at the time -- were complaining and complaining that three straight weeks of unbroken coverage of Jeremiah Wright videos might be a bit excessive given their relative importance:
I think the most important thing to note about the Jeremiah Wright Story is that we're a Nation plagued by exceedingly few significant problems; blessed with a quite healthy political culture and very trusted political and media institutions; composed of a citizenry that is peacefully content with its Government and secure and confident about their future; endowed with a supremely sturdy economic foundation free of debt and other grave economic afflictions; vested with the ability to command great respect and admiration from the other nations of the world; emancipated from the burdens of war and intractable conflicts which have toppled and destroyed so many other great nations of the past; and, most of all, we're becoming freer and more prosperous by the minute.
Not only that, but we have an extremely impressive, serious and honor-bound ruling imperial class devoted to the preservation of all of these blessings.
So it isn't as though we really have anything else to talk about besides Jeremiah Wright. There are some countries in the world -- probably most -- which have so many big problems that they could ill-afford to devote much time and energy to a matter of this sort. Thankfully, the United States isn't one of them.
And that was before the little global financial collapse, the virtual disappearance of $700 billion transferred to those responsible, and, quite relatedly, wealth-destroying fraud on a previously unimaginable scale. So things have improved and stabilized even further since the national media fixation on the Jeremiah Wright videos, thus further freeing our intrepid political press to delve fearlessly and tirelessly into the epic Penn-Ickes battles, Sarah Palin's shopping bills, and the whereabouts of Rielle Hunter.
By contrast, a country that was plagued by actual political problems might focus on such dreary, boring revelations as the choerographing and approving of torture techniques at White House Principals Meetings; or the creation of a massive, likely illegal domestic surveillance system of sprawling data bases built and maintained with no Congressional approval or oversight by the NSA; or the issuance of a memo by the Bush DOJ endlessly expanding the definition of "torture" and declaring the Fourth Amendment inoperative to "domestic military operations" inside the U.S.; or the massive contributions received from the telecom industry by Sen. Jay Rockefeller immediately before he became the key advocate of immunity for that lawbreaking industry; or the flagrant abuse of unchecked NSA eavesdropping powers for purely prurient and invasive ends; or the patently false denials by the U.S. military -- bolstered by an ostensibly first-hand report from Oliver North on Brit Hume's "news" broadcast -- of massive civilian deaths in Afghanistan; or the endless holes in the attempts by the FBI to blame the anthrax attacks on a dead scientist; or so many other similar boring disclosures.
But not our media. As Politico's own Editor-in-Chief John Harris put it earlier this year in one of his signature mea culpas that changes absolutely nothing about his publication's quite typical obsession with trivialities:
The signature defect of modern political journalism is that it has shredded the ideal of proportionality.
Important stories, sometimes the product of months of serious reporting, that in an earlier era would have captured the attention of the entire political-media community and even redirected the course of a presidential campaign, these days can disappear with barely a whisper.
Trivial stories — the kind that are tailor-made for forwarding to your brother-in-law or college roommate with a wisecracking note at the top — can dominate the campaign narrative for days.
It's hard to know what's worse: journalists like Harris who know full well that their work is a frivolous and inane distraction yet continue to do it anyway, or ones like Wolffe who -- even in the face of all of this -- actually believe, or at least claim to believe, in the enduring, guffaw-provoking myth of the intrepid, adversarial journalist. Ultimately, both types are the same, as -- regardless of motive or awareness -- they both spew the type of political coverage that generates a Top 10 "scoops" list of the kind Politico celebrates today.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Sara Roy on Gaza
By Sara Roy
Israel’s siege of Gaza began on 5 November, the day after an Israeli attack inside the strip, no doubt designed finally to undermine the truce between Israel and Hamas established last June. Although both sides had violated the agreement before, this incursion was on a different scale. Hamas responded by firing rockets into Israel and the violence has not abated since then. Israel’s siege has two fundamental goals. One is to ensure that the Palestinians there are seen merely as a humanitarian problem, beggars who have no political identity and therefore can have no political claims. The second is to foist Gaza onto Egypt. That is why the Israelis tolerate the hundreds of tunnels between Gaza and Egypt around which an informal but increasingly regulated commercial sector has begun to form. The overwhelming majority of Gazans are impoverished and officially 49.1 per cent are unemployed. In fact the prospect of steady employment is rapidly disappearing for the majority of the population.
On 5 November the Israeli government sealed all the ways into and out of Gaza. Food, medicine, fuel, parts for water and sanitation systems, fertiliser, plastic sheeting, phones, paper, glue, shoes and even teacups are no longer getting through in sufficient quantities or at all. According to Oxfam only 137 trucks of food were allowed into Gaza in November. This means that an average of 4.6 trucks per day entered the strip compared to an average of 123 in October this year and 564 in December 2005. The two main food providers in Gaza are the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and the World Food Programme (WFP). UNRWA alone feeds approximately 750,000 people in Gaza, and requires 15 trucks of food daily to do so. Between 5 November and 30 November, only 23 trucks arrived, around 6 per cent of the total needed; during the week of 30 November it received 12 trucks, or 11 per cent of what was required. There were three days in November when UNRWA ran out of food, with the result that on each of these days 20,000 people were unable to receive their scheduled supply. According to John Ging, the director of UNRWA in Gaza, most of the people who get food aid are entirely dependent on it. On 18 December UNRWA suspended all food distribution for both emergency and regular programmes because of the blockade.
The WFP has had similar problems, sending only 35 trucks out of the 190 it had scheduled to cover Gazans’ needs until the start of February (six more were allowed in between 30 November and 6 December). Not only that: the WFP has to pay to store food that isn’t being sent to Gaza. This cost $215,000 in November alone. If the siege continues, the WFP will have to pay an extra $150,000 for storage in December, money that will be used not to support Palestinians but to benefit Israeli business.
The majority of commercial bakeries in Gaza – 30 out of 47 – have had to close because they have run out of cooking gas. People are using any fuel they can find to cook with. As the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has made clear, cooking-gas canisters are necessary for generating the warmth to incubate broiler chicks. Shortages of gas and animal feed have forced commercial producers to smother hundreds of thousands of chicks. By April, according to the FAO, there will be no poultry there at all: 70 per cent of Gazans rely on chicken as a major source of protein.
Banks, suffering from Israeli restrictions on the transfer of banknotes into the territory were forced to close on 4 December. A sign on the door of one read: ‘Due to the decision of the Palestinian Finance Authority, the bank will be closed today Thursday, 4.12.2008, because of the unavailability of cash money, and the bank will be reopened once the cash money is available.’
The World Bank has warned that Gaza’s banking system could collapse if these restrictions continue. All cash for work programmes has been stopped and on 19 November UNRWA suspended its cash assistance programme to the most needy. It also ceased production of textbooks because there is no paper, ink or glue in Gaza. This will affect 200,000 students returning to school in the new year. On 11 December, the Israeli defence minister, Ehud Barak, sent $25 million following an appeal from the Palestinian prime minister, Salaam Fayad, the first infusion of its kind since October. It won’t even cover a month’s salary for Gaza’s 77,000 civil servants.
On 13 November production at Gaza’s only power station was suspended and the turbines shut down because it had run out of industrial diesel. This in turn caused the two turbine batteries to run down, and they failed to start up again when fuel was received some ten days later. About a hundred spare parts ordered for the turbines have been sitting in the port of Ashdod in Israel for the last eight months, waiting for the Israeli authorities to let them through customs. Now Israel has started to auction these parts because they have been in customs for more than 45 days. The proceeds are being held in Israeli accounts.
During the week of 30 November, 394,000 litres of industrial diesel were allowed in for the power plant: approximately 18 per cent of the weekly minimum that Israel is legally obliged to allow in. It was enough for one turbine to run for two days before the plant was shut down again. The Gaza Electricity Distribution Company said that most of the Gaza Strip will be without electricity for between four and 12 hours a day. At any given time during these outages, over 65,000 people have no electricity.
No other diesel fuel (for standby generators and transport) was delivered during that week, no petrol (which has been kept out since early November) or cooking gas. Gaza’s hospitals are apparently relying on diesel and gas smuggled from Egypt via the tunnels; these supplies are said to be administered and taxed by Hamas. Even so, two of Gaza’s hospitals have been out of cooking gas since the week of 23 November.
Adding to the problems caused by the siege are those created by the political divisions between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and the Hamas Authority in Gaza. For example, Gaza’s Coastal Municipalities Water Utility (CMWU), which is not controlled by Hamas, is supposed to receive funds from the World Bank via the Palestinian Water Authority (PWA) in Ramallah to pay for fuel to run the pumps for Gaza’s sewage system. Since June, the PWA has refused to hand over those funds, perhaps because it feels that a functioning sewage system would benefit Hamas. I don’t know whether the World Bank has attempted to intervene, but meanwhile UNRWA is providing the fuel, although they have no budget for it. The CMWU has also asked Israel’s permission to import 200 tons of chlorine, but by the end of November it had received only 18 tons – enough for one week of chlorinated water. By mid-December Gaza City and the north of Gaza had access to water only six hours every three days.
According to the World Health Organisation, the political divisions between Gaza and the West Bank are also having a serious impact on drug stocks in Gaza. The West Bank Ministry of Health (MOH) is responsible for procuring and delivering most of the pharmaceuticals and medical disposables used in Gaza. But stocks are at dangerously low levels. Throughout November the MOH West Bank was turning shipments away because it had no warehouse space, yet it wasn’t sending supplies on to Gaza in adequate quantities. During the week of 30 November, one truck carrying drugs and medical supplies from the MOH in Ramallah entered Gaza, the first delivery since early September.
The breakdown of an entire society is happening in front of us, but there is little international response beyond UN warnings which are ignored. The European Union announced recently that it wanted to strengthen its relationship with Israel while the Israeli leadership openly calls for a large-scale invasion of the Gaza Strip and continues its economic stranglehold over the territory with, it appears, the not-so-tacit support of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah – which has been co-operating with Israel on a number of measures. On 19 December Hamas officially ended its truce with Israel, which Israel said it wanted to renew, because of Israel’s failure to ease the blockade.
How can keeping food and medicine from the people of Gaza protect the people of Israel? How can the impoverishment and suffering of Gaza’s children – more than 50 per cent of the population – benefit anyone? International law as well as human decency demands their protection. If Gaza falls, the West Bank will be next.
Sara Roy teaches at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies and is the author of Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict.
Saturday, December 20, 2008
Greenwald on Political Corruption
Glen Greenwald of Salon.com on deterring political crimes:
The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus today perfectly expresses the consensus view of establishment Washington regarding the exemption which political elites should and do enjoy from the rule of law, and, in doing so, she unintentionally highlights -- as vividly as possible -- the glaring flaw in this mentality. Marcus reviews the life of Mark Felt, the number 2 FBI official under J. Edgar Hoover who died this week. Felt is most famous for having been Bob Woodward's "Deep Throat" source in the Watergate investigation but, as Marcus details, he was also convicted in a 1980 criminal trial for having ordered illegal, warrantless physical searches of the homes of various friends and relatives of 1960s radicals.
Less than 24 hours after Felt was convicted, he (along with an FBI co-defendant) was pardoned by Ronald Reagan, who justified the pardon by citing Jimmy Carter's pardon of Vietnam War draft evaders and then saying, in words obviously relevant now to growing demands for prosecution of Bush officials:
We can be no less generous to two men who acted on high principle to bring an end to the terrorism that was threatening our nation. . . .
[The men's convictions] grew out of their good-faith belief that their actions were necessary to preserve the security interests of our country. The record demonstrates that they acted not with criminal intent, but in the belief that they had grants of authority reaching to the highest levels of government.
Marcus quotes Felt's Special Prosecutor, John Nields, as angrily protesting Reagan's pardon, pointing out that central to our form of Government is the proposition that our highest political leaders are constrained by the Constitution and the rule of law -- a principle Reagan subverted by protecting these criminals.
Like the good, representative establishment Washingtonian that she is, Marcus announces that -- when it comes to the growing controversy over whether Bush officials should be investigated and prosecuted for their crimes -- she "find[s herself] more in the camp of Reagan than Nields." Her reasoning is a perfect distillation of conventional Washington wisdom on this topic:
I understand -- I even share -- Nields's anger over the insult to the rule of law. Yet I'm coming to the conclusion that what's most crucial here is ensuring that these mistakes are not repeated. In the end, that may be more important than punishing those who acted wrongly in pursuit of what they thought was right.
Leave aside Marcus' revealing description of government crimes as "mistakes." Even on its own terms, even if one accepts her premise that Bush officials broke the law "in pursuit of what they thought was right," this argument makes absolutely no sense. In fact, it is as internally contradictory as an idea can be.
Along with the desire for just retribution, one of the two principal reasons we impose penalties for violations of the criminal law is deterrence -- to provide an incentive for potential lawbreakers to refrain from breaking our laws, rather than deciding that it is beneficial to do so. Though there is debate about how best to accomplish it and how effective it ultimately is, deterrence of future crimes has been, and remains, a core purpose of the criminal law. That is about as basic as it gets. From Paul Robinson, University of Pennsylvania Law Professor, and John Darley, Psychology Professor at Princeton, in "The Role of Deterrence in the Criminal Law":
For the past several decades, the deterrence of crime has been a centerpiece of criminal law reform. Law-givers have sought to optimize the control of crime by devising a penalty-setting system that assigns criminal punishments of a magnitude sufficient to deter a thinking individual from committing a crime.
Punishment for lawbreaking is precisely how we try to ensure that crimes "never happen again." If instead -- as Marcus and so many other urge -- we hold political leaders harmless when they break the law, if we exempt them from punishment under the criminal law, then what possible reason would they have from refraining from breaking the law in the future? A principal reason for imposing punishment on lawbreakers is exactly what Marcus says she wants to achieve: "ensuring that these mistakes are not repeated." By telling political leaders that they will not be punished when they break the law, the exact opposite outcome is achieved: ensuring that this conduct will be repeated.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Neo Cons Falling Apart
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Thursday, December 11, 2008
Why do they hate us, when us means Muslims?
This is in response to Mr. Patrick French’s piece “They Hate Us—and India Is Us,” published in the New York Times on December 8, 2008. The trouble with pieces like Mr. French’s (and mainstream western media is inundated with such voices) is that they only show half the picture. And then they wonder why after seven years into the “war on terror” we are arguably worse off than when we began.
“They hate us;” “you’re either with us or against us!” This is precisely the type of language that fuels the enormous credibility deficit between the Islamic and non-Islamic worlds. There is constant media coverage and vigils held for victims of the Mumbai blasts and 9/11, which is fine. But where are the cameras and the candles when the Christians and the Jews kill, when thousands of innocent civilians die in Sabra and Shatila, when air raids kill countless Iraqis and Afghans, when Hindus in India maim and kill thousands of Muslims (Gujarat 2002) and hundreds of Christians (Orissa 2008). Why is that back page news? Why are there no tears for those unfortunate souls? Those killed by NATO forces are barely mentioned as collateral damage. Is life taken by extremists only worth celebrating if the killer is a Muslim?
Mr. French makes the point that even if the Kashmir issue was solved, the hate that Lashkare Taiba and its leader, Hafiz Saeed, spew will not die. After all, their literature “is much concerned with establishing a caliphate in Central Asia, and murdering those who insult the Prophet.” In case you don’t know this Mr. French, all extremists, Muslim, Christian, Jewish or Hindu, are equally exclusionary and intolerant. Hindu fundamentalists in Orissa pledged that the “Christians would be re-converted to Hinduism,” no matter what it took to do it.
And incidentally, since we are on the subject, there is another thing we Muslims can’t understand, even the relatively secular ones amongst us. Why must the Western world make cartoons of our Prophet? Why must Britain knight Salman Rushdie, when he has brazenly offended the sentiments of so many Muslims? Why must Sherry Jones write a derogatory novel about the Prophet’s wife? (Response to this latest instigation has been largely muted—perhaps a sign of the Muslim world becoming immune to such attacks?)
This is not about free speech, but about hate speech. A large part of the eastern world, including countries like India and Thailand, takes religion very seriously. Yet only Islam is singled out for jest. Not Hinduism; not Buddhism; no other religion. Why? Is it because the West likes to see the reaction and then mock it? Or is it because the reaction helps it form the type of image of Islam it needs to justify its own gruesome actions against this hatred and lunacy? After all, what better way to deal with such hate-mongers than to eradicate them altogether and invade their countries one after the other?
Why does even Pope Benedict not spare us? In 2006, his incendiary remarks, “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached,” quoting the views of the Byzantine Emperor in 1391, astounded many Muslims. Isn’t the Pope a man of God who should be condemning evil acts like wars and terrorism alike? Shouldn’t he be diffusing tension rather than creating it? And by the way, isn’t “spreading faith by the sword” also what the Crusaders did?
Contrast this with the sermon given at Hajj (the annual pilgrimage to Mecca) this year. The Grand Mufti delivering the sermon begins by saying, “Islam is against atrocious forces but does not in any case allow acts of terrorism in any of its form and manifestation.” Why is he bothering, I ask myself? We can condemn terrorism and extremism till we are blue in the face, and it won’t make a difference! After all, haven’t we replaced communism as the “significant other,” as one panelist on BBC who defended Pope Benedict’s remarks, said, making the case that therefore “Christianity was in competition with Islam.”
Our Mufti, however, is an appeaser when it comes to the West, his strength only visible when he talks of women and children. He ends the Hajj by saying, “evil forces are at work in diverting the Muslim youth to a wrong path and all the resources are being used to unveil Muslim women.” Obviously, he makes no mention of the resources being used to forcibly veil Muslim women. If there were any doubts that the Islamic world is suffering its dark ages the Mufti’s sermon should put them to rest.
But here too, we don’t need your help, thank you very much, Mr. French. We are quite capable of battling it out for ourselves. The only thing we ask: please don’t stand in our way. Don’t bring your forces to our lands and prop up unpopular regimes. Please don’t do that because then the extremists gain legitimacy. It makes our job doubly harder.
On March 9, 2007, General Pervez Musharraf’s government forcibly removed the Chief Justice of Pakistan. Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry was a man who had, in the words of the lawyer who fought for his reinstatement, “zero tolerance for corruption, abuse of human rights and environmental degradation.” He had given justice to Mukhtaran Mai, the brave lady who had been gang raped on the order of village elders, but is now an inspiration to many as she runs a shelter for abused women and a school for girls. Chaudhry had also reversed orders by village elders to trade underage girls as compensation in tribal feuds.
Yet the American Ambassador to Pakistan, Ms. Anne Patterson, did not support the incredible lawyers’ movement that was launched to reinstate Chief Justice Chaudhry. In fact, she actively stood against it. And later, Britain’s Sir Mark Lyall-Grant worked actively for Musharraf’s immunity. Because Musharraf, and later Zardari (who has thus far resisted reinstating the Chief Justice most likely due to fears that his corruption cases may be reopened), are considered “friends of the west,” so what if a few girls between the ages of 8 and 12 are given away to a hostile tribe?
Western media spends hours interviewing Irshad Manji and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, but when I first wrote about Chief Justice Chaudhry in March of last year, the New York Times chose not to print the story. An editor at a British publication told me “it may just be a fantasy of the chattering classes”. So, I wrote about it on alternative media, publications like CounterPunch, for months, until the story became so big that even the NYT could no longer ignore it.
Still, has the NYT or the Washington Post or Los Angeles Times ever bothered to cover the story of Wael Abbas, an Egyptian human rights activist, journalist and blogger, whose videos depict police brutality by Hosni Mubarak’s (yet another “friend of the west”) regime inflicted on its people? Did they ever write about the fact that his accounts with YouTube and Yahoo were closed because he was exposing a face of Mr. Mubarak’s regime that the West was uncomfortable with? How many times have they interviewed Saudi dissidents who have risked everything to speak out against a claustrophobically closed society with some of the most discriminatory legal practices? Why is the coverage of western media so selective in its reach? How can your governments preach one thing and do another and yet expect to maintain moral authority?
There are of course some good journalists in mainstream media as well, but the number is limited. Carlotta Gall, for instance, wrote about Javed Ahmad, the Afghan reporter who worked for a Canadian outlet and was arrested by American troops, declared an unlawful enemy combatant, and tortured for eleven months. Ms. Gall’s piece in the NYT eventually led to Ahmad’s release. More recently, Nicholas Kristoff, who had followed Mukhtaran Mai’s plight in Pakistan, has also written about Sajida Bibi, a Christian woman who was threatened with the same fate as Mukhtaran, but has fled to Mukhtaran’s shelter. Kristoff’s piece is important because it shows that the root causes behind such heinous human rights abuses are poverty, illiteracy and chauvinistic societies, and not necessarily any particular religion.
Shortly before the Mumbai attacks, the Council of Islamic Ideology in Pakistan proposed divorce law reform such that the laws would become more equitable and fair to women. There was uproar from the local mullahs (who are far less learned in religious matters than the members of the Council) and the government of the day sent the proposals back so they could be toned down. But many women and men, who believe in freedom and equality, spoke out. Newspaper editorials focused on the issue and almost unanimously supported the Council’s proposals.
But then the attacks in Mumbai happened and instead of following leads bottom up; instead of questioning who at the Taj and Oberoi Hotels and at their ports was involved with the terrorists, India began pointing fingers in Pakistan’s direction even before the siege had ended. In a day, the entire focus in Pakistan changed. Nobody talked about divorce law reform anymore. Front page news focused on how Pakistan would survive these allegations as a nation. The extremists instantly became patriots. And all other issues took a back seat.
It would make perfect sense for India to punish all perpetrators of this heinous crime, regardless of whether they were indigenous or foreign, but to implicate other countries without substantive proof or to lay collective responsibility on a nation because of a few rotten apples, yes in that case, perhaps India is like you. Or at least tries to be like you. In August of this year, Nassir Sultan, a young boy of 15 from a remote Pakistani town called Dir, had become obsessed with watching Bollywood movies (readily available in Pakistan) and decided that he would go to India to meet with his favorite actor, Shahrukh Khan. His parents did not take him seriously as he had never left Dir previously. But one day, he got dressed for school, and without telling anyone at home, left for Peshawar (the nearest big town) by bus. From there, he took another bus to Lahore. He had been saving for this trip for months. From Lahore, he took a rickshaw to Wagah Border, and when the guards were not looking, climbed through a hole in the fence and slipped into India. Soon after he crossed the border, he was apprehended by Indian police. Of course, Nassir was in the wrong. He had slipped into India without a visa. But the profiling of Muslims as terrorists in India is such that the first thing they said to Nassir was, “Where are you going? We have already caught two of your brothers who had come for Jihad in Kashmir. Now, we are going to lock you up unless you give us all the information,” as revealed by Nassir in a television interview last week.
“But I only want to meet Shahrukh Khan. I am his biggest fan,” a silly and naïve Nassir insisted. He was duly locked up for four months, and when they found absolutely nothing on him and after significant diplomatic efforts, finally released earlier this month.
It is true that India is a democracy, and that is impressive, especially because democracy is so lacking in the Muslim world. And democracy is truly something to be relished. To be able to hold your rulers accountable, to be able to change them in a few years if they fail the people, this is for the most part, impossible in most Islamic countries. And far be it from me to agree with the commandant of the Lashkare Taiba on anything, but when he regards “democracy a Jewish and Christian import from Europe,” isn’t that a fair assessment of the governments that have been implanted in Afghanistan and Iraq by western powers today, in the name of democracy?
When Afghanistan and Iraq are hailed as democratic successes but the Islamic Salvation Front is prevented, with the aid of western powers, from taking office after it has won an election fair and square in Algeria, what are the Muslims supposed to think?
As Rubina Saigol writes in Pakistan’s widely read English daily, The News, “Blaming one group of people as a whole, while absolving another as a whole, is a sterile approach that is likely to exacerbate rather than resolve the issues of terrorism that the world faces today.” And thus, I must point out, that in the West too there are voices and organizations that are sincere in building partnerships that are based on concern for human rights, without regard to race or religion, who are willing to shun their prejudices and their biases (because all of us have them) to work towards a better tomorrow. Groups like Stop The War Coalition in Britain, who march in London’s dreary rain and cold to express solidarity with those who sit miles away and are victim to hellfire missiles, or organizations like the New York Bar Association, who give life membership to Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, recognizing his services for the cause of justice in Pakistan, without regard to their own government’s dubious stand on his restoration.
If President-Elect Obama wants to distinguish his legacy from Bush’s, he will have to look to such organizations to show him the way. He will have to make a clean break from the Bush years and search for solutions to problems like Kashmir and Palestine, and he will have to end support for repressive monarchies and dictatorships and pay attention to the anger and frustration that brews beneath their surface. Only then will we put an end to hate.
Ayesha Ijaz Khan is a London-based lawyer and political commentator and can be contacted via her website www.ayeshaijazkhan.com
