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Today's
Stories
August 28,
2004
Alexander Cockburn
Zombies
for Kerry
Patrick Cockburn
Najaf Ceasefire Good for Iraq, But Weakens Allawi and US
Ray McGovern
Blowing Smoke on Intelligence
Dr. Juan Romagoza
From El Salvador to Abu Ghraib: Reflections of Torture Survivor
Ray Hanania
An Israeli Spy in the Pentagon? Ridiculous!
Fred Gardner
Eddie Lepp Busted by DEA: Facing Life for Growing Medical Pot
Diane Christian
Big Men: the Better Leader Lets You Live
Mickey Z.
Media Declares War on Anti-War Protests
Winslow T. Wheeler
Sen. McCain's Pork Chops: an Exchange
Thomas St. John
Burning Slaves at the Stake: On "Sinners in the Hands of
an Angry God"
August 27,
2004
Gary Leupp
Neocon
Musings
Robin Cook
The
Ghosts of Abu Ghraib
Diane Christian
Disarming
Michael Donnelly
Situational Democracy: the Show Me the Green Party?
Jack Random
4F and Other Heroes: an Army of War Resisters
Mike Ferner
"To the Swift Boats!"
Mazin Qumsiyeh
7000 Palestinian Political Prisoners
Veronza Bowers, Jr.
"You Won't Be Leaving Tomorrow"
Sex, Drugs & the Blues!
Serpents in the Garden
CounterPunch's
Sizzling New Book on Culture and Sex is Now Available
Click here to purchase
August 26,
2004
M. Shahid Alam
The
Clash Thesis: a Failing Ideology?
Diane Christian
War
Rules: Bush is No Sun Tzu
Derek Seidman
"They're As Bad As Wal-Mart:" Starbucks Workers Get
Organized
David Lindorff
Court to RNC Protesters: Drop the Rally
Christopher
Brauchli
Signs of Dissent: the Bush in the Bubble
Stew Albert
Reporting Suspicious Activity
Mark Donham
Judgement in Athens: Give the Koreans Their Day in Court
Saul Landau
Pinochet:
the Al Capone of the Southern Cone
Website of
the Day
The Kerry 527 Ad You'll Never See
August 25,
2004
Amelia Peltz
Can
I Have 9.8 Seconds of Your Time?
Noah Leavitt
Defining and Redefining Torture
Ron Jacobs
Takin' It to the Streets: It's Not About the Election, It's About
Democracy
James Brooks
Coronado Crosses the Jordan
Akiva Eldar
How to Win the Jewish Vote: Turn Gaza into a "Mini-Afghanistan"
Gemma Araneta
Chavez's New Brand of Populism
Philip Cryan
Uribe's Boys: the Death Squads of Colombia
CounterPunch Wire
Cheney Opens the Closet Door
August 24,
2004
Jeremy Scahill
John
Kerry: the Warchurian Candidate
Gary Leupp
"We
Want Them to Go Away"
David Domke
God
Willing: an Echoing Press and Political Fundamentalism
William Loren Katz
The Meaning of Hugo Chávez: Black and Indian Power in
Venezuela
Jonah Gindin
With Chavez? Reading the International Private Media
Fran Schor
Denying Atrocities: From Vietnam to Fallujah
Joe Bageant
Driving
on the Bones of God
Website of the Day
The Great America Lockdown: a Primer for the RNC
August 23,
2004
Winslow Wheeler
Don't
Mind If I Do: Porkbarrel and the War on Terror
John Pilger
Bush
May Be the Lesser Evil
Stan Goff
Swift
Boat Dogfight
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
Notes
from the West Bank: Build, Demolish, Rebuild
Mike Whitney
The Unraveling of Afghanistan
William Blum
Brave
New World of Iraqi Sovereignty
Ralph Nader
A Letter to the Washington Post: a Shameful and Unsavory Editorial
August 21 /
22, 2004
Cockburn /
St. Clair
"They
Want Blood:" The Bi-Partisan Origins of the Total War on
Drugs
Landau / Hassen
Failing
the Mission? Form a Commission
Brian Cloughley
The
Bush Team in Iraq: Moral Cowardice, as Practiced by Experts
Josh Frank
Nader as David Duke? The ADL Wants You to Think So
Mike Whitney
Reincarnating Mengele: the Torture Doctors of Abu Ghraib
Ron Jacobs
Day Labor Blues
Mickey Z.
Shooting at Whales: 40 Years After Tonkin
Fred Gardner
Dr. Wolman Comes Out: The Cannabis Consultants
Dave Zirin
Uprising in Athens: Iraqi Soccer Team Gives Bush the Boot
Josh Saxe
Witnessing Police Brutality in LA
Yanar Mohammed
Letter from Baghdad: a Democracy of Killings and Bombings
Helen Williams
Ali's Story: a Taste of Reality from Baghdad
Michael Donnelly
Elemental and NaturalForests, Fire and Recovery
Elizabeth Schulte
The Crisis in Affordable Housing
Poets' Basement
Adler, Albert, Virgil, Ford and Krieger
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
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Weekend
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August 28 / 29, 2004
CounterPunch
Diary
Zombies
for Kerry; Arundhati Roy Explains NGOs; Joseph Anderson Displays Anti-Blackism and Anti-Semitism
in the East Bay
By
ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Didn't John Kerry ever read about rope-a-dope?
Karl Rove must be kicking his
heels with merriment at the way the horse-faced son of Boston
is tangling himself up in the Swiftboat comedy. A couple of weeks
more and I reckon Kerry will start crying on tv at the besmirchments
of his war record and it will all be over. Are there any skins
thinner than those belonging to Democratic loyalists-for-Kerry?
The other night CounterPunch co-editor Jeffrey St Clair, found
himself to a gathering of antiwar activists in downtown Portland,
touting our new book, Dime's
Worth of Difference, Beyond The Lesser of Two Evils.
There were about a hundred
souls assembled, and Jeffrey's seasoned eye assayed the political
temper of the throng. Sure enough, at least a score had that
fixity of gaze and tensed naso-labial musculature that betrayed
the presence of Zombies-for-Kerry.
Jeffrey plunged into his talk,
an even-handed assault on both Bush and Kerry. First he whaled
away at Bush, tracing the shameful decline of this war-resister
from the moral Everest of his Quaker-like refusal to spill Vietnamese
blood (or his own) to his latterday militarist posturing and
use of the National Guard as a de facto draft, with the draftees
press-ganged into indentured servitude by stop loss orders. (The
stop loss orders, I should note, now face a challenge in US District
Court in San Francisco, with lawyers Michael Sorgen and Joshua
Sondheimer suing the Defense Department on behalf of an Army
sergeant in the California National Guard.)
Then Jeffrey turned his spotlight
on Kerry's record in Vietnam and began to review the unpleasing
record of unmerited Purple Hearts and Silver Star, plus those
actions of Lieutenant Kerry that could be arguably classified
as war crimes. At this point a lady of middle years, the leader
of the Kerry loyalists, rose in indignation and after a whispered
and vehement colloquy with the organizer of the event, led her
troops haughtily from the hall.
I've no way of knowing, but
it's quite possible that among those protesters were several,
maybe many, who were passionately opposed to the war in Vietnam,
and themselves denounced it as fifteen years of war crimes against
the Vietnamese people.
Yet here they were, so deeply
committed to voting for Kerry that they could not even bear to
hear a discussion of his conduct in Vietnam, let alone sit still
for a reasoned discussion of Kerry's pledges to keep the troops
in Iraq. My in-box overflows with furious denunciations from
Zombies-for- Bush as a "draft-dodger" and fervent testimonials
to Kerry as a "war hero".
The calculation in the Kerry
camp is obviously that the liberal-progressive part of their
base will put up with anything, and they seem to be correct in
making that <assumption.Last> weekend one of these aides
took the opportunity, in a debate on CNN , to emphasize that
Kerry supported "96 per cent" of the Patriot Act and
indeed wrote some of the language of the Act.
John Kerry announces that even
if he'd known the allegations of Saddam Hussein's WMDs were spurious,
he'd had attacked Iraq. There's scarcely a quiver in the ABB
loyalists. Kerry was issuing these endorsements of Bush's war
on Iraq at the same moment that two senior Republicans , Rep
Doug Bereuter of Nebraska (number 2 on the House Intelligence
Committee) and Rep Jim Leach of Iowa, were saying the war was
a disaster launched on fraudulent pretexts. At the Iowa State
Fair Leach said the US should get out by the end of the year.
Such criticism on the Democratic
side was virtually inaudible with only Robert Byrd and Russell
Feingold of Wisconsin, publicly criticizing Kerry's stance on
the war. The Democratic power brokers have even gone so far as
to try to squelch anti-war protests at the RNC convention. They
want to present the image of a loyal opposition, with the mesage,
Oppose Bush but not the war.
After argument with an ABB-er
the other day, I asked him about his long-term political perspective
. Here he was, I said, beating the drum for a man who stood for
everything he opposed: war in Iraq, war in Colombia, war on drugs,
war on the deficit, war on teen morals. Oh, he said, the day
after we elect John Kerry we'll go to war on him.
Yeah, right! Back in the early
and middle 1990s the liberals and progressives were exactly as
indulgent to Clinton as they are to Kerry now. After almost four
years of Bill Clinton, Washington's liberal advocacy groups,
foundations and public interest networks resembled the Vichy
French after six years of Nazi occupation.
Pressed for explanations for
their pusillanimity, the liberal advocates explained that the
Republican hordes who swept into Congress in 1994 were so barbaric,
as was the prospect of a Dole presidency, that they had no choice
but to circle the wagons round Bill Clinton.
So the Democratic Party, from
DLC governors to liberal public-interest groups mustered around
their leader and marched into the late Nineties arm in arm along
the path sign-posted toward the greatest orgy of corporate theft
in the history of the planet, deregulation of banking and food
safety, NAFTA and the WTO, rates of logging six times those achieved
in the subsequent Bush years, oil drilling in the Arctic, a war
on Yugoslavia, Plan Colombia, a vast expansion of the death penalty,
re-affirmation of racist drug laws, the foundations of the Patriot
Act.
The serious rebellion took
place in the streets, in Seattle right at the end of 1999, and
the insurgents most certainly didn't come from the progressive/
liberal wing of the Democratic Party.
There's a strong case for arguing
that the importance of these presidential contests is disastrously
exaggerated. As always, a monocular obsession with getting behind
the Democratic nominee means quitting vital battlefields. In
the 1996 and 2000 campaigns the AFL-CIO pulled many of its field
organizers off its issue campaigns, to work for Clinton and Gore,
the very architects of the Agreements that these labor organizers
had spent the previous three years fighting.
Only weeks ago Andy Stern,
head of the SEIU, blurted out to Dave Broder of the Washington
Post at the Boston convention that a Kerry victory might well
demobilize labor. He had a strong point, even though he swiftly
recanted. So we see Stern sending his SEIU organizers out across
Oregon, in an effort to keep Nader off the ballot, who's done
a lot more for SIEU members in substantive terms than Kerry ever
has or will.
Rope-a-dope can mean tiring
out your opponent. It can also mean getting your brains beaten
in, and shuffling along as a Zombie.
Footnote: A shorter version
of this column ran in the edition of The Nation that went to
press last Wednesday. The previous week The Nation ran a Polonius-like
piece by "Uncle Tom" Gitlin and another fellow called
John Passacantando, chieftain of GreenPeace, wagging their fingers
at RNC demonstrators and quavering nervously that at all costs
a rerun Chicago '68 must be avoided.
Arundhati
Roy Explains NGOs to You
Say the acronym "NGO"
and most people say Huh? Then you have to explain to the unitiated
what exactly an NGO is, which produces the same sort of confusing
noise you got from people in the fourth century debating the
precise nature of the Trinity. The online Free Dictionary has
a brief general definition, then some examples which betray an
oddly specific interest in Pakistan. I quote:
"NGO: an
organization that is not part of the local or state or federal
government nongovernmental organization organization, organisation."
As very correctly stigmatized
by Arundhati Roy, the NGOs that concern us are semi-official
groups, usually dependent on grants from governments or cautious
and orthodox private foundations. Their general relationship
to mass protest and vigorous movements for social change is sedative,
conservative and ultimately lethal. Take the efforts to curb
the rampages of the World Bank, an outfit that should be destroyed,
with its senior officials reassigned to useful tasks at the lower
levels of the recycling industry. In the end the directors of
the World Bank had the bright idea of simply importing the bank's
fiercest critics and setting them to work in the World Bank where
the zeal for reform in their bosoms soon subsided to a decorous
smoulder, then vanished altogether as they mutated into compliant
functionaries spouting the nonsense they had spent their previous
existence deriding.
At one point in a long and
very interesting talk she gave in San Francisco on August 16
Ms Roy raises a cautionary finger about the evbolution of the
World Social Forum:
"In January 2001, in Porto
Alegre, Brazil, 20,000 activists, students, film makers--some
of the best minds in the world--came together to share their
experiences and exchange ideas about confronting Empire. That
was the birth of the now historic World Social Forum. It was
the first, formal coming together of an exciting, anarchic, unindoctrinated,
energetic, new kind of 'Public Power'. The rallying cry of the
WSF is 'Another World is Possible'.It has become a platform where
hundreds of conversations, debates, and seminars have helped
to hone and refine a vision of what kind of world it should be.
"By January 2004, when
the fourth WSF was held in Mumbai, India, it attracted 200,000
delegates. I have never been part of a more electrifying gathering.
It was a sign of the social forum's success that the mainstream
media in India ignored it completely. But now, the WSF is threatened
by its own success. The safe, open, festive atmosphere of the
forum has allowed politicians and nongovernmental organizations
that are imbricated in the political and economic systems that
the forum opposes to participate and make themselves heard.
"Another danger is that
the WSF, which has played such a vital role in the movement for
global justice, runs the risk of becoming an end unto itself.
Just organizing it every year consumes the energies of some of
the best activists. If conversations about resistance replace
real civil disobedience, then the WSF could become an asset to
those whom it was created to oppose. The forum must be held and
must grow, but we have to find ways to channel our conversations
there back into concrete action.
Then, a little later, Roy returned
to the topic of what she calls "the NGO-ization of Resistance":
" It will be easy to twist
what I'm about to say into an indictment of all NGOs. That would
be a falsehood. In the murky waters of fake NGOs set up or to
siphon off grant money or as tax dodges (in states like Bihar,
they are given as dowry), of course there are NGOs doing valuable
work. But it's important to consider the NGO phenomenon in a
broader political context.
"In India, for instance,
the funded NGO boom began in the late 1980s and 1990s. It coincided
with the opening of India's markets to neo-liberalism. At the
time, the Indian state, in keeping with the requirements of structural
adjustment, was withdrawing funding from rural development, agriculture,
energy, transport, and public health. As the state abdicated
its traditional role, NGOs moved in to work in these very areas.
The difference, of course, is that the funds available to them
are a minuscule fraction of the actual cut in public spending.
Most large funded NGOs are financed and patronized by aid and
development agencies, which are in turn funded by Western governments,
the World Bank, the UN, and some multinational corporations.
Though they may not be the very same agencies, they are certainly
part of the same loose, political formation that oversees the
neo-liberal project and demands the slash in government spending
in the first place.
"Why should these agencies
fund NGOs? Could it be just old-fashioned missionary zeal? Guilt?
It's a little more than that. NGOs give the impression that they
are filling the vacuum created by a retreating state. And they
are, but in a materially inconsequential way. Their real contribution
is that they defuse political anger and dole out as aid or benevolence
what people ought to have by right.
"They alter the public
psyche. They turn people into dependent victims and blunt the
edges of political resistance. NGOs form a sort of buffer between
the sarkar [the government]and public. Between Empire and its
subjects. They have become the arbitrators, the interpreters,
the facilitators.
"In the long run, NGOs
are accountable to their funders, not to the people they work
among. They're what botanists would call an indicator species.
It's almost as though the greater the devastation caused by neo-liberalism,
the greater the outbreak of NGOs. Nothing illustrates this more
poignantly than the phenomenon of the U.S. preparing to invade
a country and simultaneously readying NGOs to go in and clean
up the devastation.
"In order make sure their
funding is not jeopardized and that the governments of the countries
they work in will allow them to function, NGOs have to present
their work in a shallow framework more or less shorn of a political
or historical context. At any rate, an inconvenient historical
or political context.
"Apolitical (and therefore,
actually, extremely political) distress reports from poor countries
and war zones eventually make the (dark) people of those (dark)
countries seem like pathological victims. Another malnourished
Indian, another starving Ethiopian, another Afghan refugee camp,
another maimed Sudanese . . . in need of the white man's help.
They unwittingly reinforce racist stereotypes and re-affirm the
achievements, the comforts, and the compassion (the tough love)
of Western civilization. They're the secular missionaries of
the modern world.
"Eventually--on a smaller
scale but more insidiously--the capital available to NGOs plays
the same role in alternative politics as the speculative capital
that flows in and out of the economies of poor countries. It
begins to dictate the agenda. It turns confrontation into negotiation.
It depoliticizes resistance. It interferes with local peoples'
movements that have traditionally been self-reliant. NGOs have
funds that can employ local people who might otherwise be activists
in resistance movements, but now can feel they are doing some
immediate, creative good (and earning a living while they're
at it). Real political resistance offers no such short cuts.
"The NGO-ization of politics
threatens to turn resistance into a well-mannered, reasonable,
salaried, 9-to-5 job. With a few perks thrown in. Real resistance
has real consequences. And no salary."
This is the best dissection
of the political function of NGOs I've ever read. Next time you
see someone like Vivanco of Human Rights Watch rushing to Caracas,
as he did earlier this summer, to assist in efforts to turn out
Chavez, consult Ms Roy on NGOs for the fundamental reasons.
Anti-Blackism
and Anti-Semitism In the East Bay: Notes from Joseph Anderson
Any leftist talking to an audience
in the Bay Area will probably have faced some penetrating questions
from Joseph Anderson. Both your CounterPunch editors have, to
their edification.
Not so long ago Ishmael Reed
ran a startling piece by Anderson in his online magazine Konch, which described
a truly amazing piece of invective by a member of the faculty
of the Berkeley Journalism School. If a public official had made
the same sort of remark appropriate sanctions would have been
swift. Reed, incidentally, asked witnesses for comment or refutation
of Joe's description, and received no response. Here's Anderson
in Konch:
"The incident, which took
place back in 2003, involved a Cody's-sponsored book interview
of Anne Garrels, NPR's Iraq celebrity war reporter, 'off-site'
(at a nearby church hall).Garrels had recently made a scandalously
unconscionable (except in white society) statement about the
U.S. military killing of a prominent Palestinian reporter in
Baghdad, saying that, 'he got what was expected, because he shouldn't
have been there in the first place.' (Yet, Garrels subsequently
claims--somehow in order to cover her remarks--to have been 'a
good friend' of the slain reporter. I say, gee, with 'good white
friends' like Garrels, what Palestinian needs the Israeli army!?')
The Palestinian reporter, Tareq Ayoub, was killed (assassinated?)
when a U.S. military fighter-jet leisurely--not at all in 'the
fog of war'--fired two missiles: one, then, the jet circling
in a few minutes, another one, directly at Al-Jazeera's building,
with Ayoub on the roof
"I--and far from alone
in the nonwhite world--considered Garrels' remark to be an egregiously
racist statement. So, when I saw Garrels afterwards, I asked
her about it.
"I civilly, but frankly
told Garrels--merely performing what logicians call a substitution
analysis--that she never would have said such a
thing about "journalist" Daniel Pearl, for example.
Pearl, as you would recall, was the white media-mourned Jewish
white-American reporter killed in Pakistan. This, when he went
looking for people he knew to have connections
to the formerly U.S.-supported (and later betrayed) al-Qaeda,
during the U.S. war and bombing in Afghanistan, within which
al-Qaeda had bases! Most importantly, Pearl was well-believed,
or well-suspected, by many as having direct connections to the
CIA and Israel's Mossad! (Simply put, of being a CIA/Mossad informant
or spy.) Thus, it was Pearl who--even much more arguably--'got
what was expected, because he really shouldn't have been
there in the first place.'
"At that point, the event
interview host, Sandy Tolan, UC Berkeley Journalism School lecturer
scornfully told me that my comparison of Pearl vis-à-vis
the Al-Jazeera reporter was "deeply anti-Semitic."..
However, Tolan, for all his concerns about anti-Semitism, apparently
doesn't care much about other forms of racism. Tolan, suddenly,
angrily, shouted to me, "We're tired of all your
Black s---!" Quoi!??? That's French for, 'Say
what!???' Amazingly, this is Tolan--one of those white
liberals who apparently only respects Black turn-the-other-cheek
sports celebrities (or perhaps safely dead Black historical figures)--who
wrote an entire book about all the white s--- even baseball great
Hank Aaron had to put up with. (But then, conservative wack George
Will's greatest hero was Willie Mays. Will even wanted his first
grandson named after Willie: "Willie Wills"!
That's right! You can't make that s--- up!)"
More recently Joe went to the
3-day conference on anti-Semitism in Oakland, and filed an interesting
and often amusing report in IndyNews: "My overall, albeit
limited, personal experience of the conference and the numerous
discussions I had, with Jews having a range of political positions
on Zionism/Israel, was enjoyable, I am pleased to say."
Later, Joe writes:
"I noted the word anti-Jewish
'oppression' appeared so many times in the workshop titles that
you would think that 'Jews' were barely surviving and getting
profiled, harassed, framed, beaten or killed by cops in American
city and town ghettos, instead of Blacks, Latinos, and poor SE
Asians.
"In fact, it was I
who was stopped by a cop and held up for about 40 minutes(!)
-- as he checked me out(!) -- on a pretext for 'parking
while Black' on a quiet residential side street later that night,
when I was giving three white attendees a ride, later
after the conference! (Don't that count for 'somethin'!!???)
I guess the cop might have thought the three whites in my car
might have been in trouble!: being held hostage or something
for money! No good deed by Black men (even for whites or white
senior citizens) goes unpunished by the cops!
"Smarmily, the cop even
said as he finally let me go, though both I and the remaining
white senior citizen passenger were obviously wearing
our seatbelts and shoulder straps, "You both be sure
and buckle up now!" I just rolled my eyes. Even the Jewish
senior citizen woman in the car immediately said, "You were
definitely just racially profiled!" I'm lucky some
white people I knew were there; otherwise, God only knows what
could have happened to me -- all by myself in the middle of the
night! But, especially with my lawyer friends, those cops don't
intimidate/scare me: I just want them to do what they gotta do
-- write a ticket (that I can get dismissed anyway) or whatever
-- and get the fuck outta my face.
"But, the assumption at
the workshops seemed to be that the presence of any anti-Semitism
automatically equals anti-Jewish OPPRESSION -- in America!!
When it was my turn to speak, I said that traditional American
minorities of color face EVERYTHING -- ALL THAT
casual prejudice -- which was queried by the presenter-moderator
[in all that very broad, casual criteria that anyone might
experience for any reason -- external and internalized],
PLUS MUCH, MUCH MORE-- at the hands of society's INSTITUTIONS
or the STATE!
I then said that these
would be my questions:
"If the police have stopped
you for 'driving while Jewish', then raise your hand."
"If you have been in prison
or have relatives in prison because you're Jewish, then raise
your hand."
"If you have been manhandled,
roughed up, or beaten by a cop, because you are Jewish, then
raise your hand."
"If you fired from a job
because you are Jewish, then raise your hand."
"If your house was busted
into by the cops because you are Jewish, then raise your hand."
"If you had a non-Jewish
white guy pull a gun on you in your own residential, predominantly
white [university] neighborhood, demanding to know what you were
doing there, and trying to mockingly talk to you in Yiddish slang
-- and when you reported it to the cops they did nothing about
it -- because you are Jewish, then raise your hand."
"If you were denied a
business or investment loan or insurance because you are Jewish,
then raise your hand."
I would have added, "If
you were denied a house/apartment because you are Jewish, then
raise your hand," but I didn't want someone trying to evade
my point by talking about the 1920's or something.
I did mention it, but could
have posed it as a question, "If you were pretextually stopped
by a cop and detained for about 40 minutes, while he checked
you out, for 'parking while Jewish' on a quiet residential
street last night while you were dropping off passengers from
this conference, then raise both your hands."
But, I want to end on a positive
note (not because I believe in namby-pamby, superficial "happy
endings"), but because there were at least some very POSITIVE
things about the conference:
I especially enjoyed my conversations
there with, generally but not only, younger, enthusiastic, morally-conscious,
energetic, anti-Zionist Jews (unlike UC Berkeley IAC/AIPAC/Hillel
Jewish students) that -- raised in, in principle, egalitarian
democracies, NOT religioethnically-defined states -- weren't
up for all that political/nationalist, ethno-chauvinistic Zionism
shit!
And those younger anti-Zionist
Jews catch hell and political pressure from older, reactionary
Zionist Jews too, at least behind the scenes. I told them that
they should be like The White Rose Society during the Nazi era:
morally-driven, energetic younger non-Jewish Germans who opposed
the state-institutionalized persecution and attacks against Jews.
I told a couple of them, "You remind me of the spirit of
The White Rose Society!" -- who put their lives on the line
for German Jews -- and, sadly, sometimes paid for that with their
lives.
Those energetic younger anti-Zionist
Jews with whom I conversed -- like me, my Palestinian friend,
and my non-European Jewish acquaintance -- indeed fervently wanted
a Palestine (which Israel is IN[!!]; not, by the new Zionist
geographical propaganda, apart from) as a multicultural society,
where EVERYONE has ABSOLUTELY equal rights (with
no tricks in the small print) without regard to ethnicity, race
or religion.
Only then would Palestine-Israel
be "a light unto the world".
Weekend
Edition Features for August 7 / 8, 2004
James Petras
The
Anatomy of "Terror Experts": Meet the Mandarins of
Abu Ghraib
Fred Gardner
Run
Ricky Run: Football, Pot and Pain
Justin Delacour
Anti-Chavez Pollsters Panic: Fix Numbers; Reinvent Venezuela
Brian Cloughley
Persecuted by All; Supported by None: Who Would Be A Kurd?
Joshua Frank
The
Outsider: a Talk with Ralph Nader
Iain A. Boal
On "Shame": Warmed-Over Orientalism and Racist Projection
Chris Floyd
All About Eve: Open Season on Women in DC and Rome
Andrew Fenton
Fighting for Democracy and Justice in Haiti
Aseem Shrivastava
Saga of an Anguished Afghan
Neil Corbett
See Cuba: Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Cigar, Mr. Bush
Carol Miller
/ Forrest Hill
Rigged Convention; Divided Party: How David Cobb Won with Only
12% of the Vote
Tarek Milleron
Breaking the Principled Voter
Donald Macintyre
The
Battle of Najaf
Ron Jacobs
Spirits of The Dead: Why I Love My Petty Bourgeois Tendencies
Mickey Z.
Kid
Gavilan's Grave: Propaganda Scores a TKO
Poets' Basement
Adler, Ford and Albert
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