Winning the Populism PR War

By Howell Raines

In times gone by, Democrats were regarded as the master panderers
of American presidential elections on the basis of their supposed belief
in generous benefits for the working class. But as Democrats gather in
Boston,they do so as a party that has surrendered the title. The Republicans
are now the champion panderers in American politics and have been since
they discovered the demagogic value of what Rupert Murdoch's Weekly Standard
disingenuously calls "cultural populism."

Populism, of course, emerged as a force in American politics in the
1890s as an economic doctrine pushed by agrarian reformers in the Deep South
and the Midwest. The economic populists from the agricultural regions
wanted to wrest control of the federal government from the investment bankers and
industrial capitalists in the Northeast.

Various reporters have written incisively this year about the
egalitarian roots of economic populism and mutant populism's darker legacy as a
vehicle for nativist prejudices. These discussions were occasioned in large
part by the impact on the Democratic primaries of John Edwards's message about
"two Americas" -- George W. Bush's country of tax breaks for the rich and
war contracts for Halliburton, and the poorer outback America that has lost
2 million to 3 million jobs under Bush, lacks health insurance, and has
buried nearly a thousand of its sons and daughters killed in Iraq. The
Republicans take comfort in the fact that the Midwestern and Southern states, which
invented populism in the 19th century, now make up the Reagan-Bush
heartland. But the GOP fears a resurgence of the class consciousness at
the core of economic populism.

What needs to be watched closely this week in Boston is how John Kerry
balances his two most potent attack themes -- national security in the
physical sense and economic insecurity in the second America. Many
variables surround the physical security issue: an "October surprise" could save
Bush,or another terrorist attack could sink him. What will not change,unless
Kerry forces the issue, is the shell game by which the GOP uses
"cultural populism" to get millions of Middle Americans to vote against their
financial, medical and educational interests.

How was cultural populism -- which had its roots in Barry Goldwater's
opposition to civil rights legislation and Richard Nixon's racially
divisive"Southern strategy" -- turned into a political positive in the public
relations sense? Rupert Murdoch's kept journalists at the Weekly
Standard deserve much of the credit. The journal attacks economic populism as
"condescending" and "patronizing," because it implies that the masses
require government protection from the military-industrial, investment
banking and petroleum complexes. But "social," or "cultural," populism
is praised as a genuine expression of national values. Thus acceptance of
the agenda of Bush social policy -- abortion, gay marriage, school prayer,
guns--is required, even by people who know better.

"Country-club Republicans have been forced to accept it. Country-club
Democrats can't," Fred Barnes, an editor at the Weekly Standard, wrote
this year. This must be the most blindingly honest admission by any
Republican pundit this year, for it exposes the contract at the heart of the new
Republican pandering. As long as affluent, educated Republicans are
allowed to control wealth in this country, they're willing for the rednecks to
pray in the public schools that rich Republicans don't attend, to buy guns
at Wal-Marts they don't patronize, to ban safe abortions that are always
available to the affluent, and to oppose marriage for gays who don't
vote Republican anyway.

As the retro-populist journalist Thomas Frank pointed out in his
useful book, "What's the Matter With Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of
America,"the Republicans have given U.S. workers a new cultural enemy to
replace their traditional class rival on Wall Street and in the big
corporations: the amorphously dangerous "liberal elite."

It has been, so far, a successful strategy, but it is hardly new. By
1894 the national Populist Party had become the most powerful reform
movement of the Gilded Age and one of the most promising in U.S. history in terms
of opening economic opportunity to the country's entire population. The
national Democrats figured out that they could kill the new movement by
the simple expedient of moving slightly to the left on farm credit and
national monetary policy. More important, they broke the Populists in their
Southern strongholds by unleashing "social, or cultural, populism," if you will,
in the form of the race issue. That is, the Democrats quickly produced a
generation of demagogic governors and senators, who warned that the
Populists' doctrine of economic equality for black and white voters
would lead to social integration and eventual black domination of the South.

By 1896 the racial assault had removed the populists as a national
political force. By 1910 the national Democratic Party had
institutionalized its Solid South through a series of laws that disenfranchised black voters and mandated racial segregation. Control of state governments and
public policy in the South passed into the hands of plantation owners and
their new allies in the executive suites of the coal, steel, textile and paper
industries being established from the Carolinas to Louisiana.

But despite its political demise, economic populism has been a lively
ghost. It provided a paradigm for the economic class struggle that
dominated politics throughout the 20th century. Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal,
with its opposition to "economic royalists" and "malefactors of great
wealth,"was its lineal descendant. And it has created some odd-couple
alliances. On the surface, the academic liberals and unionized industrial workers who
supported the New Deal and later iterations of economic populism had
little in common. But they did share an economic ideology and a generally, if
imperfectly, egalitarian social ethic.

The Republicans' new cultural populism has created an odd couple of a
different sort. In their heart of hearts, the party's leadership in
Washington and the conservative think tanks disdain the social rigidity
and common tastes of the party's NASCAR wing. They worry a bit that George
W.Bush seems to have a genuine liking for the slumming required of a
self-created cultural populist. But GOP strategists and think-tankers
are able to stifle these concerns, because there's been no one since Ronald
Reagan so good at getting votes from Southern Baptists trying to raise
families on 40 grand a year.

Liberal intellectuals, journalists and candidates have been trying to
explain the class interests inherent in the tale of America's true and
aberrant populism for a long time now. It's a hard job made harder
these days by the Republicans' success in convincing the political press that
a rational appeal to voters' economic self-interest amounts to what the
Republicans, and Democratic cooperationists such as Sen. Joe Lieberman,
mislabel as "class warfare." In Bush's America, it seems only the rich
are allowed to invoke self-interest as a valid voting motivation.

The Democrats seem skittish about invoking personal income and tax
issues.David Kushnet, a former speechwriter in the Carter White House, has
written that U.S. voters do not resent wealth per se or corporate control of
public policy as much as would seem logical. "But," he observes, "they rebel
against wealth by gaming the system."

That should provide an opening for Kerry and his running mate. The
system has never been more thoroughly gamed than by Bush and his minders. For
that matter, the class warfare has not been so intense in the United States
since the days of the robber barons. But so far only one class is fighting,
and the ever-widening income gap in America shows who has been winning. At
the Democratic convention, there'll be a lot to watch for by way of a
predictor of the November election. One I'll have my eye on is whether
Kerry-Edwards seem to have a plan for freeing the political prisoners of George W.
Bush's brand of cultural populism.

The writer is former executive editor of the New York Times

Zionism as a Racist Ideology...Reviving an Old Theme to Prevent Palestinian Ethnicide

By KATHLEEN and BILL CHRISTISON

During a presentation on the Palestinian-Israeli situation in 2001, an American-Israeli acquaintance of ours began with a typical attack on the Palestinians. Taking the overused line that "Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity," he asserted snidely that, if only the Palestinians had had any decency and not been so all-fired interested in pushing the Jews into the sea in 1948, they would have accepted the UN partition of Palestine. Those Palestinians who became refugees would instead have remained peacefully in their homes, and the state of Palestine could in the year 2001 be celebrating the 53rd anniversary of its independence. Everything could have been sweetness and light, he contended, but here the Palestinians were, then a year into a deadly intifada, still stateless, still hostile, and still trying, he claimed, to push the Jews into the sea.

It was a common line but with a new and intriguing twist: what if the Palestinians had accepted partition; would they in fact have lived in a state at peace since 1948? It was enough to make the audience stop and think. But later in the talk, the speaker tripped himself up by claiming, in a tone of deep alarm, that Palestinian insistence on the right of return for Palestinian refugees displaced when Israel was created would spell the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. He did not realize the inherent contradiction in his two assertions (until we later pointed it out to him, with no little glee). You cannot have it both ways, we told him: you cannot claim that, if Palestinians had not left the areas that became Israel in 1948, they would now be living peaceably, some inside and some alongside a Jewish-majority state, and then also claim that, if they returned now, Israel would lose its Jewish majority and its essential identity as a Jewish state.*

This exchange, and the massive propaganda effort by and on behalf of Israel to demonstrate the threat to Israel's Jewish character posed by the Palestinians' right of return, actually reveal the dirty little secret of Zionism. In its drive to establish and maintain a state in which Jews are always the majority, Zionism absolutely required that Palestinians, as non-Jews, be made to leave in 1948 and never be allowed to return. The dirty little secret is that this is blatant racism.

But didn't we finish with that old Zionism-is-racism issue over a decade ago, when in 1991 the UN repealed a 1975 General Assembly resolution that defined Zionism as "a form of racism or racial discrimination"? Hadn't we Americans always rejected this resolution as odious anti-Semitism, and didn't we, under the aegis of the first Bush administration, finally prevail on the rest of the world community to agree that it was not only inaccurate but downright evil to label Zionism as racist? Why bring it up again, now?

The UN General Assembly based its 1975 anti-Zionist resolution on the UN's own definition of racial discrimination, adopted in 1965. According to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, racial discrimination is "any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life." As a definition of racism and racial discrimination, this statement is unassailable and, if one is honest about what Zionism is and what it signifies, the statement is an accurate definition of Zionism. But in 1975, in the political atmosphere prevailing at the time, putting forth such a definition was utterly self-defeating.

So would a formal resolution be in today's political atmosphere. But enough has changed over the last decade or more that talk about Zionism as a system that either is inherently racist or at least fosters racism is increasingly possible and increasingly necessary. Despite the vehement knee-jerk opposition to any such discussion throughout the United States, serious scholars elsewhere and serious Israelis have begun increasingly to examine Zionism critically, and there is much greater receptivity to the notion that no real peace will be forged in Palestine-Israel unless the bases of Zionism are examined and in some way altered. It is for this reason that honestly labeling Zionism as a racist political philosophy is so necessary: unless the world's, and particularly the United States', blind support for Israel as an exclusivist Jewish state is undermined, unless the blind acceptance of Zionism as a noble ideology is undermined, and unless it is recognized that Israel's drive to maintain dominion over the occupied Palestinian territories is motivated by an exclusivist, racist ideology, no one will ever gain the political strength or the political will necessary to force Israel to relinquish territory and permit establishment of a truly sovereign and independent Palestinian state in a part of Palestine.

Recognizing Zionism's Racism

A racist ideology need not always manifest itself as such, and, if the circumstances are right, it need not always actually practice racism to maintain itself. For decades after its creation, the circumstances were right for Israel. If one forgot, as most people did, the fact that 750,000 Palestinians (non-Jews) had left their homeland under duress, thus making room for a Jewish-majority state, everyone could accept Israel as a genuine democracy, even to a certain extent for that small minority of Palestinians who had remained after 1948. That minority was not large enough to threaten Israel's Jewish majority; it faced considerable discrimination, but because Israeli Arabs could vote, this discrimination was viewed not as institutional, state-mandated racism but as the kind of discrimination, deplorable but not institutionalized, faced by blacks in the United States. The occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, with their two million (soon to become more than three million) Palestinian inhabitants, was seen to be temporary, its end awaiting only the Arabs' readiness to accept Israel's existence.

In these "right" circumstances, the issue of racism rarely arose, and the UN's labeling of Israel's fundamental ideology as racist came across to Americans and most westerners as nasty and vindictive. Outside the third world, Israel had come to be regarded as the perpetual innocent, not aggressive, certainly not racist, and desirous of nothing more than a peace agreement that would allow it to mind its own business inside its original borders in a democratic state. By the time the Zionism-is-racism resolution was rescinded in 1991, even the PLO had officially recognized Israel's right to exist in peace inside its 1967 borders, with its Jewish majority uncontested. In fact, this very acceptance of Israel by its principal adversary played no small part in facilitating the U.S. effort to garner support for overturning the resolution. (The fact of U.S. global dominance in the wake of the first Gulf war and the collapse of the Soviet Union earlier in 1991, and the atmosphere of optimism about prospects for peace created by the Madrid peace conference in October also played a significant part in winning over a majority of the UN when the Zionism resolution was brought to a vote of the General Assembly in December.)

Realities are very different today, and a recognition of Zionism's racist bases, as well as an understanding of the racist policies being played out in the occupied territories are essential if there is to be any hope at all of achieving a peaceful, just, and stable resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The egg of Palestine has been permanently scrambled, and it is now increasingly the case that, as Zionism is recognized as the driving force in the occupied territories as well as inside Israel proper, pre-1967 Israel can no longer be considered in isolation. It can no longer be allowed simply to go its own way as a Jewish-majority state, a state in which the circumstances are "right" for ignoring Zionism's fundamental racism.

As Israel increasingly inserts itself into the occupied territories, and as Israeli settlers, Israeli settlements, and Israeli-only roads proliferate and a state infrastructure benefiting only Jews takes over more and more territory, it becomes no longer possible to ignore the racist underpinnings of the Zionist ideology that directs this enterprise. It is no longer possible today to wink at the permanence of Zionism's thrust beyond Israel's pre-1967 borders. It is now clear that Israel's control over the occupied territories is, and has all along been intended to be, a drive to assert exclusive Jewish control, taming the Palestinians into submission and squeezing them into ever smaller, more disconnected segments of land or, failing that, forcing them to leave Palestine altogether. It is totally obvious to anyone who spends time on the ground in Palestine-Israel that the animating force behind the policies of the present and all past Israeli governments in Israel and in the occupied West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem has always been a determination to assure the predominance of Jews over Palestinians. Such policies can only be described as racist, and we should stop trying any longer to avoid the word.

When you are on the ground in Palestine, you can see Zionism physically imprinted on the landscape. Not only can you see that there are settlements, built on land confiscated from Palestinians, where Palestinians may not live. Not only can you see roads in the occupied territories, again built on land taken from Palestinians, where Palestinians may not drive. Not only can you observe that water in the occupied territories is allocated, by Israeli governmental authorities, so inequitably that Israeli settlers are allocated five times the amount per capita as are Palestinians and, in periods of drought, Palestinians stand in line for drinking water while Israeli settlements enjoy lush gardens and swimming pools. Not only can you stand and watch as Israeli bulldozers flatten Palestinian olive groves and other agricultural land, destroy Palestinian wells, and demolish Palestinian homes to make way for the separation wall that Israel is constructing across the length and breadth of the West Bank. The wall fences off Palestinians from Israelis, supposedly to provide greater security for Israelis but in fact in order to cage Palestinians, to define a border for Israel that will exclude a maximum number of Palestinians.

But, if this is not enough to demonstrate the inherent racism of Israel's occupation, you can also drive through Palestinian towns and Palestinian neighborhoods in and near Jerusalem and see what is perhaps the most cruelly racist policy in Zionism's arsenal: house demolitions, the preeminent symbol of Zionism's drive to maintain Jewish predominance. Virtually every street has a house or houses reduced to rubble, one floor pancaked onto another or simply a pile of broken concrete bulldozed into an incoherent heap. Jeff Halper, founder and head of the non-governmental Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), an anthropologist and scholar of the occupation, has observed that Zionist and Israeli leaders going back 80 years have all conveyed what he calls "The Message" to Palestinians. The Message, Halper says, is "Submit. Only when you abandon your dreams for an independent state of your own, and accept that Palestine has become the Land of Israel, will we relent [i.e., stop attacking Palestinians]." The deeper meaning of The Message, as carried by the bulldozers so ubiquitous in targeted Palestinian neighborhoods today, is that "You [Palestinians] do not belong here. We uprooted you from your homes in 1948and now we will uproot you from all of the Land of Israel."

In the end, Halper says, the advance of Zionism has been a process of displacement, and house demolitions have been "at the center of the Israeli struggle against the Palestinians" since 1948. Halper enumerates a steady history of destruction: in the first six years of Israel's existence, it systematically razed 418 Palestinian villages inside Israel, fully 85 percent of the villages existing before 1948; since the occupation began in 1967, Israel has demolished 11,000 Palestinian homes. More homes are now being demolished in the path of Israel's "separation wall." It is estimated that more than 4,000 homes have been destroyed in the last two years alone.

The vast majority of these house demolitions, 95 percent, have nothing whatever to do with fighting terrorism, but are designed specifically to displace non-Jews and assure the advance of Zionism. In Jerusalem, from the beginning of the occupation of the eastern sector of the city in 1967, Israeli authorities have designed zoning plans specifically to prevent the growth of the Palestinian population. Maintaining the "Jewish character" of the city at the level existing in 1967 (71 percent Jewish, 29 percent Palestinian) required that Israel draw zoning boundaries to prevent Palestinian expansion beyond existing neighborhoods, expropriate Palestinian-owned lands, confiscate the Jerusalem residency permits of any Palestinian who cannot prove that Jerusalem is his "center of life," limit city services to Palestinian areas, limit development in Palestinian neighborhoods, refuse to issue residential building permits to Palestinians, and demolish Palestinian homes that are built without permits. None of these strictures is imposed on Jews. According to ICAHD, the housing shortage in Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem is approximately 25,000 units, and 2,000 demolition orders are pending.

Halper has written that the human suffering involved in the destruction of a family home is incalculable. A home "is one's symbolic center, the site of one's most intimate personal life and an expression of one's status. It is a refuge, it is the physical representation of the family,maintainingcontinuity on one's ancestral land." Land expropriation is "an attack on one's very being and identity." Zionist governments, past and present, have understood this well, although not with the compassion or empathy that Halper conveys, and this attack on the "very being and identity" of non-Jews has been precisely the animating force behind Zionism.

Zionism's racism has, of course, been fundamental to Israel itself since its establishment in 1948. The Israeli government pursues policies against its own Bedouin minority very similar to its actions in the occupied territories. The Bedouin population has been forcibly relocated and squeezed into small areas in the Negev, again with the intent of forcing an exodus, and half of the 140,000 Bedouin in the Negev live in villages that the Israeli government does not recognize and does not provide services for. Every Bedouin home in an unrecognized village is slated for demolition; all homes, and the very presence of Bedouin in them, are officially illegal.

The problem of the Bedouins' unrecognized villages is only the partial evidence of a racist policy that has prevailed since Israel's foundation. After Zionist/Israeli leaders assured that the non-Jews (i.e., the Palestinians) making up the majority of Palestine's population (a two-thirds majority at the time) departed the scene in 1948, Israeli governments institutionalized favoritism toward Jews by law. As a Zionist state, Israel has always identified itself as the state of the Jews: as a state not of its Jewish and Palestinian citizens, but of all Jews everywhere in the world. The institutions of state guarantee the rights of and provide benefits for Jews. The Law of Return gives automatic citizenship to Jews from anywhere in the world, but to no other people. Some 92 percent of the land of Israel is state land, held by the Jewish National Fund "in trust" for the Jewish people; Palestinians may not purchase this land, even though most of it was Palestinian land before 1948, and in most instances they may not even lease the land. Both the Jewish National Fund, which deals with land acquisition and development, and the Jewish Agency, which deals primarily with Jewish immigration and immigrant absorption, have existed since before the state's establishment and now perform their duties specifically for Jews under an official mandate from the Israeli government.

Creating Enemies

Although few dare to give the reality of house demolitions and state institutions favoring Jews the label of racism, the phenomenon this reality describes is unmistakably racist. There is no other term for a process by which one people can achieve the essence of its political philosophy only by suppressing another people, by which one people guarantees its perpetual numerical superiority and its overwhelming predominance over another people through a deliberate process of repression and dispossession of those people. From the beginning, Zionism has been based on the supremacy of the Jewish people, whether this predominance was to be exercised in a full-fledged state or in some other kind of political entity, and Zionism could never have survived or certainly thrived in Palestine without ridding that land of most of its native population. The early Zionists themselves knew this (as did the Palestinians), even if naïve Americans have never quite gotten it. Theodore Herzl, father of Zionism, talked from the beginning of "spiriting" the native Palestinians out and across the border; discussion of "transfer" was common among the Zionist leadership in Palestine in the 1930s; talk of transfer is common today.

There has been a logical progression to the development of Zionism, leading inevitably to general acceptance of the sense that, because Jewish needs are paramount, Jews themselves are paramount. Zionism grew out of the sense that Jews needed a refuge from persecution, which led in turn to the belief that the refuge could be truly secure only if Jews guaranteed their own safety, which meant that the refuge must be exclusively or at least overwhelmingly Jewish, which meant in turn that Jews and their demands were superior, taking precedence over any other interests within that refuge. The mindset that in U.S. public discourse tends to view the Palestinian-Israeli conflict from a perspective almost exclusively focused on Israel arises out of this progression of Zionist thinking. By the very nature of a mindset, virtually no one examines the assu

Zionism as a Racist Ideology...Reviving an Old Theme to Prevent Palestinian Ethnicide

By KATHLEEN and BILL CHRISTISON

During a presentation on the Palestinian-Israeli situation in 2001, an American-Israeli acquaintance of ours began with a typical attack on the Palestinians. Taking the overused line that "Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity," he asserted snidely that, if only the Palestinians had had any decency and not been so all-fired interested in pushing the Jews into the sea in 1948, they would have accepted the UN partition of Palestine. Those Palestinians who became refugees would instead have remained peacefully in their homes, and the state of Palestine could in the year 2001 be celebrating the 53rd anniversary of its independence. Everything could have been sweetness and light, he contended, but here the Palestinians were, then a year into a deadly intifada, still stateless, still hostile, and still trying, he claimed, to push the Jews into the sea.

It was a common line but with a new and intriguing twist: what if the Palestinians had accepted partition; would they in fact have lived in a state at peace since 1948? It was enough to make the audience stop and think. But later in the talk, the speaker tripped himself up by claiming, in a tone of deep alarm, that Palestinian insistence on the right of return for Palestinian refugees displaced when Israel was created would spell the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. He did not realize the inherent contradiction in his two assertions (until we later pointed it out to him, with no little glee). You cannot have it both ways, we told him: you cannot claim that, if Palestinians had not left the areas that became Israel in 1948, they would now be living peaceably, some inside and some alongside a Jewish-majority state, and then also claim that, if they returned now, Israel would lose its Jewish majority and its essential identity as a Jewish state.*

This exchange, and the massive propaganda effort by and on behalf of Israel to demonstrate the threat to Israel's Jewish character posed by the Palestinians' right of return, actually reveal the dirty little secret of Zionism. In its drive to establish and maintain a state in which Jews are always the majority, Zionism absolutely required that Palestinians, as non-Jews, be made to leave in 1948 and never be allowed to return. The dirty little secret is that this is blatant racism.

But didn't we finish with that old Zionism-is-racism issue over a decade ago, when in 1991 the UN repealed a 1975 General Assembly resolution that defined Zionism as "a form of racism or racial discrimination"? Hadn't we Americans always rejected this resolution as odious anti-Semitism, and didn't we, under the aegis of the first Bush administration, finally prevail on the rest of the world community to agree that it was not only inaccurate but downright evil to label Zionism as racist? Why bring it up again, now?

The UN General Assembly based its 1975 anti-Zionist resolution on the UN's own definition of racial discrimination, adopted in 1965. According to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, racial discrimination is "any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life." As a definition of racism and racial discrimination, this statement is unassailable and, if one is honest about what Zionism is and what it signifies, the statement is an accurate definition of Zionism. But in 1975, in the political atmosphere prevailing at the time, putting forth such a definition was utterly self-defeating.

So would a formal resolution be in today's political atmosphere. But enough has changed over the last decade or more that talk about Zionism as a system that either is inherently racist or at least fosters racism is increasingly possible and increasingly necessary. Despite the vehement knee-jerk opposition to any such discussion throughout the United States, serious scholars elsewhere and serious Israelis have begun increasingly to examine Zionism critically, and there is much greater receptivity to the notion that no real peace will be forged in Palestine-Israel unless the bases of Zionism are examined and in some way altered. It is for this reason that honestly labeling Zionism as a racist political philosophy is so necessary: unless the world's, and particularly the United States', blind support for Israel as an exclusivist Jewish state is undermined, unless the blind acceptance of Zionism as a noble ideology is undermined, and unless it is recognized that Israel's drive to maintain dominion over the occupied Palestinian territories is motivated by an exclusivist, racist ideology, no one will ever gain the political strength or the political will necessary to force Israel to relinquish territory and permit establishment of a truly sovereign and independent Palestinian state in a part of Palestine.

Recognizing Zionism's Racism

A racist ideology need not always manifest itself as such, and, if the circumstances are right, it need not always actually practice racism to maintain itself. For decades after its creation, the circumstances were right for Israel. If one forgot, as most people did, the fact that 750,000 Palestinians (non-Jews) had left their homeland under duress, thus making room for a Jewish-majority state, everyone could accept Israel as a genuine democracy, even to a certain extent for that small minority of Palestinians who had remained after 1948. That minority was not large enough to threaten Israel's Jewish majority; it faced considerable discrimination, but because Israeli Arabs could vote, this discrimination was viewed not as institutional, state-mandated racism but as the kind of discrimination, deplorable but not institutionalized, faced by blacks in the United States. The occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, with their two million (soon to become more than three million) Palestinian inhabitants, was seen to be temporary, its end awaiting only the Arabs' readiness to accept Israel's existence.

In these "right" circumstances, the issue of racism rarely arose, and the UN's labeling of Israel's fundamental ideology as racist came across to Americans and most westerners as nasty and vindictive. Outside the third world, Israel had come to be regarded as the perpetual innocent, not aggressive, certainly not racist, and desirous of nothing more than a peace agreement that would allow it to mind its own business inside its original borders in a democratic state. By the time the Zionism-is-racism resolution was rescinded in 1991, even the PLO had officially recognized Israel's right to exist in peace inside its 1967 borders, with its Jewish majority uncontested. In fact, this very acceptance of Israel by its principal adversary played no small part in facilitating the U.S. effort to garner support for overturning the resolution. (The fact of U.S. global dominance in the wake of the first Gulf war and the collapse of the Soviet Union earlier in 1991, and the atmosphere of optimism about prospects for peace created by the Madrid peace conference in October also played a significant part in winning over a majority of the UN when the Zionism resolution was brought to a vote of the General Assembly in December.)

Realities are very different today, and a recognition of Zionism's racist bases, as well as an understanding of the racist policies being played out in the occupied territories are essential if there is to be any hope at all of achieving a peaceful, just, and stable resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The egg of Palestine has been permanently scrambled, and it is now increasingly the case that, as Zionism is recognized as the driving force in the occupied territories as well as inside Israel proper, pre-1967 Israel can no longer be considered in isolation. It can no longer be allowed simply to go its own way as a Jewish-majority state, a state in which the circumstances are "right" for ignoring Zionism's fundamental racism.

As Israel increasingly inserts itself into the occupied territories, and as Israeli settlers, Israeli settlements, and Israeli-only roads proliferate and a state infrastructure benefiting only Jews takes over more and more territory, it becomes no longer possible to ignore the racist underpinnings of the Zionist ideology that directs this enterprise. It is no longer possible today to wink at the permanence of Zionism's thrust beyond Israel's pre-1967 borders. It is now clear that Israel's control over the occupied territories is, and has all along been intended to be, a drive to assert exclusive Jewish control, taming the Palestinians into submission and squeezing them into ever smaller, more disconnected segments of land or, failing that, forcing them to leave Palestine altogether. It is totally obvious to anyone who spends time on the ground in Palestine-Israel that the animating force behind the policies of the present and all past Israeli governments in Israel and in the occupied West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem has always been a determination to assure the predominance of Jews over Palestinians. Such policies can only be described as racist, and we should stop trying any longer to avoid the word.

When you are on the ground in Palestine, you can see Zionism physically imprinted on the landscape. Not only can you see that there are settlements, built on land confiscated from Palestinians, where Palestinians may not live. Not only can you see roads in the occupied territories, again built on land taken from Palestinians, where Palestinians may not drive. Not only can you observe that water in the occupied territories is allocated, by Israeli governmental authorities, so inequitably that Israeli settlers are allocated five times the amount per capita as are Palestinians and, in periods of drought, Palestinians stand in line for drinking water while Israeli settlements enjoy lush gardens and swimming pools. Not only can you stand and watch as Israeli bulldozers flatten Palestinian olive groves and other agricultural land, destroy Palestinian wells, and demolish Palestinian homes to make way for the separation wall that Israel is constructing across the length and breadth of the West Bank. The wall fences off Palestinians from Israelis, supposedly to provide greater security for Israelis but in fact in order to cage Palestinians, to define a border for Israel that will exclude a maximum number of Palestinians.

But, if this is not enough to demonstrate the inherent racism of Israel's occupation, you can also drive through Palestinian towns and Palestinian neighborhoods in and near Jerusalem and see what is perhaps the most cruelly racist policy in Zionism's arsenal: house demolitions, the preeminent symbol of Zionism's drive to maintain Jewish predominance. Virtually every street has a house or houses reduced to rubble, one floor pancaked onto another or simply a pile of broken concrete bulldozed into an incoherent heap. Jeff Halper, founder and head of the non-governmental Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), an anthropologist and scholar of the occupation, has observed that Zionist and Israeli leaders going back 80 years have all conveyed what he calls "The Message" to Palestinians. The Message, Halper says, is "Submit. Only when you abandon your dreams for an independent state of your own, and accept that Palestine has become the Land of Israel, will we relent [i.e., stop attacking Palestinians]." The deeper meaning of The Message, as carried by the bulldozers so ubiquitous in targeted Palestinian neighborhoods today, is that "You [Palestinians] do not belong here. We uprooted you from your homes in 1948and now we will uproot you from all of the Land of Israel."

In the end, Halper says, the advance of Zionism has been a process of displacement, and house demolitions have been "at the center of the Israeli struggle against the Palestinians" since 1948. Halper enumerates a steady history of destruction: in the first six years of Israel's existence, it systematically razed 418 Palestinian villages inside Israel, fully 85 percent of the villages existing before 1948; since the occupation began in 1967, Israel has demolished 11,000 Palestinian homes. More homes are now being demolished in the path of Israel's "separation wall." It is estimated that more than 4,000 homes have been destroyed in the last two years alone.

The vast majority of these house demolitions, 95 percent, have nothing whatever to do with fighting terrorism, but are designed specifically to displace non-Jews and assure the advance of Zionism. In Jerusalem, from the beginning of the occupation of the eastern sector of the city in 1967, Israeli authorities have designed zoning plans specifically to prevent the growth of the Palestinian population. Maintaining the "Jewish character" of the city at the level existing in 1967 (71 percent Jewish, 29 percent Palestinian) required that Israel draw zoning boundaries to prevent Palestinian expansion beyond existing neighborhoods, expropriate Palestinian-owned lands, confiscate the Jerusalem residency permits of any Palestinian who cannot prove that Jerusalem is his "center of life," limit city services to Palestinian areas, limit development in Palestinian neighborhoods, refuse to issue residential building permits to Palestinians, and demolish Palestinian homes that are built without permits. None of these strictures is imposed on Jews. According to ICAHD, the housing shortage in Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem is approximately 25,000 units, and 2,000 demolition orders are pending.

Halper has written that the human suffering involved in the destruction of a family home is incalculable. A home "is one's symbolic center, the site of one's most intimate personal life and an expression of one's status. It is a refuge, it is the physical representation of the family,maintainingcontinuity on one's ancestral land." Land expropriation is "an attack on one's very being and identity." Zionist governments, past and present, have understood this well, although not with the compassion or empathy that Halper conveys, and this attack on the "very being and identity" of non-Jews has been precisely the animating force behind Zionism.

Zionism's racism has, of course, been fundamental to Israel itself since its establishment in 1948. The Israeli government pursues policies against its own Bedouin minority very similar to its actions in the occupied territories. The Bedouin population has been forcibly relocated and squeezed into small areas in the Negev, again with the intent of forcing an exodus, and half of the 140,000 Bedouin in the Negev live in villages that the Israeli government does not recognize and does not provide services for. Every Bedouin home in an unrecognized village is slated for demolition; all homes, and the very presence of Bedouin in them, are officially illegal.

The problem of the Bedouins' unrecognized villages is only the partial evidence of a racist policy that has prevailed since Israel's foundation. After Zionist/Israeli leaders assured that the non-Jews (i.e., the Palestinians) making up the majority of Palestine's population (a two-thirds majority at the time) departed the scene in 1948, Israeli governments institutionalized favoritism toward Jews by law. As a Zionist state, Israel has always identified itself as the state of the Jews: as a state not of its Jewish and Palestinian citizens, but of all Jews everywhere in the world. The institutions of state guarantee the rights of and provide benefits for Jews. The Law of Return gives automatic citizenship to Jews from anywhere in the world, but to no other people. Some 92 percent of the land of Israel is state land, held by the Jewish National Fund "in trust" for the Jewish people; Palestinians may not purchase this land, even though most of it was Palestinian land before 1948, and in most instances they may not even lease the land. Both the Jewish National Fund, which deals with land acquisition and development, and the Jewish Agency, which deals primarily with Jewish immigration and immigrant absorption, have existed since before the state's establishment and now perform their duties specifically for Jews under an official mandate from the Israeli government.

Creating Enemies

Although few dare to give the reality of house demolitions and state institutions favoring Jews the label of racism, the phenomenon this reality describes is unmistakably racist. There is no other term for a process by which one people can achieve the essence of its political philosophy only by suppressing another people, by which one people guarantees its perpetual numerical superiority and its overwhelming predominance over another people through a deliberate process of repression and dispossession of those people. From the beginning, Zionism has been based on the supremacy of the Jewish people, whether this predominance was to be exercised in a full-fledged state or in some other kind of political entity, and Zionism could never have survived or certainly thrived in Palestine without ridding that land of most of its native population. The early Zionists themselves knew this (as did the Palestinians), even if naïve Americans have never quite gotten it. Theodore Herzl, father of Zionism, talked from the beginning of "spiriting" the native Palestinians out and across the border; discussion of "transfer" was common among the Zionist leadership in Palestine in the 1930s; talk of transfer is common today.

There has been a logical progression to the development of Zionism, leading inevitably to general acceptance of the sense that, because Jewish needs are paramount, Jews themselves are paramount. Zionism grew out of the sense that Jews needed a refuge from persecution, which led in turn to the belief that the refuge could be truly secure only if Jews guaranteed their own safety, which meant that the refuge must be exclusively or at least overwhelmingly Jewish, which meant in turn that Jews and their demands were superior, taking precedence over any other interests within that refuge. The mindset that in U.S. public discourse tends to view the Palestinian-Israeli conflict from a perspective almost exclusively focused on Israel arises out of this progression of Zionist thinking. By the very nature of a mindset, virtually no one examines the assumptions on which the Zionist mindset is based, and few recognize the racist base on which it rests.

Israeli governments through the decades have never been so innocent. Many officials in the current right-wing government are blatantly racist. Israel's outspoken education minister, Limor Livnat, spelled out the extreme right-wing defense of Zionism a year ago, when the government proposed to legalize the right of Jewish communities in Israel to exclude non-Jews. Livnat justified Israel's racism as a matter of Jewish self-preservation. "We're involved here," she said in a radio interview, "in a struggle for the existence of the State of Israel as the state of the Jews, as opposed tothose who want to force us to be a state of all its citizens." Israel is not "just another state like all the other states," she protested. "We are not just a state of all its citizens."

Livnat cautioned that Israel must be very watchful lest it find in another few years that the Galilee and the Negev, two areas inside Israel with large Arab populations, are "filled with Arab communities." To emphasize the point, she reiterated that Israel's "special purpose is our character as a Jewish state, our desire to preserve a Jewish community and Jewish majority hereso that it does not become a state of all its citizens." Livnat was speaking of Jewish self-preservation not in terms of saving the Jews or Israel from a territorial threat of military invasion by a marauding neighbor state, but in terms of preserving Jews from the mere existence of another people within spitting distance.

Most Zionists of a more moderate stripe might shudder at the explicitness of Livnat's message and deny that Zionism is really like this. But in fact this properly defines the racism that necessarily underlies Zionism. Most centrist and leftist Zionists deny the reality of Zionism's racism by trying to portray Zionism as a democratic system and manufacturing enemies in order to be able to sustain the inherent contradiction and hide or excuse the racism behind Zionism's drive for predominance.

Indeed, the most pernicious aspect of a political philosophy like Zionism that masquerades as democratic is that it requires an enemy in order to survive and, where an enemy does not already exist, it requires that one be created. In order to justify racist repression and dispossession, particularly in a system purporting to be democratic, those being repressed and displaced must be portrayed as murderous and predatory. And in order to keep its own population in line, to prevent a humane people from objecting to their own government's repressive policies, it requires that fear be instilled in the population: fear of "the other," fear of the terrorist, fear of the Jew-hater. The Jews of Israel must always be made to believe that they are the preyed-upon. This justifies having forced these enemies to leave, it justifies discriminating against those who remained, it justifies denying democratic rights to those who later came under Israel's control in the occupied territories.

Needing an enemy has meant that Zionism has from the beginning had to create myths about Palestinians, painting Palestinians and all Arabs as immutably hostile and intransigent. Thus the myth that in 1948 Palestinians left Palestine so that Arab armies could throw the Jews into the sea; thus the continuing myth that Palestinians remain determined to destroy Israel. Needing an enemy means that Zionism, as one veteran Israeli peace activist recently put it, has removed the Palestinians from history. Thus the myths that there is no such thing as a Palestinian, or that Palestinians all immigrated in modern times from other Arab countries, or that Jordan is Palestine and Palestinians should find their state there.

Needing an enemy means that Zionism has had to make its negotiating partner into a terrorist. It means that, for its own preservation, Zionism has had to devise a need to ignore its partner/enemy or expel him or assassinate him. It means that Zionism has had to reject any conciliatory effort by the Palestinians and portray them as "never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity" to make peace. This includes in particular rejecting that most conciliatory gesture, the PLO's decision in 1988 to recognize Israel's existence, relinquish Palestinian claims to the three-quarters of Palestine lying inside Israel's pre-1967 borders, and even recognize Israel's "right" to exist there.

Needing an enemy means, ultimately, that Zionism had to create the myth of the "generous offer" at the Camp David summit in July 2000. It was Zionist racism that painted the Palestinians as hopelessly intransigent for refusing Israel's supposedly generous offer, actually an impossible offer that would have maintained Zionism's hold on the occupied territories and left the Palestinians with a disconnected, indefensible, non-viable state. Then, when the intifada erupted (after Palestinian demonstrators threw stones at Israeli police and the police responded by shooting several demonstrators to death), it was Zionist racism speaking when Israel put out the line that it was under siege and in a battle for its very survival with Palestinians intent on destroying it. When a few months later the issue of Palestinian refugees and their "right of return" arose publicly, it was Zionist racism speaking when Israel and its defenders, ignoring the several ways in which Palestinian negotiators signaled their readiness to compromise this demand, propagated the view that this too was intended as a way to destroy Israel, by flooding it with non-Jews and destroying its Jewish character.


Continued

Depleted Uranium: America's Silent Weapon of Mass Destruction

Over the past months we have seen more and more stories and reports in the press on the reasons and reasoning of the United States and the United Kingdom for going into Iraq.

The evidence acquired and used to go against the United Nations and go into Iraq has been shown to be largely circumstantial - Weapons of Mass Destruction - 45 minutes etc. have all be shown to have been exaggerated or distorted in such a way to allow our elected leaders to take our countries to War.

If there was a court case, the evidence would be unacceptable, however we have elected leaders who have acted in a way that is unpatriotic against the constitution and against the principles of Law.

The two leaders are educated people. We know that Tony Blair is a qualified lawyer "Barrister" how could he accept the intelligence reports - in a court of law it would be laughed at!!

Elections will come up the vote must be

ABB

Anybody but Bush

Anybody but Blair

WHY?

by Sally Carless

American troops are coming home poisoned -- not by Saddam -- but by their own government's weapons of mass and indiscriminate destruction.

The first reports from soldiers returning from Iraq have come in, and they are testing positive for depleted uranium (DU) in their systems. And these are not just random soldiers many are police officers and fire fighters from New York who serve in the NY Army National Guard. These are the very symbols of what this war was supposedly about.

Depleted uranium is a component of toxic nuclear waste. As such, it is extremely cheap. It is also very effective -- the densest material available on the market, it can smash through tanks as if they were butter.

When DU weapons explode, a fine aerosol of radioactive dust (uranium oxide) is formed. This dust -- which remains radioactive for billions of years -- is small enough to be inhaled. Once inhaled, uranium oxides lodge in the body and emit radiation indefinitely. The U.S. military has used hundreds of tons of these weapons - not just in the Iraqi conflict, but also in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Serbia, and in the first Gulf War. This dust attaches itself to tanks, clothing and equipment, becomes absorbed in the soil, plants, and water, and is propelled around every time the wind blows.

DU powder does not discriminate; it gets into the lungs of Iraqi men, women, and children, as well as in the lungs of American service people.

The recently tested soldiers from New York were not even in combat - imagine the amounts of DU waiting to be found in those who were in the midst of fighting and deploying these weapons. Many of the troops currently in Iraq are suffering from "mysterious" symptoms.

Why is it that so many of the troops do not even know what depleted uranium is? Why were they told to camp in areas where DU weapons were used? Why weren't they told that the destroyed Iraqi tanks they pass on their patrols are highly radioactive?

The rates of birth defects and cancer in Iraq have skyrocketed since the first Gulf War. Thousands of veterans from that war have fallen ill with a range of symptoms that have come to be known as Gulf War Syndrome. Common complaints include chronic fatigue, multiple cancers, musculoskeletal pain, neurological damage, signs and symptoms involving skin (including skin rashes and unusual hair loss), sleep disturbances, menstrual disorders, gastrointestinal problems, abnormal weight loss, upper and lower respiratory problems, memory loss, and chemical sensitivities. Veterans'

children suffer increased rates of sickness as well.

Babies whose fathers served in the first Gulf War are 50 percent more likely to have physical abnormalities than those born to soldiers who were not sent to that region, according to a recent study funded by the UK's Ministry of Defense. The study cited increased risks of genital, urinary and renal abnormalities, deformed limbs, bones and muscles. The Gulf War Veterans Association reports that at least 300,000 Gulf War vets have developed incapacitating illnesses. This is the fallout from the supposedly "quick and easy" war that lasted only a few weeks.

While the U.S. military claims Gulf War Syndrome is a mystery, many vets -- and scientists -- believe that depleted uranium is one of the major causes of their ailments. It took the U.S. thirty years to admit that Agent Orange actually did harm our Vietnam vets, so perhaps the military believes it can put off admitting what is already known about DU for many years to come. In the meantime, service people are denied proper care.

Major Doug Rokke (Ret.) led the Pentagon's depleted uranium assessment team, which spent several months in the Persian Gulf in 1990-91 involved in DU cleanup, research, and follow-up medical care for U.S. personnel exposed to DU. Rokke has since become seriously ill, and many on his team have already died. He published his research in an Army pamphlet which, according to Rokke, was never distributed to NATO troops operating in the Balkans or to civilians living in areas bombarded by DU shells. Rokke's research concluded that anyone who comes in contact with DU must get medical attention, including those who fired the weapons, as well as anyone who has been near equipment or structures struck with DU shells.

In 1999 a United Nations subcommittee called for an initiative banning the use of DU worldwide. The initiative died in committee where it was blocked by the U.S. In 2003 the European Parliament called for a moratorium on the use of depleted uranium. Despite the fact that the U.S. Army acknowledges the hazards of DU in a training manual, the Pentagon continues to deny that DU is dangerous.

Saddam's WMDs were not found. But, America's DU weapons continue to contaminate our soldiers and are likely to contaminate the planet for billions of years to come. Our troops have not been informed of the danger they face from DU. The American corporate media remains silent. The politicians are looking the other way. These weapons are being used in our name; these are our tax dollars at work. Who is keeping watch here?

Sally Carless is the founder and director of Global Village School for Peace and Diversity Studies, an international K-12 distance-learning diploma program dedicated to teaching about peace and justice. She can be reached at sally@globalvillageschool.org.

Additional resources as well as

articles documenting the facts stated in this article can be found at www.globalvillageschool.org/resources.html

and

www.globalvillageschool.org/troops.html.
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Published on Tuesday, July 13, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

New book by senior US intelligence official slams Bush administration policy 'Imperial Hubris' joins long list of critiques

By Hussein Ibish

WASHINGTON: An anonymous author identified only as "a senior US intelligence official" has published a new book, "Imperial Hubris," blasting the Bush administration's Middle East policies. It joins a long list of other critiques of the administration's response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks against the US from former senior officials, including former counterterrorism chief Richard Clark and a formidable group of retired ambassadors and four-star generals.

These attacks have increasingly undermined the main thrust of US President George W. Bush's re-election strategy, the argument that Americans have been well-served by and should continue to rely on his approach to counterterrorism.

The book is extremely unusual in that it has been written by a senior and still serving intelligence officer, leading to accusations that it was produced at the behest of the beleaguered US intelligence services, or at least a faction within their leadership.

The author dismisses these charges as silly. "Imperial Hubris" is, by any measure, the strongest of these attacks, stating that because of administration policies, "the US remains Osama bin Laden's only indispensable ally."

The invasion of Iraq, it says, was "bin Laden's gift from America, one he has long and ardently desired, but never realistically expected," and "like our war on Mexico in 1846 - an avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked war against a foe who posed no immediate threat but whose defeat did offer economic advantages." The official's controversial analysis places bin Laden not at the margins, but rather at the center of political discourse in the Arab and Islamic worlds, and shows little regard for other political trends and tendencies.

"Bin Laden has exploited a political situation in the Muslim world that has been on auto-pilot for some 25 years, a total void of leadership" the intelligence official told The Daily Star. "Every! culture needs heroes and the leadership of the Islamic world has been nothing to write home about - who else is out there- this makes him a leader by default," said the author, who, breaking with almost all trends in American discourse, describes bin Laden as "a dangerous and worthy foe" rather than a madman or criminal.

"What we need to do i! s to undercut his ability to grow in influence, and to me his ability is defined by our policies," he said.

"Imperial Hubris" argues that these policies include support for Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, and alliances with corrupt and dictatorial Arab regimes "from Rabat to Riyadh." According to the senior intelligence official, "victory ... lies in a yet undetermined mix of stronger military actions and dramatic foreign policy change; neither will suffice alone."

He argues that without major Middle East policy changes, the US is left with no options other than "relentless, brutal and, yes, blood-soaked offensive military actions until we have annihilated the Islamists who would threaten us."

"I am not advocating this," the official explained to The Daily Star, "but we have left ourselves only one option because our policies are detested, and a great power needs to defend itself, but in the long run it is counterproductive to approach things in a strictly militarily way."

The author said: "We will have to attack when the opportunity presents itself and destroy completely what we attack - we should have destroyed as many of the Taleban foot soldiers as we could. Our opponents looked at the supposedly most powerful army in world history and said: 'Shit, we rode that out, we're still here, we can still attack them. These people are not serious abo! ut killing us, and probably won't be serious about protecting their allies in the long term.'"

"Some exemplary use of force by the US is necessary in the Middle East," he said.

He added that the US was being failed by its "feckless" military as well as its > political leadership. "I don't think we have generals any more, we have bureaucrats, they don't want to lose people, they don't want to hurt people, and it's a terrible situation. We should not waste troops on half-measures."

He cited the! aborted US siege of Fallujah in Iraq as a "dreadful loss" that reinforces in the minds of "a lot of our enemies in the Middle East that the United States does not succeed because we are afraid of casualties."

Asked about the rebuffing of efforts by Syria and Iran to establish anti-Al-Qaeda cooperation with the US, the official agreed these were "appalling missed opportunities," saying: "Better relations with Syria or Iran are impossible because of our Israel policies, it's just a nonstarter. These things need to be debated but, if you so much as mention them, you will be cast aside as an anti-Semite."

The senior official is deeply critical of the influence of Israel on US policies, writing that "surely there can be no other historical example of a far away, theocracy-in-all-but-name of only about 6 million people that ultimately controls the extent and even the occurrence of an important portion of the political discourse and national security debate in a country of 270-plus million people that prides itself on religious toleration, separation of church and state, and freedom of speech."

"Imperial Hubris" has generated considerable attention not just because of its provocative arguments, and t! he fact that it has been written by a still-serving senior intelligence official, but also because of the anonymity of its author.

On June 30, the ace freelance journalist Jason Vest published an article in the Boston Phoenix identifying him as Michael Scheuer, and arguing that the forced anonymity was an attempt to limit the impact of "Imperial Hubris." But on July 11, The Washington Post published excerpts from the book, claiming: "At this point, his name is about the only basic biographical detail (about the author) that hasn't become known."

The author said: "I would have preferred to use my name, and I dislike the idea that I am hiding behind anonymity, but I was asked not to by my employer, an! d I agreed."
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Published in the Daily Star(Beirut,Lebanon)on Saturday, July 17, 2004
URL:http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=2&article_id=6355#

Torturing Children

By William Rivers Pitt

The biggest story of the Iraq war is not about missing weapons of mass destruction, or about deep-cover CIA officers getting their covers blown by vengeful White House agents, or even about 896 dead American soldiers. These have been covered to one degree or another, and then summarily dismissed, by the American mainstream news media. The biggest story of the Iraq war has not enjoyed any coverage in America, though it has been exploding across the international news media for several weeks now.

The biggest story of the Iraq war is about the torture of Iraqi children

A German TV magazine called 'Report Mainz' recently aired accusations from the International Red Cross, to the effect that over 100 children are imprisoned in U.S.- controlled detention centers, including Abu Ghraib. "Between January and May of this year, we've registered 107 children, during 19 visits in 6 different detention locations," said Red Cross representative Florian Westphal in the report.

The report also outlined eyewitness testimony of the abuse of these children. Staff Sergeant Samuel Provance, who was stationed at Abu Ghraib, said that interrogating officers had gotten their hands on a 15 or 16 year old girl. Military police only stopped the interrogation when the girl was half undressed. A separate incident described a 16 year old being soaked with water, driven through the cold, smeared with mud, and then presented before his weeping father, who was also a prisoner.

Seymour Hersh, the New Yorker reporter who first broke the story of torture at Abu Ghraib, recently spoke at an ACLU convention. He has seen the pictures and the videotapes the American media has not yet shown. "The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling, and the worst part is the soundtrack, of the boys shrieking," said Hersh. "And this is your government at war."

Hersh described the prison scene as, "a series of massive crimes, criminal activity by the president and the vice president, by this administration anyway," and that there has been, "a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there, and higher."

Reports of abuses at Abu Ghraib and other American prisons have been public knowledge since the release of the Taguba Report. Recently, however, some 106 annexes to the report, previously classified, have also been released. U.S. News and World Report detailed the sum of what is contained in these annexes in an article titled 'Hell on Earth.'

In it, U.S. News says, "The abuses took place, the files show, in a chaotic and dangerous environment made even more so by the constant pressure from Washington to squeeze intelligence from detainees. Riots, prisoner escapes, shootings, corrupt Iraqi guards, unsanitary conditions, rampant sexual misbehavior, bug-infested food, prisoner beatings and humiliations, and almost-daily mortar shellings from Iraqi insurgents--according to the annex to General Taguba's report, that pretty much sums up life at Abu Ghraib." According to coalition intelligence officers cited in a Red Cross report from last May, between 70% to 90% of Iraqi detainees held in these prisons were arrested "by mistake." That means they were innocent.

The orders to treat prisoners in this fashion were not manufactured by the few "bad apples" we have heard about, but came from up on high. Brig. Gen Janis Karpinski, former commander of Abu Ghraib and now scapegoat for the abuses, says the truth about where the orders came from would be revealed in the trials of the accused soldiers. Memos ordering the abuse of prisoners were signed off on by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. The Justice Department and Mr. Bush's senior legal advisor went out of their way to craft arguments justifying this, claiming that torture isn't really torture and that the President is basically above the law.

Mr. Hersh will revisit this issue within the next several weeks. In the meantime, the American news media has an obligation to report on this situation. Photographic and videotape evidence of this torture is currently in the hands of the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the U.S. Congress and the White House. It must be released.

We invaded a country based upon the false claim that Iraq was allied with al Qaeda. We invaded a country based on the false claim that there were weapons of mass destruction which needed to be destroyed. We promised freedom and democracy, and instead installed a CIA-trained strongman named Allawi who has all but created a dictatorship in Iraq, and who has been accused of killing Iraqi prisoners by his own hand. 896 American soldiers have died so we could do this.

We took thousands of innocent civilians off the streets in Iraq and threw them into hellhole prisons, where they were beaten, raped, and killed. This story has faded from public view because no new pictures of the abuses have come out in the last several weeks. Those pictures are out there, and they show the rape and torture of children. The international media is reporting on it. Coalition ally Norway may be preparing to flee Iraq because of the allegations regarding these children.

Where is the American news media? Where are the pictures? Who is responsible for this abomination? Torturing children in the name of freedom? Is this what we have become?
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http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/072004A.shtml

Abu Ghraib: Hidden Costs and Consequences

By David D. Haines,PhD

George W. Bush is presently doing his best to convince whomever will listen, that he is disgusted at the antics of the U.S. Military Police garrison of Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, who apparently have been acting out sexual fantasies on Iraqi prisoners under their guard.

In keeping with time-honored tradition, the incident has been painted as “isolated” and in no way representative of the high standards to which our public servants are accustomed to following. Inevitably, the usual suspects will be rounded up and designated as sacrificial lambs to show the world that such behavior will not be tolerated and its perpetrators properly punished. In this case, the Army will likely make a pointed negative example of a few hapless enlisted personnel and perhaps an officer or two. This certainly will include the incredibly stupid soldiers who gleefully included themselves in pictures with naked Iraqis in various creative poses. It’s also a good bet that the rather pathetic one star General in command of the prison complex will get a pink slip and told not to bother planning for a military pension. Closure of the issue will presumably be attempted through activation of plausible deniability safeguards always in place, which in the present situation will shield the upper ranks from any suggestion that the behavior at Abu Ghraib was known or tolerated.

In fact, careful observation of the interaction between guards and prisoners as shown in the photos, clearly demonstrates that this kind of treatment was at very least tolerated by the chain of command at Abu Ghraib – and probably represents an unofficial, albeit extra-legal policy accepted by CENTCOM, but never intended for public scrutiny.

My experience in 15 years of military service is that troops who willfully violate a fundamental command directive are wisely reluctant to be photographed doing it. Which is why the substantial photo gallery documenting the actions of the MP garrison says so much about where the incentive and license for such behavior came from. These are not furtive, blurred shots taken by folks who knew they were doing a bad thing. They were exuberant life stills that reflected a great deal of enthusiasm for the work at hand. The troops who appear in the pictures are obviously not the sharpest tools in the shed, but stupidity alone doesn’t account for the egregious quality of the album. The events at Abu Ghraib reveal a “situational ethic” by the prison staff, in which a basic tenet of military operations – humane and respectful treatment of prisoners, has been deferred in favor of a policy more conducive to extraction of useful information.

I personally encountered evidence of such activities while serving as Support Command’s liaison officer to U.S. Army 7th Corps in demobilization activities following the First Gulf War. Incidental to this duty I met with members of MP units and heard descriptions of methodology routinely employed to extract information from persons of interest among the thousands of Iraqi POWs in our detention centers. Among these troops, there was a jocular acceptance of sexual humiliation as an approach to interrogation. One account in particular sticks in my mind: in this, an MP sergeant’s words were: “…. We’d get 2 guys naked at gunpoint and set them to playing with each other in front of their buddies - you better believe the others told us everything we asked after that. Nobody wanted to be part of that show”. The prevailing rationalization was that the detainees were not physically harmed but were nonetheless induced to provide a great deal of useful information. In any case, this was mild stuff compared to what prisoners had been subjected to under Saddam.

Undoubtedly, a similar mindset was a contributor to the field-expedient policies in force at Abu Ghraib and made it easy for the U.S. staff to casually override the basic principles of dignity, which are stressed during basic military training. The lethal error in this logic is that the Army officers who condoned and undoubtedly encouraged these acts, failed to fully factor in the cultural context under which they were done. Most US personnel assigned to duty in the Gulf are sharply cognizant of the fact that sexuality is an extremely sensitive issue in their host countries and that behavior taken for granted in Western culture has no acceptable equivalent in Islamic society. However very few Americans have an accurate idea of the extent to which this is true, or the long-term consequences of sexual misconduct.

An Iraqi colleague of mine remarked that if the prisoners had been physically brutalized, or even mutilated, this certainly would have stoked further hatred of America in the region, but the public perception of the victims would be as honorable martyrs who died at the hands of unbelievers. By contrast, to be stacked alive and naked in front of a leering, half-witted American female, or in positions of homosexual copulation, has deprived the detainees of any sense of personal honor for the rest of their lives. If this behavior had not been revealed to the public, these men might have had some chance of returning to society at some point, with their experiences at Abu Ghraib unspoken. However as events stand now, any of them released from US custody will by default seek a last act of martyrdom to erase the social stigma they will inevitably carry. Their extended families too, will carry this stigma and can be counted on to become our implacable enemies. This will be added to the general fury provoked by images of these acts, now available for all to see. What is absolutely certain is that the events at Abu Ghraib will cost American lives, probably a lot of them.

The Bush White House, which already suffers a significant credibility gap, would do well not to subject itself to further ridicule by pretending that this incident was an aberration. Regrettably, public accountability is not the long suit of our present administration. The President’s remedy for the recent travesty was to send the chief of the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility, Major General Geoffrey Miller to Abu Ghraib as deputy manager for detention operations. General Miller is a highly efficient soldier with a long-standing record of error-free mission accomplishment. Certainly, he can be counted on to do a better job than his poor, disheveled predecessor.

However, this change of command also sends entirely the wrong message to the Islamic World. A hallmark of Miller’s tenure at Guantanamo was the hermetic seal on information, all of which was rigidly controlled by military censors and Public Affairs. This feature has become well known as a result of the often futile efforts of families to contact their loved ones – an experience widely covered by international the press. Thus, his appointment will be perceived as a move to prevent further unauthorized disclosure of activities inside the prison and it will be broadly assumed that the sexual torture condoned under General Janis Karpinski continues unabated.

None of this helps the U.S. position in Iraq. A much more honorable course of action would be to admit command culpability at the highest echelon and to take steps to make transparent and verifiable changes in the protocol for handling military detainees. A best-case solution would be to completely eliminate U.S. military jurisdiction over any persons apprehended in Iraq and turn over control of detention centers to entirely to the U.N. This solution – or something like it, would deprive CENTCOM of the ability to gather battlefield intelligence as effectively as is now possible. However in the long run, this disadvantage would be considerably offset by decreased tensions between US troops and Iraqis – although at this juncture, the situation may be too far gone to remedy.
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Dr. David Haines is a biomedical scientist and former military chemical warfare specialist,investigating war-linked disease among U.S. veterans, Kuwaitis and Iranians in cooperation with Janbazan Medical and Engineering Research Center (JMERC http://www.jmerc.ac.ir). He served as a U.S. Army officer during the 1991 Persian Gulf War

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