Bulletin N°279
Subject: ON THE WEAKENING MORAL FIBER IN THE
WEST.
22 December 2006
Grenoble, France
Dear Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
The Middle East
Crisis Committee at New Haven Connecticut reported recently that
"Europe and the US are doing their part, suspending aid programs to the
Palestine Authority. Pressure. Pressure. Dov Weinglass a key adviser to
Olmert made a joke about it :
The idea is to put the
Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger."
The Germans tried to use starvation
tactics to subdue the French nation into submission during the Second
World War. If this strategy works in Gaza, the world will not have seen
the end of it.
The long history of Israeli references to the Palestinian people as
“cancer”, “lice,” grasshoppers,” and many other designations of
subhuman character are increasingly combined with crimes of
violence against the untermenschen, not just
words. Dov Weinglass’s recent joke to reporters about starving
the people of Gaza we’re just putting them on “a diet” made
reporters laugh. Do the citizens of Europe and the United States really
want to have anything to do with a government like this? Henry
Kissinger instructed the power elite during the Vietnam war:
"It's not a matter of what is
true that counts but a matter of what is perceived to be true."
Is this the lesson learned from those years
of capitalist warfare?
It should be clear that our Center for the Study of American
Institutions and Social Movements (CEIMSA) has taken the
ethical position that all hate crimes are unacceptable :
killing Armenians in Turkey simply because they were Armenians, killing
Jews and Gipsies in Nazi Germany simply because of their ethnic
identities, killing Serbs in Bosnia, killing Tutsis in Rwanda,
killing Palestinians in Gaza --each of these crimes are examples of the
same pathology, nationalism turning into "ethnic
cleansing", and they are equally obscene. The perpetrators of these
murders and their indispensable collaborators must be held accountable
for their actions. During the Nuremberg war crime trials, the Tribunal
declared, in 1950, that :
"Individuals have
international duties which transcend the national obligations of
obedience…therefore [individual citizens]
have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace
and humanity from occurring."
The 8 items below address this
problem of deadly silence around U.S.-Israeli tyranny in Middle East, a
collaboration which portends ill for things to come, and for all of us.
Item A. is a talk by Noam Chomsky recorded on Democracy
Now! where he is speaking on the state of World crises, from
Bolivia to Baghdad.
Item B. is an article by Robert Fisk on the "Damage Done by
Denying the Holocaust".
Item C., from Edward Herman, is an article on the
immiseration business in Israel
Item D. is an article from Jamshed
Ghandhi on Tony Blair trip to the Middle East "to bring peace".
Item
E. by Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun Magazine, is a
"Palestinian Critique of the Holocaust Denial".
Item F. is an article by Edward Herman on the "limits of
democracy in the U.S.".
Item G. is a short video sent to us by Edward Herman, on "How
Isaelis Kill With Impunity"
And finally, item H. is American actor Sean Penn's call for impeachment
President Bush at the Institute for Public Accuracy
And finally, a last word from former African-American slave and
later abolitionist, Frederick Douglass :
"Find out just what people
will quietly submit to, and you have found out the exact measure of
injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them, and these will
continue till they are resisted with either words or blows. The limits
of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
Sincerely,
Francis McCollum Feeley
Professor of American Studies
Dircector of Research
Université Stendhal Grenoble 3
http://dimension.ucsd.edu/CEIMSA-IN-EXILE/
_______________________
A.
From DEMOCRACY NOW :
19 December 2006
Noam Chomsky spoke this weekend at an event
titled, "What's Next? Creating Another World in a Time of War, Empire
and Devastation."
Chomsky spoke about the Iraq Study Group report, recent elections in
Latin America, the current situation with Iran and much more.
_______________
B.
from Council for National Interest :
16 December 2006
Subject: No, Israelis are not Nazis. But it's time we talked of war
crimes
The Independent (UK)
We think this is a remarkable comment on the
Holocaust-denial conference just held in Iran.
Eugene Bird
Different narratives in the
Middle East
No, Israelis are not Nazis. But it's time we talked of war crimes
by Robert Fisk
Oh
how - when it comes to the realities of history - the Muslims of the
Middle East exhaust my patience. After years of explaining to Arab
friends that the Jewish Holocaust - the systematic, planned murder of
six million Jews by the Nazis, is an indisputable fact - I am still met
with a state of willing disbelief.
And now, this week, the preposterous President Mahmoud Ahmadinajad of
Iran opens up his own country to obloquy and shame by holding a
supposedly impartial "conference" on the Jewish Holocaust to repeat the
lies of the racists who, if they did not direct their hatred towards
Jews, would most assuredly turn venomously against those other Semites,
the Arabs of the Middle East.
How, I always ask, can you expect the West to understand and accept the
ethnic cleansing of 750,000 men, women and children from Palestine in
1948 when you will not try to comprehend the enormity done the Jews of
Europe? And, here, of course, is the wretched irony of the whole
affair. For what the Muslims of the Middle East should be doing is
pointing out to the world that they were not responsible for the Jewish
Holocaust, that, horrific and evil though it was, it is a shameful,
outrageous injustice that they, the Palestinians, should suffer for
something they had no part in and - even more disgusting - that they
should be treated as if they have. But, no, Ahmadinajad has neither the
brains nor the honesty to grasp this simple, vital equation.
True, the Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem shook hands with Hitler.
I met his only surviving wartime Palestinian comrade before he died and
it is perfectly true that the intemperate, devious Had al-Husseini made
some vile anti-Jewish wartime speeches in German, in one of which he
advised the Nazis to close Jewish refugee exit routes to Palestine and
deport Jews eastwards (why east, I wonder?) and helped to raise a
Muslim SS unit in Bosnia. I have copies of his speeches and his
photograph hangs in the Yad Vashem Museum. But the downtrodden,
crushed, occupied, slaughtered Palestinians of our time - of Sabra and
Chatila, of Jenin and Beit Yanoun - were not even alive in the Second
World War.
Yet it is to the eternal shame of Israel and its leaders that they
should pretend as if the Palestinians were participants in the Second
World War. When the Israeli army was advancing on Beirut in 1982, the
then Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, wrote a crazed letter to
US president, Ronald Reagan, explaining that he felt he was marching on
"Berlin" to liquidate "Hitler" (ie Yasser Arafat, who was busy
comparing his own guerrillas to the defenders of Stalingrad).
That courageous Israeli writer Uri Avneri wrote an open letter to
Begin. "Mr Prime Minister," he began, "Hitler is dead." But this did
not stop Ariel Sharon from trying the same trick in 1989. By talking to
the US State Department, Arafat was "like Hitler, who also wanted so
much to negotiate with the Allies in the second half of the Second
World War", Sharon told the Wall Street Journal. "... Arafat is the
same kind of enemy."
Needless to say, any comparison between the behaviour of German troops
in the Second World War and Israeli soldiers today (with their
constantly betrayed claim to "purity of arms") is denounced as
anti-Semitic. Generally, I believe that is the correct reaction.
Israelis are not committing mass rape, murder or installing gas
chambers for the Palestinians.
But the acts of Israeli troops are not always so easy to divorce from
such insane parallels. During the Sabra and Chatila massacres - when
Israel sent its enraged Lebanese Christian Phalangist militias into the
camps after telling them that Palestinians had killed their beloved
leader - up to 1,700 Palestinians were slaughtered. Israeli troops
watched - and did nothing.
The Israeli novelist A B Yehoshua observed that, even if his country's
soldiers had not known what was happening, "then this would be the same
lack of knowledge of the Germans who stood outside Buchenwald and
Treblinka and did not know what was happening".
After the killings of Jenin, an Israeli officer suggested to his men,
according to the Israeli press, that, with close quarter fighting, they
might study the tactics of Nazi troops in Warsaw in 1944.
And I have to say - indeed, it needs to be said - that, after the
countless Lebanese civilian refugees ruthlessly cut down on the roads
of Lebanon by the Israeli air force in 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996 and again
this summer, how can one avoid being reminded of the Luftwaffe attacks
on the equally helpless French refugees of 1940? Many thousands of
Lebanese have been killed in this way over the past 25 years.
And please spare me the nonsense about "human shields". What about the
marked ambulance of women and children rocketed by a low-flying Israeli
helicopter in 1996? Or the refugee convoy whose women and children were
torn to pieces by an equally low-flying Israeli air force helicopter as
they fled along the roads after being ordered to leave their homes by
the Israelis?
No, Israelis are not Nazis. But it's time we talked of war crimes
unless they stop these attacks on refugees. The Arabs are entitled to
talk the same way. They should. But they must stop lying about Jewish
history - and take a lesson, perhaps, from the Israeli historians who
tell the truth about the savagery which attended Israel's birth.
As for the West's reaction to Ahmadinajad's antics, Lord Blair of Kut
al-Amara was "shocked" into disbelief while Israeli Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert responded with more eloquent contempt. Strangely, no one
recalled that, the holocaust deniers of recent years - deniers of the
Turkish genocide of 1.5 million Armenian Christians in 1915, that is -
include Lord Blair, who originally tried to prevent Armenians from
participating in Britain's Holocaust Day and the then Israeli foreign
minister, Shimon Peres, who told Turks that their massacre of the
victims of the 20th century's first Holocaust did not constitute a
genocide.
I've no doubt Ahmadinajad - equally conscious of Iran's precious
relationship with Turkey - would gutlessly fail to honour the Armenian
Holocaust in Tehran. Who would have thought that the governments of
Britain, Israel and Iran had so much in common?
Oh how - when it comes to the realities of history - the Muslims of the
Middle East exhaust my patience. After years of explaining to Arab
friends that the Jewish Holocaust - the systematic, planned murder of
six million Jews by the Nazis, is an indisputable fact - I am still met
with a state of willing disbelief.
And now, this week, the preposterous President Mahmoud Ahmadinajad of
Iran opens up his own country to obloquy and shame by holding a
supposedly impartial "conference" on the Jewish Holocaust to repeat the
lies of the racists who, if they did not direct their hatred towards
Jews, would most assuredly turn venomously against those other Semites,
the Arabs of the Middle East.
How, I always ask, can you expect the West to understand and accept the
ethnic cleansing of 750,000 men, women and children from Palestine in
1948 when you will not try to comprehend the enormity done the Jews of
Europe? And, here, of course, is the wretched irony of the whole
affair. For what the Muslims of the Middle East should be doing is
pointing out to the world that they were not responsible for the Jewish
Holocaust, that, horrific and evil though it was, it is a shameful,
outrageous injustice that they, the Palestinians, should suffer for
something they had no part in and - even more disgusting - that they
should be treated as if they have. But, no, Ahmadinajad has neither the
brains nor the honesty to grasp this simple, vital equation.
True, the Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem shook hands with Hitler.
I met his only surviving wartime Palestinian comrade before he died and
it is perfectly true that the intemperate, devious Had al-Husseini made
some vile anti-Jewish wartime speeches in German, in one of which he
advised the Nazis to close Jewish refugee exit routes to Palestine and
deport Jews eastwards (why east, I wonder?) and helped to raise a
Muslim SS unit in Bosnia. I have copies of his speeches and his
photograph hangs in the Yad Vashem Museum. But the downtrodden,
crushed, occupied, slaughtered Palestinians of our time - of Sabra and
Chatila, of Jenin and Beit Yanoun - were not even alive in the Second
World War.
Yet it is to the eternal shame of Israel and its leaders that they
should pretend as if the Palestinians were participants in the Second
World War. When the Israeli army was advancing on Beirut in 1982, the
then Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, wrote a crazed letter to
US president, Ronald Reagan, explaining that he felt he was marching on
"Berlin" to liquidate "Hitler" (ie Yasser Arafat, who was busy
comparing his own guerrillas to the defenders of Stalingrad).
That courageous Israeli writer Uri Avneri wrote an open letter to
Begin. "Mr Prime Minister," he began, "Hitler is dead." But this did
not stop Ariel Sharon from trying the same trick in 1989. By talking to
the US State Department, Arafat was "like Hitler, who also wanted so
much to negotiate with the Allies in the second half of the Second
World War", Sharon told the Wall Street Journal. "... Arafat is the
same kind of enemy."
Needless to say, any comparison between the behaviour of German troops
in the Second World War and Israeli soldiers today (with their
constantly betrayed claim to "purity of arms") is denounced as
anti-Semitic. Generally, I believe that is the correct reaction.
Israelis are not committing mass rape, murder or installing gas
chambers for the Palestinians.
But the acts of Israeli troops are not always so easy to divorce from
such insane parallels. During the Sabra and Chatila massacres - when
Israel sent its enraged Lebanese Christian Phalangist militias into the
camps after telling them that Palestinians had killed their beloved
leader - up to 1,700 Palestinians were slaughtered. Israeli troops
watched - and did nothing.
The Israeli novelist A B Yehoshua observed that, even if his country's
soldiers had not known what was happening, "then this would be the same
lack of knowledge of the Germans who stood outside Buchenwald and
Treblinka and did not know what was happening".
After the killings of Jenin, an Israeli officer suggested to his men,
according to the Israeli press, that, with close quarter fighting, they
might study the tactics of Nazi troops in Warsaw in 1944.
And I have to say - indeed, it needs to be said - that, after the
countless Lebanese civilian refugees ruthlessly cut down on the roads
of Lebanon by the Israeli air force in 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996 and again
this summer, how can one avoid being reminded of the Luftwaffe attacks
on the equally helpless French refugees of 1940? Many thousands of
Lebanese have been killed in this way over the past 25 years.
And please spare me the nonsense about "human shields". What about the
marked ambulance of women and children rocketed by a low-flying Israeli
helicopter in 1996? Or the refugee convoy whose women and children were
torn to pieces by an equally low-flying Israeli air force helicopter as
they fled along the roads after being ordered to leave their homes by
the Israelis?
No, Israelis are not Nazis. But it's time we talked of war crimes
unless they stop these attacks on refugees. The Arabs are entitled to
talk the same way. They should. But they must stop lying about Jewish
history - and take a lesson, perhaps, from the Israeli historians who
tell the truth about the savagery which attended Israel's birth.
As for the West's reaction to Ahmadinajad's antics, Lord Blair of Kut
al-Amara was "shocked" into disbelief while Israeli Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert responded with more eloquent contempt. Strangely, no one
recalled that, the holocaust deniers of recent years - deniers of the
Turkish genocide of 1.5 million Armenian Christians in 1915, that is -
include Lord Blair, who originally tried to prevent Armenians from
participating in Britain's Holocaust Day and the then Israeli foreign
minister, Shimon Peres, who told Turks that their massacre of the
victims of the 20th century's first Holocaust did not constitute a
genocide.
I've no doubt Ahmadinajad - equally conscious of Iran's precious
relationship with Turkey - would gutlessly fail to honour the Armenian
Holocaust in Tehran. Who would have thought that the governments of
Britain, Israel and Iran had so much in common?
_______________________________________
Council for the National Interest Foundation
1250 4th Street SW, Suite WG-1
Washington, District of Columbia 20024
http://www.cnionline.org/
http://www.rescuemideastpolicy.com/
Phone: 202-863-2951
Fax: 202-863-2952
____________________
C.
from Edward Herman :
16 December 2006
Subject: chosen people in the immiseration business
Israel shut its last border
crossing with Egypt, keeping hundreds of thousands of Palestinians
stranded and penned like cattle, unable to move freely in and out of
their own land.
____________________
D.
From: Jamshed Ghandhi :
Sent: Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Subject: Blair as Angel of Peace
http://comment.independent.co.uk/
Bremer has it right: Blair going to the Middle
East to bring peace is like a mosquito trying to find a cure for
malaria.
________________
E.
From Michael Lerner :
Subject: Holocaust Denial--A Palestinian Militant Speaks Out
19 December 2006
http://www.tikkun.org
An important
message!
Dec. 18, 2006
Palestinian
Militant Critiques Holocaust Denial, Joining Many other Muslims who
also Critique the Iranian sponsored Holocaust Denial Conference
An important message!
The following
letter to the President of
Iran was written by a Palestinian militant who had spent 18 years in an
Israeli prison. It was sent weeks before the Holocaust-denying
conference that the Iranian president sponsored last week in Teheran,
and was printed in early December, before the conference, in Le Monde,
and only recently was translated into English.
I have only one thing to add about the morally disgusting and
intellectually bankrupt Holocaust-denying conference: it was an
unearned gift to the Bush Administration and its attempt to gather
support for a war against the "Axis of Evil" and for regime change in
Iran. The president of Iran has weakened those of us in the peace
movement who oppose any new US-initiated wars by giving to Cheney and
Bush evidence of the irrationality of the Iranian leadership and hence
greater credibility to the claim of right-wingers that Iran might use
nuclear weapons against Israel and the West even if that was
self-destructive, because these people are more interested in their
ideology than in their own survival. We reject the conclusion that war
is necessary, but it's hard not to feel a deep revulsion at the current
leadership of Iran. For those of us who critique the lies and
distortions that come from the Western media, it is particularly
important to also critique the lies and distortions that sometimes come
from the Arab, Muslim and Palestinian world--and this Holocaust denial
is the mother of all such lies and distortions. That's why it's
particularly significant that so many organizations of Islamic life are
joining in the condemnation of the Holocaust denial that was sponsored
by the Iranian government, and why I urge you to read carefully the
statement from a Palestinian militant below.
Please read the statement below by Mahoud Al-Safadi--it is one of many
from the Muslim world that is not given attention in the U.S. press or
Israeli press, since these statements critiquing the Iranian
leadershp's lies about the Holocaust would weaken the "dominant frame"
through which the media views the current stories about Muslims in the
world--namely that if they are militantlyi against western colonialism
then they are automatically irrrational and anti-Semitic. Part of our
task at Tikkun is to provide a more complex analysis of the world (and
that is only one of many reasons why we are asking you to subscribe or
make an end-of-the-year donation to Tikkun to support our work: checks
to 2342 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley, Ca. 94708 or donate on line with your
credit card at www.tikkun.org or www.spiritualprogressives.org or by
calling 510 644 1200).
Blessings for a Happy, merry and spiritually rich Chanukah, Christmas,
Hajj, Diwali, Kwanzaa, and New Year.
Michael
Rabbi Michael Lerner
Other Victims of Denial
by Mahmoud Al-Safadi
A Letter to the President of Iran
Mr.
President, I write to you following the announcement of your intention
to organize a conference on the Holocaust in Teheran on 11-12 December,
and I sincerely hope that this letter will be brought to your attention.
First of all, allow me to introduce myself: Mahmoud Al-Safadi, a former
prisoner from occupied Jerusalem. I was released less than three months
ago from the Israeli prison where I had been locked up for eighteen
years for having been a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation
of Palestine and having taken an active part in resistance to the
occupation during the first Intifada. Since you were elected president,
I have followed your declarations with great interest -- in particular
those relating to the Holocaust. I respect your opposition to the
American and Western injunctions concerning the Iranian nuclear program
and believe it legitimate that you complain of the double standard that
the world has with regard to the nuclear development of certain regimes.
But I am furious about your insistence on claiming that the Holocaust
never took place and about your doubts about the number of Jews who
were murdered in the extermination and concentration camps, organized
massacres, and gas chambers, consequently denying the universal
historical significance of the Nazi period.
Allow me to say, Mr. President, with all due respect to you, that you
made these statements without really knowing the Nazi industry of
death. To have read the works of some deniers seems to be enough for
you -- a little like a man who shouts above a well and hears only the
echo of his own voice. I believe that a man in your position should not
make such an enormous error, because it could be turned against him
and, worse still, his people.
Like you and millions of people in the world -- among whom, alas, are
innumerable Palestinians and Arabs -- I was also convinced that the
Jews exaggerated and lied about the Holocaust, etc., even apart from
the fact that the Zionist movement and Israel use the Holocaust to
justify their policy, first of all against my own people.
My long imprisonment provided me with the occasion to read books and
articles that our ideology and social norms made inaccessible to us
outside the prison. These documents gave me a thorough knowledge of the
history of the Nazi regime and genocide that it perpetrated. At the
beginning of the 1990s, by reading articles written by the Palestinian
intellectuals Edward Said and Azmi Bishara, I discovered facts and
positions which contradicted mine and those of many Palestinians. Their
writings having piqued my curiosity and given birth inside me to the
need to know more, I set about reading accounts of survivors of the
Holocaust and the Nazi occupation. These testimonies were written by
people of various nationalities, Jews or non-Jews.
The more I learned, the more I realized that the Holocaust was indeed a
historical fact and the more I became aware of the monumental dimension
of the crime committed by Nazi Germany against the Jews, other social
and national groups, and humanity in general. I discovered that Nazi
Germany aspired to found a "new world order" dominated by the "pure
Aryan race" thanks to the physical annihilation of "impure races" and
the enslavement of other nations. I discovered that various "normal"
official institutions -- bureaucracies, judicial systems, medical and
educational authorities, municipalities, railroad companies, and others
-- had taken part and collaborated in the implementation of this new
world order. From a theoretical point of view, this objective, just
like the victories won at the time by the Nazi armies of occupation,
threatened the existence of the Arabs and Muslims as well.
Whatever the number of victims -- Jewish and non-Jewish -- the crime is
monumental. Any attempt to deny it deprives the denier of his own
humanity and sends him immediately to the side of torturers. Whoever
denies the fact that this human disaster really took place should not
be astonished that others deny the sufferings and persecutions
inflicted on his own people by tyrannical leaders or foreign occupiers.
Ask yourself, I beg you, the following question: were hundreds of
thousands of testimonies written about death camps, gas chambers,
ghettos, and mass murders committed by the German army, tens of
thousands of works of research based on German documents, numerous
filmed sequences, some of which were shot by German soldiers -- were
all these masses of evidence completely fabricated?
Can all that be summed up simply as an imperialist-Zionist plot? Are
the confessions of high-ranking Nazis officials about their personal
role in the project of extermination of whole nations only the fruit of
the imagination of some disturbed spirit?
And all these heroic deeds of the people subjected to the German
occupation -- the first among whom were Russians, Polish, and Yugoslavs
-- only lies and gross exaggerations? Could the struggle of the Soviets
against Nazi Germany be only a phantasm? The Russians continue to
celebrate their victory over Nazi Germany and remember millions of
their civilian and military compatriots who lost their lives in this
struggle. Are they lying, too?
I invite you to read historical studies and serious testimonies before
making your public statements. You divide the world in two camps: the
imperialists-Zionists, who manufactured the myth of the Holocaust, and
the adversaries of imperialism, who know the truth and uncover the
plot. Perhaps you think that the act of denying the Holocaust places
you at the vanguard of the Muslim world and that this refusal
constitutes a useful tool in the combat against American imperialism
and Western hegemony. By doing so, you actually do great disservice to
popular struggles the world over.
At best, you cover your people and yourself with ridicule in the eyes
of political forces who reject imperialism but cannot take your ideas
and arguments seriously, due to the fact that you obsessively deny the
existence of an abundantly documented and studied historical period
whose consequences are still felt and discussed today.
At worst, you discourage and weaken the political, social, and
intellectual forces who, in Europe and in the United States, reject the
policy of confrontation and war carried out by George Bush, but are
forced to conclude that you, too, jeopardize the world by your
declarations denying the genocide and by your nuclear program.
Concerning the struggle of my people for their independence and their
freedom: perhaps do you regard the negation of the Holocaust as an
expression of support for the Palestinians? There, again, you are
mistaken. We fight for our existence and our rights and against the
historical injustice which was inflicted on us in 1948. We will not win
our victory and our independence by denying the genocide perpetrated
against the Jewish people, even though the forces who occupy our
country today and dispossess us are part of the Jewish people.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mahmoud Al-Safadi is a former Palestinian
militant, He was imprisoned in Israel for eighteen years and freed in
2006. The French text, a translation from English by Gilles Berton, was
published in Le Monde on 4 December 2006. The English original was
unavailable on the Net, so the English text on the right is a
translation from the French text published in Le Monde. English
translation by Yoshie Furuhashi.
Copyright
© 2005 Tikkun Magazine. Tikkun® is a registered trademark.
2342 Shattuck Avenue, #1200
Berkeley, CA 94704
510-644-1200 Fax 510-644-1255
email: community@tikkun.org
____________
F.
from Ed Herman :
20 December 2006
Subject:
Z Magazine
Democratic Betrayal: A Standard
Form
Edward S. Herman
It
has become absolutely standard practice for parties of the left, or
that at least claim to represent mass constituencies, to make populist
and peace-stressing promises and gestures that are betrayed
instantly on the assumption of power. Sometimes, as with Tony Blair in
1997, a close reading of the pre-election political statements would
make one aware that neither service to ordinary citizens nor peace are
likely to be high on the leader’s agenda. Also, a study of the
funding and economic and political connections of the
incoming leadership is often a giveaway as to likely political
direction. But occasionally the leaders seem genuinely surprised that
meeting their constituency’s demands will not be practicable, and that
the political costs will be more than they care to accept.
Bill Clinton affords a classic case of standard-form betrayal. He
was going to “put people first,” but very quickly abandoned even
his initial modest expansionist program, partly on competing
triangulation principles, partly upon his discovery that the bond
market disapproved, which led to his rapid adjustment to that
disapprovalhe acknowledged that “Roosevelt was trying to help
people. Here we help the bond market, and we hurt the people who voted
us in.” Clinton compromised his health care reform into
unworkability and failed to press for it very hard, and famously put
deficit reduction ahead of people or programs (see Robert Pollin,
Contours of Descent, chapter 2, “Clintonomics: The Hollow
Boom”). He spent much of his political capital getting passage of the
North American Free Trade Agreement, which his voting constituency was
strongly against, but which was favored by the business community and
major election funders. His Crime, Terrorism and Personal
Responsibility bills were strongly anti-people; there was a gigantic
leap in black imprisonment in the Clinton years. He kept the military
budget very high despite the death of the Soviet Union, precluding any
peace dividend, sponsored two nice wars in the Balkans, and was
responsible for the “sanctions of mass destruction” against Iraq which
cost possibly a million civilian lives. His triangulation was an
important reason for the Republican triumph in 1994, and his overall
policy thrust paved the way to the continuing Republican success
in 2000.
The Clinton experience suggests some painful questions about the
probable outcome of the recent Democratic election triumph. Some
liberal-left commentators are claiming that the swing to the right is
over and the left is now on the march (e.g., Paul Waldman, “A Big Step
in Nation’s March to Left,”
Baltimore Sun, Nov. 12, 2006). But
Clinton’s years of office turned out to be only a brief slowup in
the longer-term move to the right, and in some ways he accelerated the
move, as in his support of the Personal Responsibility Act of
1996 that ended federal responsibility for poor people. It has
been argued that it would have been hard for conservatives to get this
responsibility ended so quickly; it required “bipartisan” support,
provided by the leadership of a Democratic President. Most important,
by pushing for NAFTA and fiscal austerity, and failing to carry out any
program that actually served the mass constituency of the Democratic
Party, Clinton set the stage for a return of Republicans able to
implement an even more rightwing agenda.
The lesson was that unless the Democratic Party can actually come
through and meet the demands and needs of its mass constituency,
its triumph can be short-lived. There are ample grounds for thinking
that this problem is as acute now as it was 14 years ago, and that the
existing Democratic Party is likely to fall short of meeting
constituency demands. The Democratic Party has benefited from a
widespread disaffection and distrust of the Bush
administration--its wars, corruption, mismanagement and lies--with
votes falling into Democratic hands not because of what the
Democrats have done or even promised but simply because they are not
Bush and company. Bill Fletcher and others have called this
the “I am fed up” vote. Beyond this, if we examine what the Democratic
Party stands for, who leads it, who it represents, and what it is
likely to do, it is hard to be optimistic.
Frank Rich, John Nichols and others contest this, arguing that the
newly elected Democrats are almost across the board to the left of the
displaced Republicans. Rich acknowledges that “disengaging America from
that war is what the country voted for overwhelmingly on November 7,
and that’s what the Democrats almost uniformly promised to speed up,
whatever their vague, often inchoate notions about how to do it.”
(Rich, “It’s Not the Democrats Who Are Divided,”
New York Times,
Nov. 19, 2006). Nichols points out that the “Progressive Caucus”
of the Democrats in the House (about 64 but growing) is substantially
larger than the collections of “Blue Dogs” (perhaps 40) or “New
Democrats” (possibly 50), and that virtually all of the newly elected
Democrats were to the left of the displaced Republicans (Nichols, “The
Crowded Progressive Caucus,”
The Nation online, Nov. 12, 2006).
One difficulty with the Nichols argument is that the Progressive Caucus
is still a minority bloc, and on his own count it is smaller than the
Blue Dog
plus New Democrat total even within the Democratic
Party. The problem of the Democrats for years has been that with
substantial numbers of Blue Dogs and New Democrats ready to
abandon the progressive ship on the basis of non-progressive
principle, or at the drop of a lobbyist’s check, progressive actions
are easily stymied. Thus, in earlier years, under Carter and Clinton,
progressive legislation and actions were regularly blocked in congress
despite Democratic majorities
and Democratic presidents. There
have been no comparable dissident “liberal” blocs of Republican
legislators, so that George W. Bush has had an easy ride with
Republican legislative majorities.
With a splintered and not very well disciplined Democratic majority in
the House, a majority in the Senate with Bush ally Joseph Lieberman as
the balancing voter, and with George W. Bush still President and in
possession of a veto power, the possibilities for progressive
Democratic action are sharply limited. It is hoped that the Democrats
will at least launch some serious investigations of Bush
administration corruption, law violations, and mismanagement, but while
this may transpire there are questions about how many and how
aggressively and effectively they will function. The Democratic leaders
will have to work with the executive to get many things done, and they
have already indicated that they are keen to avoid “partisanship.” But
non-partisanship will discourage or compromise the needed
investigations and legal actions within congressional power.
Impeachment is ruled out in advance--“off the table” for both Nancy
Pelosi and John Conyers, although Conyers himself sponsored an
impeachment hearing for Bush in the basement of the Capitol building on
June 19, 2005, and although in terms of impeachable behavior
“Bush is the most impeachable president in American history” (Paul
Craig Roberts). Furthermore, experts like Elizabeth Holtzman, Dave
Lindorff and Barbara Olshansky, and Elizabeth de la Vega contend that
impeachment for impeachable offenses is legally obligatory on
Pelosi and company. (For former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la
Vega’s very plausible hypothetical indictment of George W. Bush, see
"Tomgram: United States v. George W. Bush et al.,"
Working for
Change.com, Dec. 1, 2006.) The Democrats seem graciously willing
and even eager to forget that the Bush administration’s effectiveness
was based on partisanship without limit, and that in the Clinton years
the Republicans were prepared to sabotage government functions in order
to weaken and discredit Clinton.
One reason beyond their disunity that causes the Democrats to fight so
weakly is their treatment by the media. We now have a very powerful
rightwing media that runs interference for the Republican Party in a
hugely unfair and unbalanced way, which has cowed the “liberal media,”
causing them to work hard to disprove their alleged liberal bias by
assailing the Democrats and showing their patriotic ardor. Thus the
liberal media cooperated fully in the campaigns of denigration that
sought Clinton’s impeachment for a lie without political significance,
but none of them have called for Bush’s impeachment for serial lies of
huge political importance. This contrast in itself is strong evidence
of severe institutionalized media bias.
The media have also regularly peddled and failed to confront the charge
that the Democrats are weak on “national security,” and Democratic
deficits and spending have aroused them much more than Republican
“borrow and spend” excesses. The Democrats are under constant pressure
to counter their alleged spending excesses and “national security”
caution, whereas the Republicans have been able to get away with larger
and more corruption-ridden spending excesses and foreign policy actions
that have been immensely costly while actually diminishing national
security.
Nichols, FAIR, and others have pointed out how quickly the mainstream
media have rushed to claim that the new Democratic legislators are
conservatives and not likely to rock the political boat toward populism
and cutting-and-running, and the media have also been very sensitive to
aggressive Democratic statements that show “partisanship.” As Molly
Ivins says, “So after 12 years of tolerating lying, cheating and
corruption, the press is prepared to lecture Democrats on how to behave
with bipartisan manners.” However, one thing the media (and John
Nichols as well) fail to point out is that if many of the newly
elected Democrats are pretty conservative, and I believe they
are--several dozen of them were carefully selected by New Democrat (and
former Israeli warrior) Illinois congressman Rahm Emanuel, chairman of
the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee--they will not be truly
representing the constituency that put them into office, a constituency
once again likely to be denied a really progressive option. The
Democratic Party is capitalizing on a rejection of Bush and
policies that Blue Dogs and New Democrats have tended to support, and
their success in keeping out real progressives will help prevent any
major attacks on Bush, his constitution-busting, his foreign policies,
and neoliberalism.
These political constraints on the Democrats flow in large measure from
the fact that the Republicans serve the business community more
undeviatingly than the Democrats, are more trusted by business, and
therefore get more financial support from them and, as noted, kinder
treatment by the corporate media. The Democrats have to struggle harder
to prove their business-supportive credentials, including their support
for “defense” and “national security.” This, and the related media
bias, weakens the Democrats’ capacity for service in the general public
interest and even for rational behavior. As regards Iraq, the Democrats
are now ham-strung by the threat of political costs in failure to
“support our boys” or responsibility for “losing.” Extrication has
political risks in both Iraq and the United States, and the Democrats
don’t like risk-taking, especially in a media environment in which a
Democratic war hero can be trashed while Republican war evaders (“I had
other priorities”) and deserters can be essentially free of
criticism.
So the widespread public call for extrication will not see the
Democrats calling for speedy withdrawal or even a definite time-table
for withdrawal. Pelosi’s attempt to get John Murtha appointed House
speaker, if successful, would have placed in a strong power position
one of the few Democrats committed to an early and rapid withdrawal.
His rejection was a defeat for the possibility of a
Bush-contesting Iraq stance on the part of the Democrats. (The winner
of that struggle, Rep. Steny Hoyer, ranks number one in Public
Citizen’s ratings of representatives “most dependent on special
interest money to finance campaigns.” Admittedly, Murtha also ranks
high in receipt of special interest money.)
And the Democrats are not likely to use their theoretical control
over the military budget to force a rapid withdrawal. Some of them even
favor an escalation in one more “last push” to establish military
control and “stability,” using this as an alleged response for the
demand for change. One of Harry Reid’s earliest post-election
statements was a promise to boost the military budget by $75 billion
“to try to get the Army’s diminished units back into combat shape.”
(Jonathan Weisman,“Reid Pledges To Press Bush On Iraq Policy, “
Washington
Post, Nov. 15, 2006.) The Pentagon is reportedly preparing a larger
emergency budget request of $127-150 billion that will supposedly
put the military establishment into conflict with the Democrats and
test the Democrats ability to rein in military spending. (See Julian
Barnes and Peter Spiegel, “Controversy Over Pentagon's War-Spending
Plans,”
Los Angeles Times, Nov. 29, 2006). On the other hand,
it may be a deliberately inflated request designed to give the
Democrats room to make cuts without impinging on Pentagon plans, a
tactic used often in the past.
Another major constraint on the Democrats is their close ties to the
pro-Israel lobby and financial dependence on lobby-related campaign
contributions, the latter compensating in part for the business
community’s pro-Republican bias. We are talking about 40 percent or
more of the Democrats campaign budget, large enough, especially
when combined with the aggressiveness of the lobby, to make any
systematic criticism of Israeli policy, no matter how egregious,
out of the question. Hillary Clinton and Pelosi have been notorious for
Israel-protective apologetics, and the new chairman of the House
Committee on Foreign Affairs, Tom Lantos, is a virtual agent of
the Israeli state. This is likely to constrain Democratic policy not
only on doing anything about Israeli ethnic cleansing and
semi-genocidal attacks on Gaza, but also in making difficult any
constructive actions by the Democrats on Iran, Syria, Lebanon and
Iraq itself, where Lantos, Pelosi and company are likely to support or
at minimum fail to oppose Israel’s hardline and militaristic policies.
(See “AIPAC Eats New Congress Critters for Lunch,”
Signs of the
Times, Nov. 13, 2006. See also Pelosi’s frightening remarks before
AIPAC on May 24, 2005, with total apologetics for Israeli ethnic
cleansing and a strong indication of support for military action
against Iran: Mark Gaffney,“Nancy Pelosi Gives a Pep Talk to AIPAC,”
with a copy of her remarks included:
Common Dreams.org,
May 27, 2006).
In short, with the Democratic Party’s electoral triumph we may expect a
small increment in the minimum wage, some other modest economic policy
actions that serve middle America and the poor, and a brake on the Bush
program of service to a tiny elite and regressive environmental
policy. The Bush take-down of the Constitution will probably be halted,
but reversals of the serious encroachments via the Patriot and
Military Commissions Acts will face the veto plus traditional Blue Dog
and New Democrat defections. Impeachment is already off the table, and
investigations that will take place may be useful but may be
compromised by the Democrats bipartisanship proclivities.
The Democrats may exercise a modest drag on the military budget, but
the party has long been supportive of a militarized state, and
party funding, pressures to prove their “national security”
credentials, and fear of charges of failing to support our boys,
are likely to sharply constrain Democratic initiatives here and as
regards Iraq. They are likely to follow along with something like
the weak, conditional, slow, non-withdrawal withdrawal proposals
of the Bush appointed “bipartisan” Iraq Study Group, designed to
repel demands for a real withdrawal. As regards Israel and Palestine,
the Democrats have been virtually captured by the Lobby and we can
expect nothing from them in this crucial area where U.S.-Israeli policy
feeds hostility to this country as well as Israel. Given Israel’s
eagerness to get the United States to attack Iran, here again the
Democrats are likely to offer nothing constructive and will provide
little brake if Bush-Cheney decide that another war might serve God’s
and the Bush administration’s interests. This country and the world
still desperately need a party in the United States that will support
non-violent and non-imperialistic alternative policies, something that
the victorious Democrats do not provide.
________________
G.
from Edward Herman :
12 December 2006
Subject: how israelis
kill with impunity
AlterNet
One Iraqi solder says the
world doesn't seem to notice killing in small numbers. And those
closest to the violence become too scared to empathize for those who
die.
_______________
H.
from Edward Herman :
Subject: Interviews Available on Sean Penn's Call for Accountability
December 19, 2006
Institute for Public Accuracy
http://www.accuracy.org
Accountability and the Bush
Administration
In
a piece today, Editor & Publisher reports that Sean Penn "hit the
media and called for impeachment of the president in receiving the 2006
Christopher Reeve First Amendment Award from The Creative Coalition
Monday night in New York City."
In his speech, Penn said: "Now, there's been a lot of talk lately on
Capitol Hill about how impeachment should be 'off the table.' We're
told that it's time to look ahead -- not back. ... Can you
imagine how far that argument would go for the defense at an
arraignment on charges of grand larceny, or large-scale distribution of
ethamphetamines? How about the arranging of a contract killing on a
pregnant mother? 'Indictment should be off the table.' Or 'Let's look
forward, not backward.' Or 'We can't afford another failed defendant.'
"Our country has a legal system, not of men and women, but of laws. Why
then are we so willing to put inconvenient provisions of the U.S.
constitution and federal law 'off the table?' ... Unless we're going to
have one set of laws for the powerful and another set for those who
can't afford fancy lawyers, then truth matters to everyone. And
accountability is a matter of human and legal principle."
Penn's remarks were first published at:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sean-penn/on-receiving-the-2006-chr_b_36659.html
Two former prosecutors released comments this afternoon to the
Institute for Public Accuracy about Penn's speech and are available for
interviews:
ELIZABETH HOLTZMAN, via Stephen Kent, (845) 758-0097, cell: (914)
589-5988, skent@kentcom.com,
http://www.impeachbushbook.com
Holtzman is a former Congresswoman and was the
district attorney of Brooklyn; she was a member of the House panel that
impeached Richard Nixon. Holtzman is co-author with Cynthia L. Cooper
of the new book "The Impeachment of George W. Bush: A Practical Guide
for Concerned Citizens."
Holtzman said today: "Penn is right; the principle
here is holding our leaders accountable for their actions under the
law, just as citizens are held accountable under the law for theirs.
There is plenty of evidence President Bush has committed what the
Constitution calls 'high crimes and misdemeanors,' the remedy for which
is empeachment. Congress needs to get the Constitutional machinery
started, first by formally investigating the evidence, then executing
the required procedures for impeachment and removal from office."
ELIZABETH DE LA VEGA, (408) 399-5641, ElizabethdelaVega@Verizon.net,
http://www.thenation.com/directory/bios/elizabeth_de_la_vega,
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=126958
Elizabeth de la Vega served as a federal
prosecutor in Minneapolis and San Jose for more than 20 years. She is
author of the new book "U.S. v. George W. Bush et. al."
De la Vega said today: "Sean Penn is absolutely
correct in his call for accountability. 'The law is no respecter of
persons,' meaning, of course, that both the protections and the
obligations of our laws apply equally to plumbers, preachers and
presidents -- of corporations and of the United States. That is the
bedrock principle of our justice system. Prosecutors who are trying to
enforce the laws of our country will have a difficult task indeed if we
allow the President and his senior administration to violate them at
will, simply because our representatives, Democrats and Republicans
alike, are more concerned about political strategy, however misguided,
and protecting their power
than about carrying out their sworn duty to oversee the Executive
Branch.
"Even without having had hearings, we in the United
States now have far more than enough evidence, based on the Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence Report, and other documents, to know
that the President and his senior administration officials used all of
the same techniques used by fraudsters everywhere to deceive the
American people and Congress into authorizing an invasion of people
8,000 miles away who had not harmed us in any way and were not
threatening to do so. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell and others
suppressed material information, repeated half-truths, used
artfully-worded misleading statements and asserted 'facts' with
reckless disregard for their truth or falsity.
"Around this country every day, those who use such
deceit to defraud people into making decisions they would not otherwise
have made -- purchases of swampland in the Everglades or unneeded house
repairs -- are prosecuted. Yet, in the case of the most egregious and
horrific fraud imaginable, perpetrated by our highest elected
officials, our Congress seems to have strategized itself into
paralysis. In their obligation to conduct oversight of the Executive
Branch, Congress stands in the shoes of law enforcement. We are calling
911 and we need them to respond.
"It is long past time for everyone who loves this
country and who cares about the Constitution to be on their feet saying
'I object!' to the conduct of this President and his entire
administration. This is not a radical position, nor is it a partisan
one. On the contrary, it is a conservative and patriotic stance that
shows deep reverence for the
ideals and tenets that inform our legal system."
_______________
For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:Sam
Husseini, (202) 347-0020, (202) 421-6858; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167