The
following is an update from Suzanne Taylor and TheConversation.org
Making Sense of These Times [http://www.theconversation.org] Website. Thank you for your interest. If you wish to be
removed from this list at any time, just let us know.
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April 13,
2002
Quotes that appear on the site in
the Quotes section, are in bold in this Five Star Piece.
Five Star Piece: U.S. Jews
Cannot Acquiesce to Sharone's Monstrous Behavior,
Robert Scheer -- April 9,
2002
Suzanne's comments:
I get some
flack for taking sides, but I do so openly. This Website is for people who think
like I do -- not in black and white, in an old paradigm win and lose mentality,
but in reverence for the oneness in which we must find the love of ourselves,
each other, and our home on this planet. I am on that side. Now, how we operate
in support of this ideology is indeed what this website is here to discern, and
there can be disagreement and colloquy about that. However, in our oneness,
morality is its core, and there is still right and wrong. And, inside that idea
of oneness based on morality, I am in shock and horror at what my fellow Jews
are doing to the Arabs in the Middle East. If you find this too oppositional --
too contrary to my stated ideals -- well, either we can hash it out or you can
go where you find someplace you would not consider so biased. But, from my
perspective, blessings on Robert Scheer for his L.A. Times Opinion piece
that is what I think all us Jewish people should hearken to: "Not that anyone
asked me, but those are not my tanks careening around the West Bank bringing
fear and havoc in their wake. Yet they are marked as Jewish tanks and
consequently they and I bear some familial resemblance on my mother's side. I am
thus obligated to consider what cruelty is being done in the name of defending
my people."
What does it mean to be Jewish?
Is it belief in a set of religious values, identity with a much-splintered
ethnic tribe or automatic membership among God's chosen people as certified by
the lineage of one's mother?
For many, being Jewish carries with it the
lessons of universal tolerance and compassion, while for others it is a "never
again" pride in the military power of a David turned modern-day Goliath.
This latter allusion to the Holocaust, a horror that occurred in the
center of modern European civilization and had little to do with the Arabs,
nonetheless provides the enduring rationale for Israeli brutality in the name of
self-defense. What irony that many Jews now comfortably vacation in Germany but
insist that Arab anti-Semitism is an immutable aspect of Muslim culture that can
be met only with the crushing power of tanks. Not that anyone asked me,
but those are not my tanks careening around the West Bank bringing fear and
havoc in their wake. Yet they are marked as Jewish tanks and consequently they
and I bear some familial resemblance on my mother's side. I am thus obligated to
consider what cruelty is being done in the name of defending my people.
Some of us make a deliberate effort to disassociate from the mayhem of
Ariel Sharon's carnage, while others seem to wallow in it, as if displaying the
awesome firepower of the Israeli army is necessary to the survival of the Jewish
state. I would like to think that the peacemakers still outnumber the
militarists among U.S. Jews, but my own e-mail and street-corner conversations
no longer bear out that hope.
While Jews are hardly monolithic, even in
their views of Israel, their large presence in the media contrasts sharply with
a near total exclusion of Palestinian Americans.
Palestinian Americans
in particular, and Arabs in general, are the ghosts haunting U.S. newsrooms by
their embarrassing absence. As journalists, we do not know them as a people, we
have little connection with their slights and sorrows, and we can only, even
with the best of intentions, experience their suffering as an abstraction.
While the family tales of Jewish oppression during the pogroms of czars,
the Holocaust and Soviet anti-Semitism have been merged into the dominant
American culture, horrific tales of Arab suffering are systematically ignored.
But, as when blacks and Latinos were absent from newsrooms and nightly
death in the ghetto was not thought to be news, it is difficult to escape the
notion that many in the media, Jews and non-Jews alike, lean to the view that
Arab life is cheap.
Despite all the attention accorded
affirmative action by news organizations on the grounds that diversity is
necessary to better news reporting, the exclusion of Arabs has been ignored. It
is not appropriate, particularly given the past decades in which Arab-Israeli
strife has never left the news and has frequently been a front-page headline--a
story covered far differently by the European media, where Arab voices are much
more integrated.
One can recognize this enormous imbalance without
endorsing the anti-Semitic slanders of the late Richard M. Nixon and the Rev.
Billy Graham, who asserted in tapes made 30 years ago, which were recently
released, that Jews control the media. They don't own the media. Nor do Jewish
journalists toe a common Israeli party line. Indeed, they are less inclined to
apologize for Israel than Graham, who has lined up consistently behind Israeli
militarism as somehow godly.
For Nixon there were good Jews, such as his
speech writer William Safire, who was hawkish back then and whose current
columns in the New York Times provide the most reliable outlet for Sharon's
propaganda.
Sharon himself is a man of barbaric impulse,
demonstrated all too clearly in his terrorizing of civilians two decades ago in
Lebanon and now on the West Bank. He has been a consistent provocateur,
undermining peace efforts no matter their content, and now he is using his tanks
to poison the ground for future generations.
Yes, Yasser Arafat
also has poisoned the ground under his feet and shares responsibility with
Sharon for the breakdown of the peace process. But until recently,
Arafat has been unrelentingly reviled by the news media while Sharon, no less
monstrous in his behavior, hardly has been criticized.
Both are killers
of the innocent. Both are to be roundly condemned by all, and the
failure of prominent moderate Arabs to do their part to restrain Arafat is all
too obvious. No less a moral offense is the acquiescence of too many Jews, in
Israel and abroad, to the comparable crimes of Sharon.
Source: Los Angeles
Times. http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-000025268apr09.column?coll=la-headlines-oped-manual
Further
comment from Suzanne: Some flack
I received from someone to whom I separately sent this
piece: "Robert
Scheer's piece, which I read the other day in the
paper, was horrific. It attempted to equate the arsonist
(terrorist Arafat) and the
firefighter (Ariel Sharon and the IDF). This inability to make
moral distinctions will destroy the West, if we allow it." Scary how incendiary this situation is,
where the good guys are tearing each other apart. And, all the more reason Joe
Simonetta's work can matter now -- he defines "sacred" where we all could come
together, outside of warring ideologies.
____________________________________________________
Column from Geov Parrish:
The Trouble With Normal: The Bar
is Low for Israeli Tactics Acceptable to the White House
-- April 9, 2002
Suzanne's comment: Thanks to Geov's contact with Middle East eyewitnesses,
we are seeing what you can't get in the media, which is not only shocking to our
sensibilities, but reveals the escalating retaliatory endangerment to us. "Ariel
Sharon's government, now, also seems to be playing a game, of just how much of
the West Bank it can punish before overwhelming international condemnation
forces it to either pull back or at least mitigate its tactics -- sickening,
brutal, inexcusable, and starkly illegal tactics...Europe has lost patience with
both Sharon and Bush. The third world is united behind Palestinians as never
before. As for the Arab world, says Jamal Khashoggi, deputy editor-in-chief of
the Saudi daily, Arab News, "The rage [of Arabs] is phenomenal...What's
happening in Palestine is creating suicide bombers everywhere, not only in
Palestine."
Other Quotes Drawn From the Column:
The near-universal -- with the curious exception of America --
rage at Israel at the moment clearly isn't about the use of a crackdown, which,
especially after 26 died on the cusp of Passover at the now-scattered hands of a
suicide bomber, was widely expected and at least in rarified circles tacitly
understood. The problem is the unexpectedly excessive tactics Israel has used in
an operation that was clearly in the planning for months...
In the past
week, Israel has taken an already impoverished people and systematically
destroyed Palestinian economic infrastructure and almost every aspect of
Palestinian government, from the very buildings and records to assassination or
arrest of many personnel. Perhaps more importantly, Israeli forces have
systematically acted to simply humiliate ordinary citizens...
Powell has
emerged in the last year as perhaps the only genuinely sane mind in the Bush
military circle...
The Bush Administration, by not taking action in the
one place in the world where it doesn't seem inclined to put troops, and by
telling the world to eat its boots everywhere else, has made the world, and
America, a far more dangerous place than Osama bin Laden's petty dreams of
global conquest could ever have imagined. Today, compared to six months ago, the
world is a much, much worse place, and there's plenty more being cooked up in
Washington.
____________________________________________________
This article was sent to us by Wade Frazier, part of
our Joe Simonetta conversation [http://www.theconversation.org/joesimonetta.html#wadejoe],
who said "Edward Said has long been my favorite Arab commentator in the West. Here is something
recent from him." William Golden also
forwarded the article, with this
description: "Edward Said, professor at
Columbia University...is a world renowned Palestinian scholar who
has written many important books ...[it
is] strong in its condemnation of the
current state of affairs, and I forward it because it helps us
American taxpayers broaden our
understanding of a situation in which we are
intimately (through our government's massive support of Israel)
involved."
With scarcely a peep from the
American professorate or intelligentsia, we have all succumbed to the
promiscuous misuse of language and sense, by which everything we don't like has
become terror and what we do is pure and simple good -- fighting terror, no
matter how much wealth, and lives, and destruction is involved...
As
educators and as citizens, we have failed in our mission by allowing ourselves
to be bamboozled in this way, without so much as an organized public discussion
about a defense budget that has shot up to $400 billion while 40 million people
remain without health insurance...
Israel is now waging a war against
civilians, pure and simple, although you will never hear it put that way in the
US. This is a racist war, and in its strategy and tactics, a colonial one as
well. People are being killed and made to suffer disproportionately because they
are not Jews. What an irony!...
And that pseudo-pundit -- the
insufferably conceited Thomas Friedman -- still has the gall to say that "Arab
TV" shows one-sided pictures, as if "Arab TV" should be showing things from
Israel's point-of-view the way CNN does, with "Mid-East violence" the catch-all
word for the ethnic cleansing that Israel is wreaking on the Palestinians in
their ghettoes and camps.
What Price
Oslo?
Edward Said, professor at Colombia University...world renowned
Palestinian scholar
http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/2002/577/op2.htm
Lawyers representing Enron shareholders in their civil
suit against the failed energy giant intend at the beginning of the week to
amend their complaint. That amendment will add the names of six powerful
investment banks to the charges. Merrill Lynch, JP Morgan Chase, Citibank and
Deutsche Bank are on the list. The implications of this are almost beyond
comprehension. Investors have been praying to the Money Gods since December that
Enron was a localized phenomenon, like a rogue tornado. The indictment of the
accounting firm Arthur Andersen for obstruction of justice burst some of their
hopes. If these investment banks are shown to have been playing fast and loose
with the rules, however, all bets are off.
The cancer of Enron is
spreading. It has cast doubt upon the worth of virtually every retirement
portfolio in the nation, caused corporate accounting practices to come under
suspicion, and shaken trust in the way companies report profits. In short, Enron
has taken a buzz saw to the basic underpinnings of our economic system. .
Shadows on the White
House
William Rivers Pitt
http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/04.08A.WRP.Shadows.htm
____________________________________________________
Two authors of
Five Star Pieces, who are Listmembers, engage. Ed Herman, long time leading light in the dark, writes, re our William Rivers Pitt
conversation:
I'm amazed to
read the suggestion that Clinton was a good president and would make a fine
emissary to the Middle East. On his greatness as president, he had the following
accomplishments:
1. The 1996 Personal Responsibility Act that
ended "welfare as we know it," but also ended any federal commitment to poor
people; and was a hugely reactionary act done for vote-getting advantage, that a
Republican president would have had trouble getting passed.
2. Put up a health care reform bill that was
unworkable and failed of passage, but gave a great impetus to the privatization
of medical care via HMOs.
3. Got through NAFTA and the WTO, opposed by
80% of the people who voted for him, but loved by the TNC community and people
who slept in the Lincoln bedroom.
4. Kept Star Wars in budget and otherwise took quite good
care of the military industrial complex, even if W is doing better here.
5. Apart from taking care of the MIC, Clinton
starved the civil budget and put all his fiscal marbles on balancing the budget
and reducing the debt, and this Herbert Hooverite program is now
institutionalized in his party.
6. He welcomed Suharto in DC in 1995 as "our
kind of guy," kept giving him military aid even into the period when his
military was subverting the East Timor independence election. He allowed far
more East Timorese to be killed before that referendum than were
killed in Kosovo in the year before
we bombed Yugoslavia, without his lifting a finger--eventually, with a huge
international outcry, after 5000+ deaths and huge destruction, he asked the
Indonesians to leave. No war crimes tribunals there however.
7. His policy toward Iraq was genocidal--and in
a famous line, his Secretary of State, asked on national TV if 500,000 dead
Iraqi children from his sanctions (and regular bombings) policy was worth it,
said: yes it is worth it. Perfect continuity with the Bush policies. If William
thinks this policy is fine, he should ask himself how come we supported the same
Saddam for years, before he refused to obey orders in 1990.
8. His Balkans policy was in my opinion
monstrous--and I think he eventually went to war not to save Albanians but to
show US muscle, to demonstrate Nato's relevance at its 50th birthday, to divert
attention away from Monica, and for other reasons that have nothing whatever to
do with humanitarianism. In fighting here he used Turkey as a base -- a country whose generals did far more ethnic
cleansing of Kurds than Milosevic ethnically cleansed Albanians. Clinton poured
aid into Turkey as ethnic cleansing there advanced throughout the 90's.
9. Clinton gave virtually unconditional support
to Israel--Oslo was a disaster, giving the Palestinians nothing and making the
pathetic Arafat into an enforcer of a completely unacceptable state of affairs.
As the Israelis took advantage of this agreement and built new settlements and
roads in the occupied territories, and ousted thousands more Palestinians,
Clinton didn't lift a finger. Gore got a huge Jewish vote in 2000 because
Clinton-Gore had delivered -- although they now find that Bush is competitive
in giving the Israelis all they want.
In sum, Clinton was a terrible president -- George
W is beyond terrible, frighteningly terrible, but that is the alternatives that
our plutocratic system affords us. But frightful doesn't make terrible
good.
Suzanne
responds:
Halt. Stop. Don't go there.
Just when we're falling in love. I was a Clinton foe -- archives on my site pre
9/11 [http://www.theconversation.org#pre911]
are full of my polemics. But, at this juncture, since he got the two
sides talking, maybe he could break the Middle East stalemate -- and it would be
symbolic of a bi-partisanship that could be a beginning of what we need at home.
No merit to this?
In the meantime, here's my intro to the post of the Geov Parrish
column, "Deeper than Whitewater: Clinton’s Real Crimes
Continue into the Bush Administration" [http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemId=13006],
from March 21. (And thanks for the laundry
list -- it goes in my ammunition stockpile.)
"Although for my taste, the lying Clinton also
was beyond the pale, I'm with Geov here. He points out how that flap took our
attention off what Clinton did -- 'the result of intentional public policies,
embraced, for the most part, by both parties, the Clintons and their appointees
as well as the Bushes' -- that was far
more hurtful to us...for all of the non-policy related embarrassments Clinton's
Republican persecutors howled about, they were conspicuously silent on the real
crimes -- the sorts of betrayals of public trusts that are, along with the
necessary arrogance and ego, hallmarks of just about anyone who manages to rise
to high political office in the United States. Simply put, you can't work the
system in America unless you've been bought and sold so many times you no longer
stand for anything except the expansion of your own power. And Clinton was a
master at it.'"
William Rivers Pitt, Five Star writer extraordinaire, chimes
in:
I'd have to agree [with Ed] here. Clinton was undoubtedly the best
Republican President we've ever had, with a few significant differences (Earned
Income Tax
Credit was a MASSIVE tax cut for regular folks, etc.) BUT his knowledge and
diplomatic clout in the Middle East make him the best option we have for a
brokered peace.
If you wait for the perfect person to come along and
help solve the problem -- a person of unassailable character, perfect liberal
pedigree, enough clout to get the job done - everyone will be dead over there
and you'll still be waiting. Noam Chomsky's phone won't be ringing for a long
time. Bill is the best option for a tough job, your issues with his
administration be damned.
That vein of inspired pragmatism really hasn't yet
taken hold on the Left, it seems. I wonder why we're on the outside looking in
at a bunch of psychopathic conservatives?
Hm.
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