More than any other
newspaper, the New York Times
influences how policymakers,
journalists and the general
public understand important
issues. Unfortunately, Times'
news reporters continue to
misrepresent the
Israeli/Palestinian conflict by
failing to acknowledge the broad
international consensus that
Israel's settlements and West
Bank Wall violate international
law. Times' reporters instead
present Palestinian and Israeli
views using a 'he said, she said'
formula, without an appropriate
framework to help readers
evaluate competing claims.
These
shortcomings came to a head in an
April 19 piece by Steven
Erlanger, The New York Times'
correspondent to the region,
titled 'Israel, on Its Own, Is
Shaping the Borders of the West
Bank'.
The article's
thesis that, 'the likely impact
of the provisional new border on
Palestinian life is, perhaps
surprisingly, smaller than
generally assumed,' was
essentially based on the flawed
analysis of the Wall's impact by
David Makovsky.
Mr. Makovsky, a
former Editor of the right-wing
Jerusalem Post, is now a Senior
Fellow at The Washington
Institute for Near East Policy, a
spinoff from the right-wing
American Israeli Public Affairs
Committee(AIPAC). On top of
paraphrasing Mr. Makovsky's
arguments, Mr. Erlanger quotes
144 words from Mr. Makovsky,
versus only 23 words from
Palestinian negotiator Saeb
Erekat.
'The land between
the green line and the barrier is
8 percent of the West Bank,' Mr.
Erlanger reported. He happily
added that, 'Eight percent is
half of what the figure was last
summer,' ignoring the reality
that Palestinians don't accept
Israeli annexation of any of
their land,
Mr. Erlanger
wrote that the revised Wall
'route has sharply reduced the
number of Palestinians caught
inside the barrier: fewer than
10,000 of the two million
Palestinians in the West Bank.'
He then added caveats - 10,000
does not include Wall impacts on
195,000 Palestinian residents of
East Jerusalem, the Wall has cut
off most of the Palestinians'
best agricultural land, and the
Israeli army can completely seal
off Palestinian towns like
Qalqilya that the Wall nearly
surrounds. Though Mr. Erlanger
never admits this, these caveats
add hundreds of thousands of
Palestinians negatively impacted
by the Wall, making Mr.
Makovsky's figure of 10,000
Palestinians totally misleading.
Worse, Mr.
Erlanger notes three times that
Israeli annexation of 8% of the
West Bank is close to the 5% that
President Bill Clinton supposedly
proposed in 2000. The emphasis on
annexing 5% - 8% of the West Bank
serves Mr. Makovsky's partisan
political agenda - lowering the
bar for expectations of what
constitutes a just resolution.
However, there is
no justification for 'lowering
the bar' when international law
requires that Israel withdraw
from the entire West Bank,
including East Jerusalem, and the
Gaza Strip. Furthermore, analysts
like Jeff Halper of the Israeli
Committee Against Home Demolition
have explained repeatedly that
Israeli annexation of a strategic
5% of the West Bank will leave
Israel in control of the West
Bank, and prevent the
establishment of a viable
Palestinian state.
What is crucial
to note in all of this is that
there is a widespread consensus
that international law provides a
viable framework to address most
elements of the conflict. The
Times, however, studiously and
systematically avoids mentioning
that international law -- even
the 2004 ruling by the
International Court of Justice
(ICJ), the world's highest legal
body -- deems the construction of
the Wall on Palestinian land
illegal.
After Mr.
Erlanger's article, Michael Brown
of Partners for Peace suggested
to the Times that it note in
articles that UN Security Council
resolutions declare all Israeli
settlements illegal. Daniel
Okrent, the Times Public Editor
responded in his April 24, 2005
column 'The Hottest Button: How
the Times Covers
Israel/Palestine,' by quoting the
Times Deputy Foreign Editor Ethan
Bronner who said, 'We view
ourselves as neutral and unbound
by such judgments.
We cite them, but
we do not live by them.'
Bronner's
response is very telling and
quite typical of the types of
responses the mainstream media
gives its critics when it has no
answer. Instead of answering Mr.
Brown's point that the Times
systematically ignores UN
resolutions and international
law, Mr. Bronner accuses Mr.
Brown of wanting the Times to
'live by them,' and then proceeds
to vehemently assert that the
Times will not bend to doing
that!
On a positive
note, Mr. Okrent left the door
open to improving the Times
coverage of Israel/Palestine. In
response to the observation that
a Ramallah-based correspondent
might see the conflict
differently from those based in
West Jerusalem, Okrent wrote,
'The Times ought to give it a
try.'
Readers should
hold the Times to Okrent's
proposal.
Back to Top
5. WHY SHOULD THEY HATE
US?: GHOSTS OF 9-1-1
BY
WARD
CHURCHILL
"What goes
around comes around," it has
been said. In the end,
"Karma is unavoidable."
So it was on September 11th,
2001.
This is so in
many respects, perhaps, but no
doubt most importantly because
the ghosts of Iraq's wasted
children were by no means alone
in their haunting. There were
others present on 9-1-1, many
others, beginning with the
800,000 Iraqi adults—the
great majority of them either
elderly or pregnant—known to
have died along with their
youngsters as a direct result of
US sanctions. This makes a total
of 1.3 million dead among a
population of fewer than twenty
million in the decade since the
Gulf War supposedly ended. To
these must be added another
150,000-or-so Iraqi civilians
written off as "collateral
damage" during the massive
US aerial bombardment defining
the war itself.
Then there were
the soldiers, conscripts mostly,
butchered in the scores of
thousands as they fled northward
along what became known as the
"Highway of death," out
of combat, in full compliance
with US demands that they
evacuate Kuwait, effectively
defenseless against the waves of
aircraft thereupon hurled at them
by cowards wearing American
uniforms. Also at hand were some
10,000 Iraqi guardsmen retreating
along a causeway outside Basra,
killed in another "turkey
shoot" conducted by US
forces 24 hours after the
"war-ending ceasefire"
had taken effect. Untold
thousands of others were there as
well, terrified teenagers, many
of them wounded, refused quarter
by advancing American troops who
disparaged them as "sand
niggers," then buried them
alive while they pleaded for
mercy, using bulldozers specially
prepared for the task.
Neither the
litany nor the count ends with
the suffering of Iraq, of course.
Present on 9-1-1 were the many
thousands of Palestinians
shredded over the years by
Israeli pilots flying planes
purchased with US funds and
dropping cluster bombs
manufactured in/provided by the
USA. There, too, were the
"Intifadists,"
rockthrowing—or simply
fist-waving—Palestinian kids
mowed down with numbing
regularity by M-16 rifles. Also
in the throng were the hundreds
massacred in refugee camps like
Sabra and Shatila under authority
of Israel's onetime defense
minister, now prime minister, and
always full time US accessory.
Ariel Sharon. Countries , no less
than individuals, will—indeed,
must—be judged not only by
what they do but by the company
they elect as a matter of policy
to keep and support (as the
Taliban).
Compared to
others with whom the US has
bonded since 1950, moreover, the
appalling Mr. Sharon might well
purport to saintliness. Consider
the 300,000 Guatemalans
exterminated after the CIA
destroyed their
democratically-elected government
in 1954, installing in its stead
a brutal military junta dedicated
to making the country safe for
the operations of US
corporations. Consider, too, the
million or more Indonesian
victims of a CIA-sponsored 1965
coup in which the Sukarno
government was overthrown in
favor of a military regime headed
by Suharto, a maneuver that led
unerringly—and with
uninterrupted American support—to
the not so long ago genocide in
East Timor. The ghosts of these
victims were surely present,
along with their Iraqi and
Palestinian counterparts, on
9-1-1.
No less apparent
are the reason for the presence
of the multitudes subjected to
numerically lesser but
nonetheless comparable carnage by
an array of others US client
governments: persons tortured and
murdered by Shah Mohammad Reza
Pahlavi's secret police, the
SAVAK, after the CIA-engineered
dissolution of Iran's
parliamentary system in 1954;
more thousands
"disappeared" and
summarily executed after the
"CIA-instigated 1973
overthrow of Chile's Allende
government and installation of a
military junta headed by Augusto
Pinochet; thousands more murdered
by agents of the ghastly
"public safety"
programs implemented with US
funding and supervision
throughout South America during
the 1960s; still more who lost
their lives to the US-sponsored
and orchestrated
"contra" war against
Nicaragua's Sandanista government
during the mid-1980s.
Although the list
of such malignancies is still and
rapidly lengthening, it is
appropriate that we return to the
roster of those whose fates were
sealed by the US in a far more
direct and exclusive fashion. Of
them, there is certainly no
shortage. They include, quite
conspicuously three million
Indochinese, perhaps more,
exterminated in the course of
America's savage and sustained
assault on Vietnam, Laos and
Cambodia during the 1960s and
early 1970s. To those claimed by
the war itself must be added the
ongoing toll taken by America's
"stay behind" legacy of
landmines, unexploded artillery
rounds and cluster bomblets, as
well as an environment soaked in
carcinogenic-mutogenic
defoliants. Added, too, must be
those lost to the US default on
its pledge to pay reparations of
$4 billion in exchange for being
allowed to escape with
"honor" from a war it
started but could not win.
American has never been known for
paying its bills, either
literally or figuratively.
Present, too, on
9-1-1 were the uncounted
thousands of noncombatants
massacred by US troops at places
like No Gun Ri amidst the
"police action"
conducted in Korea during the
early 1950s. As well, there were
the hundreds of thousands of
Japanese civilians deliberately
and systematically burned alive
by the Army Air Corps during its
massive fire raids on Tokyo and
other cities conducted towards
the end of World War II. And, to
be sure, these victims were
accompanied by the dead of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
indiscriminately vaporized by
American nuclear bombs in 1945—or
left the slow, excruciating
deaths resulting from irradiation—not
to any military purpose, but
rather to the end that the US
might demonstrate the
technological supremacy of its
"kill-power" to anyone
thinking of questioning is
dominance of the postwar world.
For all its official chatter
about the necessity of preventing
weapons of mass destruction from
"falling into the hands of
rogue states and
terrorists," the US remains
the only country ever to use
nuclear devices for that reason.
Then there were
the Filipinos, as many a million
of them, "extirpated"
by American troops at the dawn of
the twentieth century, as the US
having wrested their island
homeland from the relatively
benign clutches of the Spanish
Empire, set about converting the
Philippines into a colony of its
own. Nor was there an absence of
"Indians," people
indigenous to America itself
whose unending agony was
enunciated in the silent
eloquence of several hundred
Lakota babies, mothers and old
men dumped into a mass grave—a
crude trench, really—after
they'd been annihilated by
soldiers firing Hotchkiss guns at
Wounded Knee in 1890. Punctuating
their statement were the victims
of a hundred comparable
slaughters stretching back in an
unbroken line through Weaverville
and Yrika to the Washita and Sand
Creek, through the Bad Axe to
Horseshoe Bend and beyond all the
way to General John Sullivan's
campaign against the Senecas in
1794, a grisly affair from which
his men returned proudly attired
in leggings crafted from the
skins of their victims.
Intermixed with
those massacred wholesale were
many thousands of native people
slain piecemeal, hunted down as
sport or for the bounties placed
upon their scalps at one time or
another by every state and
territory in the Lower
Forty-Eight. Many more thousands
could be counted among those
who'd perished along the routes
of the death marches—the
Cherokee "Trail of
Tears," for instance, and
the "Long Walk" of the
Navajos—upon which they were
forced at bayonet-point,
"removed: from their lands
so that it might be repopulated
by a self-anointedly superior
race busily importing itself from
Europe. Then there were the
millions dead of disease, small
pox mostly, with which they'd
been infected, often
deliberately, as a means of
causing them more literally to
"vanish."
In the end, the
grim column of stolen lives
reached such length that it
threatened to disappear in the
distance. Towards its end,
however could still be glimpsed a
scattering of Wappingers, a small
people now mostly forgotten,
eradicated by the Dutch in their
founding of new Amsterdam, now
New York, the victims' severed
heads used for jolly game of
kickball along a street near
which the WTC would later stand.
As for the street upon which this
gruesome event took place, it is
now named in honor of a
prominence by which it would long
be long flanked, the wall
enclosing the city's once
thriving slave market. The
lucrative trade in African flesh—that
, and extraction of discount
labor from such flesh—were,
after all, ingredients nearly as
vital to forming the US economy
as was the "clearing"
and expropriation of native land.
Thus, the
millions lost to the Middle
Passage took their places among
their myriad Asian and Native
American cousins. They, and all
who perished under slavers' whips
after being sold at auction in
the "New World," were
worked or tortured to death on
chain gangs after slavery was
formally abolished, or were among
the thousands lynched during a
century–long "festival
of violence" undertaken by
white Americans—there were
six million active members of the
Ku Klux Klan in 1929—to
ensure that ostensibly
"free" blacks remained
"in their place" of
subjugation. The atrocious record
of apartheid South Africa always
came in a feeble second to the
malignancies of Jim Crow.
Intermixed, too,
were a great host of others: the
thousands of Chinese coolies
imported during the nineteenth
century, none of them standing
"a Chinaman's chance"
of surviving the brutal
conditions into which they were
impressed while laying track for
America's railroads and digging
its deep shaft mines throughout
the West; the millions of
children consigned in each
generation to grinding poverty
and truncated lifespans across
America's vast sprawl of
Ghettoes, barrios, Indian
reservations and migrant labor
camps; millions upon million s
more assigned the same or worse
in the neocolonies of the Third
World, the depths of their misery
dictated by an unremitting demand
for super profits with which to
fuel America's "economic
miracle." Truly, there seems
no end to it.
Why should "they"
hate "us"? The
very question on its face absurd,
delusional, revealing of an
aggregate detachment from reality
so virulent in its evasiveness as
to be deemed clinically
pathological. Setting aside the
wholly-contrived
"confusion" professed
in the aftermath as to who might
be properly included under the
headings "we" and
"they," the sole
legitimate query that might have
been posed on 9-1-1 was—and
remains—"How could
'they' possibly not hate
'us'?" From there, honest
interrogators might have gone on
to frame two others: "Why
did it take 'them' so long to
arrive?" and "Why,
under the circumstances, did they
conduct themselves with such
obvious and admirable
restraint?"
Back to Top
6. FOLLOW THE LEADER
BY
MICHAEL
PARENTI
The distinct
characteristic of the state, said
German sociologist Max Weber, is
that it alone claims a
"monopoly of the legitimate
use of physical force within a
given territory." The
state's irreducible essence rests
in its capacity to wield legally
defined violence against its own
citizens. In many instances, the
target is not just the criminal
element but also political
dissenters who challenge the
exiting distribution of
privilege, wealth, institutional
authority, and ideological
orthodoxy.
Laws dealing with
sedition and terrorism are
enlisted against troublesome
dissidents, but so is the
ordinary criminal code:
disorderly conduct, mob action,
criminal trespass, destruction of
property, felonious assault,
resisting arrest, and the like.
In this way, acts of dissent and
protest are both depoliticized
and criminalized by the
repressive operations carried out
by state authorities.
State power is
wielded primarily by the
executive specifically the
president and the national
security apparatus. Representing
the entire nation rather than a
particular locale, the president
"possesses a sort of divine
right," as Marx noted of the
French presidency in the Second
Republic in 1852. "He is the
elect of the nation" who
stands "in a personal
relation to the nation."
Through its individual
representatives the National
Assembly exhibits manifold
aspects of the nation, but in the
president the "national
spirit finds its incarnation.
The US
Constitution gives Congress, not
the president the power to make
war. Yet again and again US
forces are committed to military
actions by presidential order,
without a declaration of war.
Indeed, some presidents make a
point of ignoring Congress on
this matter. In late 1990, while
the legislators debated whether
the US should engage in
hostilities against Iraq,
President Bush père went
on record as saying, "I
don't care if I get one vote in
Congress. We're going in."
Bush understood that during times
of crisis and national peril—real
or fabricated—Congress would
not dare impeach the
commander-in-chief for such a
trifle as an undeclared war,
especially since so many of the
lawmakers were themselves fervent
superpatirotic militarists.
Presidential
usurpation of the war making
power took a final giant step in
the aftermath of the September
2001 terrorist attacks that
destroyed the twin towers of the
World Trade Center in New York
and a wing of the Pentagon, with
the loss of some 3,000 lives.
Congress voted outright to give
the president the power to decide
when the nation should go to war.
This surrender of congressional
power to the executive was itself
an unconstitutional forfeiture.
In effect, Bush fils could
now unilaterally declare war
whenever he wanted, a one-man
decision making power usually
enjoyed only by absolute
monarchs, dictators, and chief
executives of corporations.
And when Bush
exercised that unconstitutional
power by going to war against
Iraq in March 2003, in the face
of worldwide protests, the great
majority of congressional
lawmakers, out of fear of seeming
unpatriotic, fell into line,
including many who had initially
opposed the war as ill-conceived
and illicit. Thus Democratic
leader of the House of
Representatives, Nancy Pelosi
(D-Calif.), speaking as if she
were in the US Army rather than
in the US Congress, announced
that now that our troops were
committed to action, we had to
support our commander-in-chief.
"I support the president….
We are one team in one fight, and
we stand together," she
proclaimed.
Some of our
citizens are understandably
cynical and suspicious about
politics. Politicians, we hear,
cannot be trusted; they are often
corrupt and self-serving, saying
one thing during election
campaigns, then doing something
else once they get into office.
All true enough. Yet these same
citizens display an almost
childlike trust and knee jerk
faith when politicians trumpet a
need to defend our national
security. So it happens that with
the launching of each new US war
against one or another small but
"menacing " nation,
superpatriots rally around the
flag, draped as it is around the
president. The nation is under
siege from a lethal foreign
threat, we are told. This is no
time for splitting hairs about
right and wrong. Get behind our
president and our nation; support
our troops; destroy the alien
menace. When he claims to serve
the higher good, the
commander-in-chief can do no
wrong. The inverted morality is
activated.
We should remind
ourselves of what happened in
Germany in the 1930s when Hitler
and his Nazi thugs took power
(financed by the big moneyed
cartels). The Nazis insisted that
unquestioning obedience and
adulation be accorded the leader.
It was governance by der
Feuhrerprinzip, the leader
principle, the notion that the
head of state is the living
embodiment of the state itself,
the supreme repository of the
nation's virtues. It is a short
step from the cult of the nation
(superpatriotism) to the cult of
the leader. In the case of Nazi
Germany, the world reaped bitter
fruit.
To those who say
that during times of crisis we
must have faith in the president,
we might ask: Faith? Is
this religion or politics? Is the
president to be treated as an
object of worship? We are told w
must trust the president, but
what does that mean? Trust is
something we extend to loved ones
or very close friends and family
(and even then, check them out
once in awhile). Democracy is not
about trust; it is about distrust.
It is about accountability,
exposure, open debate, critical
challenge, and popular input and
feedback from the citizenry. It
is about responsible government.
We have to get our fellow
Americans to trust their leaders
less and themselves more, trust
their own questions and
suspicions, and their own desire
to know what is going on.
There is nothing
like a war or a major crisis to
reduce adult citizens to mindless
conformity, ready to play
"follow the leader" out
of a perceived need for national
unity and a hope that our Reichführer,
the president, will see us
through the danger. President
Franklin Roosevelt's highest
rating 84 percent, came
immediately after the Japanese
attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941.
President John Kennedy's 83
percent approval rating came
after his 1961 Bay of Pigs
invasion of Cuba, even though the
operation failed. And after the
Gulf War of 1991, the elder
Bush's approval rating zoomed to
93 percent.
Consider the case
of George Bush the younger. War
and violence were especially good
to this president. As of 10
September 2001, his presidency
was floundering and his approval
ratings were sagging woefully.
Then the next day came the
attacks on the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon, and Bush saw
his rating leap up to 82 percent.
This was swiftly followed by his
newly trumpeted "permanent
war against terrorism" and
the massive bombing and invasion
of Afghanistan. Bush was
transmuted into the determined
leader who would rally the
nation, shore up our defenses (or
certainly our defense budget)
with ever larger military
allocations, and protect us with
legislation that strengthened the
repressive powers of the federal
executive.
Here was the
president protecting us from
threats at home and abroad,
addressing military gatherings,
flying onto aircraft carriers for
photo opportunities—unmindful
of how in earlier years he
himself had been AWOL from his
duties in the Air National Guard
and arguably was a deserter.
Standing proudly in front of the
cameras, with a steely gaze fixed
on the nation's ramparts, ready
to move decisively against any
and all, never did this corrupt
but affable draft-dodging
Jesus-freak billionaire and
former cokehead alcoholic seem so
presidential. His approval
ratings skyrocketed.
The came the
corporate scandals of the spring
and summer of 2002, the Enron,
WorldCom, Harkin, and Halliburton
investment crimes. By July, both
President Bush and Vice-President
Dick Cheney were directly
implicated in fraudulent insider
trading practices. Their
respective companies, Harkin and
Halliburton, made false
accounting claims of profit to
pump up stock values. Bush and
Cheney, along with other company
officers and top investors, armed
with insider information about
when to get out, sold their stock
at prime value just before it was
revealed to be nearly worthless
and collapsed in price. Both the
president and vice-president made
dubious statements about what
they knew and did not know. They
refused to hand over documents
and gave every appearance of
being directly implicated in
deceptive practices that cost
smaller investors billions of
dollars.
By July 2002, the
Republican Party was reeling from
the insider-trading scandals and
was pegged as the party of
corporate favoritism and
corruption. But by September,
with war pending against Iraq,
the GOP reemerged as the party of
patriotism , national defense,
and strong military leadership to
gain control of both house of
Congress, winning elections it
might not otherwise have won. The
impending war blew the whole
Enron-Harkin-Halliburton scandal
off the front pages and out of
the evening news. Instead of
being subject to criminal
investigation and impeachment,
Bush, the insider trader,
remained untouched in the White
House, reemerging as our fearless
peerless wartime leader.
The elder Bush
had done the same thing in
1990-1991. In late 1990, his
popularity was slumping badly
because of the savings and loan
scandal. Every evening, TV news
programs were peeling off
successive layers of corruption,
thievery, bribery, and plunder of
the public treasury, in what was
the greatest financial conspiracy
in the history of the world,
involving a raid of the public
treasury that has come to over $1
trillion. Two and possibly three
of Bush's sons risked going to
jail for financial legerdemain.
But once Bush launched the first
Gulf war against Iraq, the
networks became preoccupied with
selling that war, and the savings
and loan issue was blown out of
the evening news and sent into
media limbo. The Gulf victory
also made it harder to
investigate disclosures
implicating Bush senior himself
in the Iran-contra conspiracy, as
he basked in what seemed like an
untouchable popularity.
There is no
guarantee that such popularity
will last. As mentioned earlier,
Bush senior's approval rating
after the Gulf War was at 93
percent. Yet the following year
he lost the presidency to a
garrulous governor from Arkansas.
So with the younger Bush. His
rating began to sag in the winter
of 2002-2003 as the terrorism
hype subsided and the economy
remained in the doldrums. By 14
March 2003, his approval rating
was at 53 percent. But on 18
March after he began war
operations against Iraq, Bush's
rating climbed to 68 percent. By
late April, with a swift and easy
military victory seemingly at
hand, he was once more over 80
percent.
In the months
that followed, Bush II continued
to play the terrorism card.
Within a brief span of several
weeks in September 2003, he
referred to terrorist dangers
when talking about (a) the war in
Iraq, (b ) energy policy, (c) the
state of the economy, and (d) US
dealings with the UN. Such
persistent reference to terrorism
were designed to discourage
criticism and keep the public
rallied behind his leadership.
But then, as the
"liberation" of Iraq
devolved into a protracted
people's resistance that proved
costly in American lives and
dollars, this strategy no longer
played as well, and Bush's
ratings slumped decisively.
In sum, the
executive mantle of militaristic
patriotism makes it easy for US
presidents to gain quick—but
not necessarily durable—popularity.
In turn, this follow-the-leader
popularity allows them to deliver
the nation into wars of
aggression that arguably serve
none of the people's needs. But
on some occasions, when the
military ventures prove too
costly, Americans begin to balk
and show sign of disaffection.
Back to Top
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