HAVANA - Washington's
embargo against Cuba also has an impact on the
United States economy and prevents millions of
U.S. citizens from benefiting from Cuban medical
progress, according to a report released by the
Cuban foreign ministry.
The text of the report
will be presented at the United Nations General
Assembly, which on Nov. 8 will be examining for
the fifteenth consecutive year the need to end
the embargo imposed by Washington on Havana more
than four decades ago. The document states that
"because of the blockade regulations"
it has been impossible to begin clinical trials
in the U.S. with TheraCIM, a Cuban pharmaceutical
product for treating brain tumours in children.
TheraCIM is produced by the Molecular Immunology
Centre, which in 2004 made a deal with U.S.
company CancerVax to develop and produce
therapeutic vaccines against cancer.
This medication is registered in Cuba and other
countries for treating cancer of the head and
neck, and has been proved to reduce tumour mass.
It could benefit children in the United States
and other countries with this type of cancer, the
report points out.
It also adds that were it not for the embargo,
millions of people in the United States suffering
from diabetes could benefit from Citoprot P, a
unique product and treatment method that
accelerates healing of diabetic foot ulcers,
reducing the risk of lower extremity amputations.
Citoprot P was developed by the Cuban Centre for
Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology. According
to the foreign ministry report, about 20.8
million people in the United States suffer from
diabetes, a chronic incurable disease.
The restrictions that Cuba calls a blockade and
the U.S. an embargo have cost this Caribbean
country 86.1 billion dollars in total damages
throughout the period, including four billion in
2005 alone, the document says.
Last year the U.N. approved by 182 votes the
Cuban motion in favour of lifting the embargo.
The motion was first set before the U.N. General
Assembly in 1992, when only 59 countries voted in
favour of the resolution.
The report states that the ban on U.S. tourism to
Cuba causes tourist agents in the U.S. losses of
565 million dollars per million U.S. tourists who
are prevented from visiting the country.
An estimated 1.8 million U.S. tourists could have
vacationed in this Caribbean island in 2005, but
because of the ban, U.S. tourist agencies lost
potential income of 996 million dollars, the
report says.
In addition, the U.S. imports about 148,000 tons
of primary nickel and some 10,000 tons of cobalt
annually "from distant markets."
But "If the blockade did not exist," it
could purchase these raw materials from Cuba,
only 200 kilometres away, the report notes.
At present Cuba produces about 77,000 tons of
nickel a year, and output is set to increase
through an investment programme agreed with
Canada in March 2005 for the expansion and
modernisation of a joint venture company to
exploit the mineral.
Cuba has proven nickel reserves of 800 million
tons, and potential reserves are estimated at two
billion tons. The country's cobalt reserves
amount to approximately 26 percent of total world
reserves, according to official sources.
In presenting the report, Cuban deputy foreign
minister Bruno Rodríquez said on Monday that the
George W. Bush administration has created
"an inter-agency task force on Cuban
nickel," to monitor and prevent sales of
this strategic mineral.
Energy is another good business that Havana says
U.S. companies are missing out on, because they
are forbidden to participate in prospecting for
oil on Cuba's undersea platform in the Gulf of
Mexico, only 137 kilometres from Florida.
The platform to the north of Cuba has an
estimated potential of between one billion and
9.3 billion barrels of crude and between 1.9
trillion and 22 trillion cubic feet of natural
gas.
These estimates in the Cuban foreign ministry's
report are attributed to the U.S. Geological
Survey (USGS), which said "the possibilities
of success are of the order of 95 percent."
In 1999 Cuba opened up to tender 112,000 square
kilometres of its waters in the Gulf of Mexico,
divided into 51 blocks, for foreign exploration
aimed at eventual exploitation.
The Spanish-Argentine company Repsol YPF
currently has a contract to drill in six of these
blocks, with a total surface area of 10,700
square kilometres. This year, however it decided
to spread the risk and has sold a 30 percent
share in the venture to each of two other
companies, from India and Norway, retaining 40
percent itself.
The Canadian firm Sherritt International has also
signed a contract for four blocks in this deep
water drilling area.
Legislation approved in 2000 by the U.S. Congress
permits the sale of foods to Cuba, an exception
to the embargo that began to be implemented in
2001.
Between late 2001 and 2004, Cuban purchases from
U.S. firms totalled over one billion dollars in
cash.
In 2005, Cuba had earmarked between 700 and 800
million dollars to buy food from the United
States. But Washington tightened its trading
restrictions with Cuba, and the trade dropped to
some 474 million dollars.
"Due to the obstacles to trade imposed by
the blockade, U.S. agricultural exporters lost
income of about 300 million dollars, which were
used for purchases in other markets," the
Cuban report said.
The economic, commercial and financial embargo
was formally imposed on Feb. 3, 1962. That means
"seven out of 10 Cubans have been born and
grown up under the blockade," said deputy
foreign minister Rodríguez.
The different generations often have different
views with respect to the effects of the embargo.
For example, Antonio Díaz, 70, believes that
"the blockade is the reason why the country
has not progressed," while a 30-year-old
taxi driver who remained anonymous said
"(the embargo) is nothing but an excuse to
cover up economic inefficiency."
According to some experts, bilateral trade
between the United States and Cuba would reach 20
billion dollars in just five years, if the
embargo were lifted.
But Díaz, a retired sugar industry worker,
confessed that he agreed with those who think
ending the embargo won't be enough. "I think
changes are also needed to straighten out the
country. I don't think we're working properly,
and that's something we have to fix -- with or
without the blockade," he told IPS.
According to deputy foreign minister Rodríguez,
the sole aim of the restrictions is to subject
the Cuban people to hunger, desperation and
suffering, and in his view it constitutes
"an act of economic warfare and
genocide."
Back to Top
3. MARINE SCIENTISTS REPORT
MASSIVE "DEAD ZONES"
|
BY
STEPHEN
LEAHY
|
| |
Rising tides of
untreated sewage and plastic debris are
seriously threatening marine life and
habitat around the globe, the United
Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)
warned in a report Wednesday. The number
of ocean "dead zones" has grown
from 150 in 2004 to about 200 today, said
Nick Nuttall, a UNEP spokesperson.
"These are becoming more common in
developing countries," Nuttall told
IPS from Nairobi, Kenya.
Dead zones can encompass areas of ocean
100,000 square kms in size where little
can live because there is no oxygen left
in the water. Nitrogen pollution, mainly
from farm fertilisers and sewage,
produces blooms of algae that absorb all
of the oxygen in the water.
Growing global populations, mainly
concentrated along coastlines, and the
resulting increase in untreated sewage
are endangering human health and
wildlife, as well as livelihoods from
fisheries to tourism, according to the
"State of the Marine
Environment" report.
"An estimated 80 percent of marine
pollution originates from the land,"
said Achim Steiner, United Nations
undersecretary-general and UNEP's
executive director.
"And this could rise significantly
by 2050 if, as expected, coastal
populations double in just over 40 years
time and action to combat pollution is
not accelerated," Steiner said in a
statement.
The report is compiled from a wide
variety of government, academic and other
sources by UNEP's Global Programme of
Action for the Protection of the Marine
Environment from Land-Based Sources.
In many developing countries, between 80
percent and nearly 90 percent of sewage
entering the coastal zones is estimated
to be raw and untreated. These wastes
contain bacteria and viruses that can
contaminate marine species such as
shellfish that are consumed by people,
Nuttall said.
Studies in the Caribbean Sea have also
shown that sewage encourages the spread
of disease in corals, ultimately
destroying them. Around 80 percent of
Caribbean coral has been lost to disease
in the past 20 years, report researchers
at the University of North Carolina in
the United States.
Some cities in the developed world also
dump their sewage directly into
waterways.
More than one half of wastewater entering
the Mediterranean Sea is untreated, as is
60 percent of the wastewater discharged
into the Caspian Sea, the UNEP report
found.
Unlike the United States and countries in
the European Union, Canada has no
national standards for sewage treatment
for cities. Montreal dumps billions of
litres of untreated sewage into the St.
Lawrence River, while the
postcard-perfect tourist city of
Victoria, British Columbia dumps all of
its waste directly into the Pacific
Ocean.
Such waste can contain high levels of
toxic chemicals, heavy metals and
excreted pharmaceuticals. The latter pose
risks that are only beginning to be
understood. Emerging research shows
negative impacts on marine life from
residues of birth control and
antidepressant drugs like Prozac even at
extremely low concentrations of less than
one part per billion.
"The big unknown" is what
effect these pharmaceutical residues
might have on chronically exposed plants,
animals and people, Christian Daughton,
chief of the environmental chemistry
branch at the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency, has been reported as
saying.
Expensive treatment plants are not the
only solution to untreated sewages wastes
-- coastal wetlands, salt marshes and
mangroves can also do the job, Nuttall
explained.
"It's important for governments to
conserve and rehabilitate these natural
features and take their value into
consideration in their urban
planning," he said.
Plastic is an even more visible
environmental concern, killing more than
a million seabirds and 100,000 mammals
and sea turtles each year, according to
previous U.N. reports.
Plastic bags, bottle tops and polystyrene
foam coffee cups are often found in the
stomachs of dead sea lions, dolphins, sea
turtles and birds. Seagulls in the North
Sea had an average of 30 pieces of
plastic in their stomachs, according to a
Dutch study in 2004.
The volume of plastic debris was
estimated at eight million pieces a day
in 1982 and is unquestionably much higher
today, perhaps double or triple that
number. About 20 percent of the plastic
in the oceans comes from ships or
offshore platforms; the rest is blown or
washed off the land, according to the
U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy.
Plastic debris is now found everywhere,
even the remotest regions of Antarctica.
Truly pristine locales no longer exist,
writes David K.A. Barnes of the British
Antarctic Survey in a recent paper.
"Some surveys have involved the
first known visit by man to very 'remote'
shores, but our miracle material had long
since beaten us there," he wrote.
In parts of the Southern Ocean, marine
debris has tripled in volume in the past
decade. Barnes has also shown that marine
debris is transporting exotic species to
locales they could never have reached
normally, changing the ecology of some
regions.
Most plastics do not biodegrade, they
just break up into ever-smaller
particles. British scientists have
discovered that microscopic pieces of
plastic can be found everywhere in the
oceans, even inside plankton, the
foundation of the marine food chain.
"The problem of marine litter has
steadily grown worse, despite national
and international efforts to control
it," acknowledges the UNEP report.
The report's findings will be officially
presented to governments attending a
review of the decade-old Global Programme
of Action initiative taking place in
Beijing, China, from Oct. 16-20.
There have been some improvements, the
report notes. Levels of oily waste
discharged from industry and cities has,
since the mid 1980s, been cut by close to
90 percent. Marine contamination from
toxic persistent organic pollutants like
DDT and discharges of radioactive waste
has also been sharply reduced.
However, larger challenges lie ahead,
such as global warming and sea level
rise.
"So we have a long way to go
politically, technically and financially
if we are to hand over healthy and
productive seas and oceans to the next
generation," Steiner said.
Back to Top
|
4. A PERSONAL
DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
(I refuse
to accept as my government actions by the current
administration and its obsequious servants, the
Republican Congress and the Republican Senate.)
BY
WILLIAM
A. COOK
“If there’s
any comparison between the compassion and decency
of the American people and the terrorist tactics
of extremists, it’s flawed logic … It’s
unacceptable to think that there’s any kind
of comparison between the behavior of the United
States of America and the action of Islamic
extremists who kill innocent women and children
to achieve an objective.” (President George
W. Bush, Sept. 15, 2006 report by AP’s
Terence Hunt)
09/29/06 "Palestine
Chronicle" -- - -Citizens of
the United States of America bear an awesome
responsibility to maintain control of their
government’s behavior since that government
derives its powers from the consent granted it by
the citizens. When the government ceases to act
in accord with the dictates of the respective
consciences of its citizens as determined by its
foundational documents – the Declaration of
Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of
Rights -- , when it violates the established
principles that give this nation legitimacy
before the nations of the world through mutually
accepted agreements, charters, and conventions,
when it abrogates the inalienable rights granted
the citizens by the Creator, when it declares
unequivocally that the citizens cannot dissent
with an action or actions taken by the
government, then it is the right and the duty of
the citizen to “alter or abolish” that
government.
For the past five years, the present government
of the United States, including the Executive
branch, the Congress and the Senate, has
committed a “long train of abuses and
usurpations pursuing invariably the same object
(that) evinces a design to reduce them (the
citizens) under absolute despotism.” As a
citizen of these United States for 70 years, I
refuse to be ruled by a tyrant who imposes
despotic, autocratic control on the citizens of
these United States through a series of
clandestine actions that usurp the rights of the
people.
I refuse to accept as my government actions by
the current administration and its obsequious
servants, the Republican Congress and the
Republican Senate, that include
* spying on its citizens without their knowledge
or consent, an action contrary to existing law;
* elimination of personal privacy through the
Patriot Act, an action that presumes culpability,
not innocence until proven guilty;
* preemptive invasion of other nations determined
by the unilateral judgment of an all powerful
executive that eviscerates the power of the
peoples’ representatives;
* acts of extrajudicial execution and the
abandonment of rule by law thereby making the
President, in effect, judge, jury and
executioner;
* acts of torture and the unilateral infliction
of “acceptable” torture techniques thus
casting America before the world as an amoral
nation beholden to no international agreement and
placing at risk the soldiers who defend it;
* imposition of illegal actions of war instituted
through an orchestrated control of lies
communicated to the citizenry thereby negating
their democratic right to know that they might
vote in accord with their conscience;
* levying an incredible tax burden on the
citizens to pay for the consequences of these
lies that will cost them and their children
dearly for decades to come while corporations
reap a windfall of profit from closed bids and
corruption;
* infliction of a forced military occupation on a
nation against the desires of its people and
enabling that occupation to use illegal weapons
of war contrary to the Geneva Conventions thus
implicating its citizens in acts against
humanity;
* development of diverse nuclear weaponry in
direct violation of the UN Charter even as it
decries other nations for attempting to acquire
their own nuclear weaponry;
* acceptance, indeed, complete complicity and
support of the barbaric and genocidal actions of
the state of Israel against the people of
Palestine, and most recently, and most
deplorably, the abandonment of all pretense to
the behavior of a civilized nation through its
almost unanimous acceptance of a resolution
written by the American Israeli Political Action
Committee to endorse the Israeli state’s
wanton destruction of the state of Lebanon.
These are not the actions of a democratic state;
these are the actions of an autocratic state, an
amoral state, an arrogant state that rules by
force and acts more ruthlessly than the “extremists
who kill innocent women and children to achieve
an objective,” negating by its actions the
unthinkable comparison the President decried.
For six years I have tracked the deception of
this government as it surreptitiously acted to
acquire more and more power by instilling in the
American people the fear necessary to propel the
autocrat to absolute power. Fear suppresses
individual inquiry even as it enables control of
the people, ostensibly to provide protection for
them. Fear creates victims, especially in the
minds of those who have not been violated. It is
the unknown, what might be that metastasizes into
the mental slave, the compliant citizen who
marches to the drum of those who would control a
society. It is the instrument of tyrants and
dictators.
This government hobbles its citizens by using
fear to manipulate their belief in end time
prophecy, by implanting fear of imminent threat
from “Islamofacist” fanatics, and by
immersing the people in a false sense of “victim
hood” that links them with the state of
Israel as the only “friend” in the
mid-east suffering from the same terrorist
scourge. It is time to dispel this fear that
enslaves. It is time to declare that this
government no longer serves the people, that,
indeed, it surpasses in its behavior “the
action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent
women and children to achieve an objective.”
It is not the “compassion and decency of the
American people” that is in question; it is
the absence of “compassion and decency”
in this administration that is at fault.
It is time to withdraw recognition of it as the
government of these United States.
How can a citizen withdraw recognition, one might
ask? I would answer simply that no person with a
conscience could recognize the validity of this
government that commits the actions listed above,
each more heinous than the last, the worst being
its near universal acceptance of the genocide
perpetrated by Israel on the Palestinians,
actions that are inclusive enough to incorporate
almost all the others. If every person of
conscience gave sign of their aversion to the
behavior of this government by wearing a black
armband or posting a black flag or ribbon on the
door or window ledge or by flying our flag upside
down, the numbers who distrust this government
would be manifest for the nation and the world to
see and we would not have to wait till election
time to cast our conscience on the screen.
I tell you this, each day that passes casts more
gloom over this nation as hundreds more die and
thousands more are maimed, and all for a lie and
all in our name. Appealing to our representatives
accomplishes nothing; they are but lackeys to the
administration and to the primary lobbing groups
that determine for them America’s foreign
policy, AIPAC and the lobbies for the
military/industrial complex. We can no longer
wait for the ballot box to determine our future;
it may not be our conscience that is voted to
office. Should we not act to declare this
government unjust and hence unfit to be our
government, then we will be no better than those
who dictate and inflict these atrocities on the
innocent. I will not have my conscience held
hostage by an elite few who rule without a
conscience. The honest citizen carries no weapons
against his brothers and sisters; the honest
citizen marches forward in tune with reason and
common sense not fear and ignorance.
Think how many Lebanese died, how many were
maimed, how many went homeless, how many die now
after the cease fire because Israel left its
calling card in the form of miniature mines for
children to play with, how much destruction and
wanton devastation this government inflicted in
our name while our representatives waited for
AIPAC to pen the resolution that gave license to
such slaughter. If any justice came from this
invasion it was this: the world was witness to
the savagery and barbarism of Israel that
ruthlessly devastated another people out of sheer
anger turned to vengeance, a behavior that it has
inflicted at will on the Palestinians behind
locked gates and its Wall of Infamy.
Think now of the holocaust being inflicted on the
people of Gaza, the reign of fire that comes with
missiles launched into crowded civilian
neighborhoods randomly killing mothers and
children, a reign of terror that has lasted over
three months as the Israelis lock the gates to
prevent access to medical care, food, employment,
and business, a reign of terror that starves the
children, denies the people electricity and
water, a reign of terror that is calculated,
vicious, and inhumane. But it is done behind the
Wall, out of sight of our conscience, locked out
of public view by the Israeli IOF and its
government that has closed access to Gaza by air,
sea, or road. Americans cannot complain because
our representatives have capitulated to an
Israeli government gone mad, driven by racism as
it surreptitiously rampages through schools,
refugee camps, factories and homes killing,
demolishing, executing at will a population that
is cornered, starved, and near total death; yet
America supports this mayhem justifying it as
“self-defense.” How does an illegal
occupying force operating on stolen land defend
what they do not own and call it self-defense?
What non-sense guides this crippled republic that
our representatives would defend such dementia?
Where does one turn for guidance out of this
morass? Will our Christian leaders proclaim the
teachings of Jesus from the steeples of their
churches? Will they condemn the government for
its ruthlessness? Will they march in the streets
to demand change? Will they echo Tolstoy’s
astute observation, “to kill is incompatible
with man’s uprightness…(for) A
Christian, whose doctrine enjoins upon him
humility, non-resistance to evil, love to all
(even to the most malicious), cannot … join
a class of men whose business it is to kill their
fellow-men.” (Writings on Civil-Disobedience
and Non-Violence). Oh, there are those who cry in
the wilderness, congregations that have divested
themselves of the atrocities inflicted by Israel
and they are to be praised even as they are
ignored by our representatives. There are the
Christian Arabs in Bethlehem who weep each day as
they see their flock decimated and their brothers
and sisters murdered, maimed, and humiliated as
that malicious Wall surrounds the birth place of
their God and our representatives turn their
backs. And there are voices for peace, millions
of voices that decry the wanton brutality of this
regime, Christian and Jew and Muslim, men and
women who know they are drenched in the blood of
the innocent because this despotic “President”
has determined how they must think and how they
must behave and our representatives kneel on
bended knee before his throne.
But the horror of America today rests not just in
the dementia of its leaders but in the distorted
madness of its evangelical fanatics who have
cloaked themselves in the armament of prophecy
declaring themselves God’s voice on earth as
they propel their sheep to wage endless war
against God’s creatures. Men who follow not
in the footsteps of the humble and peaceful Jesus
but in the footsteps of prior fools and idiots
that ran rampant in other days and times
inflicting mayhem and death on the innocent.
These fanatics do not know the teachings of
Jesus; they read from a gospel of fear that has
metamorphosed Jesus into a General who wields a
bloody and fiery sword, stomping over the hills
and valleys of the earth wreaking havoc and
death, thus does the God of light and peace, of
brotherly love, become the new Satan to whom
these TV evangelists pay homage.
They are men of war who stand behind their
pulpits in glistening cathedrals of gold and
glass while they send the children of their
congregations to slaughter. These men are
criminals not Christians. They do not understand
the bells of penitence for sin; the only bells
they ring intone the opening of the Stock Market
or the cash register.
Pastors like John Hagee, Pat Robertson, Franklin
Graham, Benny Hinn, and all the others who crowd
the Cathedral of Television lead their respective
laity into battle each day, marching at their
head, holding aloft their missiles of fire and
brimstone, tearing incendiary passages from the
Old Testament and Book of Revelation that pour
like acid from their mouths and flame forth
against perceived disbelievers and infidels.
Their exhortations on behalf of their malicious
God pits dementia against the teachings of Jesus,
pits vengeance against brotherhood, pits fear
against love, and power against compassion.
Have we transformed a nation respectful of all,
protective of the rights of all, assertive of the
inherent rights that give personal authority to
our conscience, into a nation that denies these
values in order to inflict our will on all
peoples of the mid-east? Has this nation granted
to its President and Congress absolute authority
to determine what we as a citizenry must obey if
we are to be Americans? Have we returned to the
days of McCarthy, days of fear and loathing,
forcing on all the demented ideology of a few?
Have we willingly accepted their lies that
brought forth the invasion against the Iraqi
people, the subterfuge that perpetuates the
genocide of the Palestinians, the fear they use
to compel loss of individual rights? Have we
handed to this administration the one force that
gives us power in this nation, our right to
dissent? Liberty is not liberty if it is defined
for you; freedom is but a word if it does not
give you peace of mind; and conscience does not
exist if you do not exercise it.
I would assert that as long as the compassion and
decency of the American people are defined by
this administration, we are a nation without
compassion and without decency and as long as
this administration directs the behavior of this
nation, any comparison to Islamic extremists who
“kill innocent women and children”
pales in comparison with the hundreds and
thousands this administration has slaughtered in
our name in Palestine and Iraq and Lebanon. There
is but one response and that is to deny it my
consent.
-William Cook is a professor of English at the
University of La Verne in southern California and
author of Tracking Depception: Bush's Mideast
Policy He can be reached at: [email protected].
Back to Top
5. IN NYC SPARKS FLY OVER ISRAEL
CRITICISM
BY
MICHAEL
POWELL
Two major American
Jewish organizations helped block a prominent New
York University historian from speaking at the
Polish consulate here last week, saying the
academic was too critical of Israel and American
Jewry.
The historian, Tony
Judt, is Jewish and directs New York University's
Remarque Institute, which promotes the study of
Europe. Judt was scheduled to talk Oct. 4 to a
nonprofit organization that rents space from the
consulate. Judt's subject was the Israel lobby in
the United States, and he planned to argue that
this lobby has often stifled honest debate.
An hour before Judt was
to arrive, the Polish Consul General Krzysztof
Kasprzyk canceled the talk. He said the
Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish
Committee had called and he quickly concluded
Judt was too controversial.
"The phone calls
were very elegant but may be interpreted as
exercising a delicate pressure," Kasprzyk
said. "That's obvious -- we are adults and
our IQs are high enough to understand that."
Judt, who was born and
raised in England and lost much of his family in
the Holocaust, took strong exception to the
cancellation of his speech. He noted that he was
forced to cancel another speech later this month
at Manhattan College in the Bronx after a
different Jewish group had complained. Other
prominent academics have described encountering
such problems, in some cases more severe,
stretching over the past three decades.
The pattern, Judt says,
is unmistakable and chilling.
"This is serious
and frightening, and only in America -- not in
Israel -- is this a problem," he said.
"These are Jewish organizations that believe
they should keep people who disagree with them on
the Middle East away from anyone who might
listen."
The leaders of the
Jewish organizations denied asking the consulate
to block Judt's speech and accused the professor
of retailing "wild conspiracy theories"
about their roles. But they applauded the
consulate for rescinding Judt's invitation.
"I think they made
the right decision," said Abraham H. Foxman,
national director of the Anti-Defamation League.
"He's taken the position that Israel
shouldn't exist. That puts him on our
radar."
David A. Harris,
executive director of the American Jewish
Congress, took a similar view. "I never
asked for a particular action; I was calling as a
friend of Poland," Harris said. "The
message of that evening was going to be entirely
contrary to the entire spirit of Polish foreign
policy."
Judt has crossed
rhetorical swords with the Jewish organizations
on two key issues. Over the past few years he has
written essays in the New York Review of Books,
the London Review of Books and in the Israeli
newspaper Haaretz arguing that power in Israel
has shifted to religious fundamentalists and
territorial zealots, that woven into Zionism is a
view of the Arab as the irreconcilable enemy, and
that Israel might not survive as a communal
Jewish state.
The solution, he argues,
lies in a slow and tortuous walk toward a
binational and secular state.
He has, of late,
defended an academic paper -- co-authored by
professor Stephen M. Walt of Harvard University's
John F. Kennedy School of Government and John J.
Mearsheimer, a professor at the University of
Chicago -- which argues the American Israel lobby
has pushed policies that are not in the United
States' best interests and in fact often
encourage Israel to engage in self-destructive
behavior.
These are deeply
controversial views -- Foxman of the ADL and
writer Christopher Hitchens, among others, have
attacked the Walt and Mearsheimer paper as
anti-Semitic. And Judt's advocacy of a binational
state has drawn a flock of critics, the more
angry of whom accuse him of "pandering to
genocide" as the Committee for Accuracy in
Middle East Reporting in America put it. Former
Bush speechwriter David Frum said Judt was
pursuing "genocide liberalism."
Foxman has referred to
Judt's views of Israel as "an offensive
caricature."
The Mearsheimer and Walt
paper, however, has drawn praise in some quarters
in Israel, particularly on the left. So, too some
Israeli writers, not least Israeli historian and
social critic Amos Elon, have praised Judt's
writings on Israel. Nor are Judt's arguments
without historical precedent: Massachusetts
Institute of Technology linguist and political
philosopher Noam Chomsky, who is Jewish, has
advocated a binational solution in Israel, a view
that three decades ago sparked such anger that
police stood guard at his college talks. More
recently, the ADL repeatedly accused DePaul
University professor Norman G. Finkelstein, who
is Jewish and strongly opposes Israeli policies,
of being a "Holocaust denier." These
charges have proved baseless.
"There is an often
organized and often spontaneous attempt to
marginalize anyone in the Jewish world who offers
a critique of Israeli policy," said Rabbi
Michael Lerner, editor of the liberal magazine
Tikkun. "It's equated with anti-Semitism and
Israel denial."
Foxman says such
complaints are silly. "Nobody has called
Judt an anti-Semite," Foxman said.
"People who are critical of Israel and of
the Jewish people often flaunt their Jewishness.
Why isn't that an issue?"
Judt replies that he
only reluctantly talks of his Jewishness, in no
small part to inoculate himself against charges
of anti-Semitism. "For many, the way to be
Jewish in this country is to aggressively assert
that the Holocaust is your identification
tag," Judt said. "I know perfectly well
my history, but it never occurred to me that my
most prominent identity was as a Jew."
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