The grip of this fiction on the American collective mind reflects a conjuncture of causes: the West’s guilt about the Holocaust; the proto-Zionist theology of American evangelical sects; U.S. imperial interests in Middle East oil reserves; and the West’s long-distrust of and contempt for Arabs and Muslims.

Propaganda produced by Israel and the American Jewish establishment inverts reality. This is crude stuff, manifestly false to anyone who would look up information published by a multitude of respected media and human rights organizations. But omissions and outright lies are probably a deliberate tactic: deny, deny … confuse, confuse … Like Israel’s building of “facts on the ground” (settlements, roads, etc.), it gains time; the hope is that Israeli power will eventually be so entrenched in the land of “Greater Israel” that nobody will remember Palestinians ever lived there.

The justice of the Palestinian cause is increasingly recognized in the West, particularly at the grassroots level. This is due, above all, to the courage and persistence of the Palestinians themselves. But scholars—Arab, Jewish, and other—who challenge the deceptive narratives also deserve credit. One such scholar is Gilbert Achcar, a Lebanese-born professor at the University of London and author of several books on the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy.

A smear campaign

The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives (Henry Holt and Company, 2010), Achcar’s most recent book, is an ambitious attempt to present an accurate history of Arab attitudes toward Nazism, Jews, and the Holocaust. It refutes the story told by pro-Israel zealots, who attribute hostility to Israel in the Arab world not to Israel’s actions, but to Arabs’ hatred of Jews: hatred, they argue, which originated in Islam and flourished with the Arabs’ collaboration with the Nazis during WWII.

The book has been well received by Middle East and Jewish Studies scholars, and Achcar has been invited to give talks on many university campuses. This raised the ire of David Horowitz, founder of the Horowitz Freedom Center, which, according to its mission statement, “combats the efforts of the radical left and its Islamist allies to destroy American values and disarm this country … The leftist offensive is most obvious on our nation’s campuses, where the Freedom Center protects students from indoctrination and political harassment.”

Last November, an article in the web FrontPage Magazine, edited and published by Horowitz, launched a smear campaign against Achcar. Focusing on a presentation by Achcar under the auspices of Middle East Studies of the University of California at Berkeley, the article appeared on a host of kindred websites, such as that of Campus Watch, an organization founded by Daniel Pipes, a main purveyor with Horowitz of Islamophobic material and whitewashing of Israel.¹

Another attack, directed at Achcar’s lecture in the Jewish Studies Department of the University of California at Davis, came from BlueTruth, a blog devoted to “refuting the accusations and exposing the lies that are being told … about Israel, Jews and pro-Israel organizations …” One such lie, to judge by the article, is that Israel was “built on Arab land.”

As someone whose mother and father were murdered in Auschwitz, and who herself survived the Nazis’ barbarous nationalism thanks to the courage of a group of Catholics, Protestants, Communists, and Jews, I find the idea that defending the “Jewish state” supersedes all other human obligations both immoral and senseless. Nothing, not even the Holocaust, justifies Israel’s treatment of Palestinians or the continuing efforts of pro-Israel zealots to show Arabs and Muslims as less than human. Israel and its unconditional supporters are on a path leading to catastrophe not only for Palestinians, but in the not very long run, for Israel itself.

The Arabs and the Holocaust

In his talk at Berkeley, Achcar described the book’s main purpose as deconstructing the image, dominant in the West and Israel, of Arabs as pro-Nazi. Relying on an extensive array of primary sources and historical studies, Achcar presents an “Arab world” with a great diversity of beliefs and opinions, a multiplicity of evolving ideological currents—just as in the West. The many Arab countries are not peopled by an indistinct mass of millions animated by ancestral hatred of the Jews. “The Arabs,” Achcar writes, do not exist “as a politically and intellectually uniform group.”²

The first part of Achcar’s book covers the period from 1933, when Hitler acceded to power, until Israel’s foundation in 1948. At that time, “liberal Westernizers” and Marxists took a strong stand against both Nazism and anti-Semitism. In the various Arab nationalist movements, sympathy for the Axis varied but was overall low, and opposition to Zionism did not translate into hatred of “the Jews.” It is only among “reactionary and/or fundamentalist pan-Islamists” that significant anti-Semitism and support for Nazism were found.

Several recent studies confirm this. For example, Achcar’s book quotes Israel Gershoni, a professor of Middle Eastern History at Tel Aviv University, who wrote that in the 1930s:

the overwhelming majority of Egyptian voices—in the political arena, in intellectual circles, among the professional, educated, urban middle classes and even in the literate popular cultures—rejected fascism and Nazism both as an ideology and a practice, and as “an enemy of the enemy.”³ [a reference to “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” a view which did create some support for Nazi Germany among Arabs living under the yoke of French and British colonization.]

Those painting Arabs as heirs to Nazism use as “proof” one particular episode: the 1941 Baghdad “pogrom” (the Farhud). In April 1941, Iraqi pro-German nationalists led a coup against Iraq’s pro-British regent. Propaganda by the German legation, reinforced by the presence of the pro-Nazi Mufti of Jerusalem, had whipped up anti-Jewish feeling in Baghdad. British forces invaded Iraq, put the pro-German government to flight, and secured Baghdad, but their troops remained posted on the outskirts. Rumors circulated that the Jews were helping the much-hated British. There followed two days of killing and plunder; about 180 Jews were murdered. The rioters were stopped when Iraqi troops entered Baghdad and reestablished order, killing many of the mob.

Achcar notes that the vast majority of Muslim Iraqis condemned the violence and many protected their Jewish neighbors at the risk of their own lives. Looters from Baghdad’s slums, driven by need rather than anti-Jewish sentiment, joined in the action. With the regent back in power, the Iraqi government granted compensation to the families of Jewish victims.

Achcar’s account of the Farhud agrees with that of several authors, such as Nissim Rejwan, an Israeli writer of Baghdadi origin.⁴ There is little evidence that the Farhud was indicative of widespread and deeply rooted hatred toward Jews in the whole of “the Arab world.” Note that no anti-Jewish rioting occurred in any other Arab country during WWII, despite the calls to jihad broadcast from Berlin by the Mufti from November 1941 on.

In fact, Arabs played a truly remarkable role in defeating Hitler, a fact so carefully suppressed by the French after the war that I did not learn of it in 15 years of schooling in France. As part of De Gaulle’s Free French Forces, Arab troops from French North Africa contributed massively to the liberation of Europe. They fought alongside the Allies from the landing in Sicily in July 1943 to the invasion of Germany in 1945, with great loss of life. For instance, 233,000 of the 550,000 Free French troops landing on the Mediterranean coast in Nazi-occupied France in November 1944 were North African Muslims.⁵

The second part of Achcar’s book traces the rise of anti-Semitism in the Arab world after the founding of Israel in 1948. Western anti-Semitic themes, such as the “international Jewish conspiracy” of the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion, found their way into public discourse. Achcar does not excuse or minimize Arab anti-Semitism. He deplores the “abysmal stupidity” of these “anti-Semitic ravings or mindless denials of the Holocaust.” But do these ravings indicate an Arab wish to exterminate the Jews, a project they supposedly inherited from the Nazis? These claims are absurd, according to Achcar and many others. Nissim Rejwan, for instance, writes:

Neither their religious culture nor their historical record lends credence to the claim that the Muslim Arabs of today are capable of the kind of historical consummation that found expression in Auschwitz and other Nazi extermination camps … Viewed in anything like the correct historical perspective, the idea of “Arab Auschwitz” is an absurdity.⁶

And, of course, there are parallel ravings in Israeli/Jewish political discourse: referring to Arabs by animal names, calling for their expulsion and annihilation, and so on. See Israeli General Rafael Eitan’s infamous statement: “When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.”⁷

Achcar writes: “There are more anti-Semites among the Arabs today than among any other population group—for obvious historical reasons” [emphasis mine].⁸ These historical reasons, which are indeed obvious, were they not again and again obfuscated by pro-Israel apologists, include: Israel’s ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinian Arabs in 1948-1949 and its systematic destruction of 418 Palestinian villages to prevent the refugees’ return: creating 300,000 more Palestinian refugees in 1967; a brutal and tyrannical occupation accompanied by continued ethnic cleansing ever since; and atrocities against civilian populations in wars in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Lebanon.

Contemporary Arab anti-Semitism is not unmotivated, atavistic hatred. It is rooted in anger at Israel’s very real aggressive and destructive policies. Even Bernard Lewis, a historian favored by defenders of Israel, wrote “for Christian anti-Semites, the Palestine problem is a pretext and an outlet for their hatred; for Muslim anti-Semites, it is the cause.”⁹ Remove the cause—that is, end Israel’s ethnocentrism and expansionism—and Arab anti-Semitism would likely fade away.

Achcar shows how Arab anti-Semitism is “reactive” and changeable—dependent on Israel’s actions, its violence, its propaganda (e.g., calling Arabs “Nazis”), and on the particular historical and political circumstances of the various Arab/Muslim countries. It is not “the fantasy-based hatred of the Jews that was and still is typical of European racists.”¹⁰

I surmise that The Arabs and the Holocaust was written with an Arab audience in mind as well as a Western one. The book has been translated into Arabic and it is, among other things, an attempt to build bridges, a call for each side to listen to the other. He writes:

It is faith in human reason that justifies the hope that what counts as truth on one side of the Green Line or, rather, of the separation wall, will not forever count as error on the other.¹¹

In the conclusion, describing “statist Zionism” as “a Janus, one face turned toward the Holocaust, the other toward the Nakba, one toward persecution endured, the other toward persecution inflicted,” Achcar returns to the need for each side to acknowledge the sufferings of the other:

Only recognition of both of Janus’ faces—of the Holocaust and the Nakba—can bring Israeli, Palestinians, and other Arabs in genuine dialogue.¹²

Achcar’s book displays a formidable knowledge of the currents of thought on both sides of the Arab/Jewish divide as well as a brilliant analytic mind. By placing Arab attitudes toward the Holocaust in historical and psychological contexts, he opens up vistas to Western readers beyond the shallow, warped views of U.S. main media. He understands and has compassion for the historical wounds of the Jews. His integrity and openness shine throughout.

Hasbara

The authors of the FrontPageMag article, Cinnamon Stillwell and Rima Greene, seem not to be concerned about historical context. They mix innuendo, distortion and falsehood, quote out of context and misquote, then add in one or another point of dogma. They do not at any point counter Achcar with contrary evidence. Instead, they speak in generalities, e.g., Achcar’s book “masks its outlandish conclusions with scholarly apparatus while confirming the biases of the left-leaning, anti-Israel Middle East studies establishment.”

The “Hasbara Handbook: Promoting Israel on Campus” (hasbara is Hebrew for “public relations, “ or “propaganda”), published in 2002 by the World Union of Jewish Students, gives advice on how to score points “whilst avoiding genuine discussion”: rather than addressing your opponent’s arguments, make “as many comments that are positive about Israel as possible whilst attacking certain Palestinian positions, and attempting to cultivate a dignified appearance”; repeat points again and again, “If people hear something often enough, they come to believe it.” The same tactics seem to be used in the writing of most FrontPageMag articles.

Nakba vs. Holocaust

Stillwell and Greene write: “Achcar concluded by drawing an asinine correlation between the Holocaust … and the ‘Nakba’ or ‘catastrophe,’ the Arabic term to describe the creation of the state of Israel: ‘The Shoah ended in 1945, but the suffering of the Palestinians is never-ending.’”

In fact, Achcar, in his talk characterized the Nakba as “fortunately not a genocide, but what we could call an act of ethnic cleansing.” He went on to say that real dialogue conducive to peace requires

the mutual recognition of the tragedies of each other without putting them on the same plane … because the magnitude of the Holocaust cannot be compared to that of the Nakba… Nevertheless, this does not diminish the importance of what Palestinians have suffered. Not only the ordeal of the Palestinians is continuing … But they went through … the worst kind of experience just recently in Gaza in the winter of 2008-2009.

In his book, Achcar condemns making “no distinction between colonialist usurpation of a territory and the racist extermination of a whole population.”¹³ He quotes Edward Said: “Who would want morally to equate mass extermination with mass dispossession?”¹⁴ But he also states that Palestinian suffering is ongoing, and getting worse.

In fact, it is rarely useful to compare the Holocaust and the ordeal of the Palestinians; it does not help us understand the reality of either. Sixty-four years have elapsed since the Nakba, 64 years during which Palestinians have been subjected to further wars, expulsions, and dispossession. They have been denied political, economic, and human rights. At present, in Gaza, 1.5 million people, half of them children, are imprisoned behind a 25-foot high fence and regularly attacked by Israeli drones and Apache helicopters, killed by fire from tanks and snipers on Gaza’s borders; in the West Bank, Palestinians are evicted from their land to make way for Israeli settlers who harass and kill with impunity; and East Jerusalem is being “judaized,” i.e., emptied of its Palestinian inhabitants.

This is not genocide, but what name is there for it?

Anti-Arab racism in Israel

Stillwell and Greene claim that, unlike anti-Semitism in the Arab world, “’anti-Arab attitudes in Israel’ are neither widespread, [nor] promulgated through state-provided education and other official means.” But all polls of Israeli Jews reveal deep anti-Arab feeling. For instance, the Israel Democracy Institute released a poll in January 2011, which found that nearly half of Israeli Jews would not want to live next door to an Arab.¹⁵ Racism is strongest among the young: the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper reported that civics teachers around the country were complaining of rampant, virulent anti-Arab racism amongst their Jewish students.¹⁶

Nuri Peled-Elhanan, an Israeli professor of education and author of a book on Israeli school books,¹⁷ thinks “state-provided education” is a main culprit in promoting racism. Interviewed in the Guardian, she said Israeli school books describe Arabs “as vile and deviant and criminal, people who don’t pay taxes, people who live off the state, people who don’t want to develop… The only representation is as refugees, primitive farmers and terrorists.”

She added: “One question that bothers many people is how do you explain the cruel behavior of Israeli soldiers towards Palestinians, an indifference to human suffering, the inflicting of suffering. … I think the major reason for that is education.”

“Other official means” of promulgating racism include laws that are the very foundation of the Israeli state: the 1950 Law of Return and 1952 Citizenship Law, which allow every Jew in the world to immigrate to Israel and become an Israeli citizen. These same laws forbid the return of Palestinians who were forced to flee their homes from 1947 to 1952. This inequity may have made sense to those in the West who lived through the years after WWII, when the horrors of the Holocaust and general acceptance of colonialism blinded almost everyone to the injustice perpetrated against Palestinian Arabs. But it is much past time to look at the situation through Palestinian eyes.

More recent laws show racism becoming increasingly institutionalized in Israel. Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, reports that “the current government coalition has proposed a flood of new racist and discriminatory bills.” One such bill legalizes “admission committees” operating in nearly 700 small towns, allowing them to reject applicants deemed “unsuitable to the social life of the community … or the social and cultural fabric of the town”—for “unsuitable applicants,” read principally “Arabs.”¹⁸

Holocaust denial, Nakba denial

Israel’s recent Nakba Law effectively forbids the public commemoration of the Nakba. Israel lodged a protest when UN secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon used the word in a telephone conversation with Mahmoud Abbas on May 2008, the 60th anniversary of the Nakba. Tzipi Livni, then Israel’s foreign minister, declared: “The Palestinians can celebrate an Independence Day if, on that day, they eliminate the word Nakba from their vocabulary.”

Speaking with her usual icy self-assurance, Livni was essentially telling the Arab minority to shut up about a fact no historian denies, not even Zionist historian Benny Morris, who said: “I don’t think that the expulsions of 1948 were war crimes. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”¹⁹ Because she speaks as a government minister of a state with a very powerful military and several hundred nuclear weapons, her pronouncements are alarming.

Livni makes luminously clear that Israel is not a democracy for all its citizens. For the Jews, yes, although the rights of dissenters are increasingly restricted. In effect, “a Jewish and democratic state” is an oxymoron, no matter how much ink has been spent to deny it: a state so defined must privilege the Jews over other citizens. And being Jewish is unlike being, for example, French. One can become French by participating in the country’s communal life for five years, but there is no way to become Jewish and qualify for the Law of Return except by converting to Judaism, or by being “a child and a grandchild of a Jew, the spouse of a Jew, the spouse of a child of a Jew, and the spouse of a grandchild of a Jew.”

Israel: innocent, victimized, maligned …

Gail Rubin J.D. author of the BlueTruth article, waxes indignant at Achcar for describing Israel as a “’settler colonial project’ built on ‘Arab land,’” and “accusing Zionists of ‘ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.’”

That Israel was built on Arab land, whether bought or confiscated, is undeniable. As for “ethnic cleansing,” Benny Morris, who argued in his early books that the Palestinians had fled because of the war, now concedes the role of deliberate Zionist policy: “I have concluded that pre-1948 thinking had a greater effect on what happened in 1948 than I had allowed for…”²⁰

In any case, no one denies that Israel prevented the return of refugees, a violation of international law. It was Israeli policy to shoot as “infiltrators” Palestinians trying to return to their villages in the night. Hundreds of villages were destroyed to foreclose their former inhabitants’ return.

Arguments about the colonial nature of the Israeli state usually take the form of semantic nitpicking. Sociologist Maxime Rodinson, a French Jew who first broke the taboo against calling Israel a “colonial-settler state,” concludes his remarkable 1967 essay:

… the creation of the State of Israel on Palestinian soil is the culmination of a process that fits perfectly into the European-American movement of expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries whose aim was to settle new inhabitants among other people or to dominate them economically and politically. This is, moreover, an obvious diagnosis, and if I have taken so many words to state it, it is only because of the desperate efforts that have been made to conceal it.²¹

Stillwell and Greene recommend a review of Achcar’s book by “atypical professors” Matthias Küntzel and Colin Meade. The lengthy review²² takes up the themes of Küntzel’s book, Jihad and Jew-hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the roots of 9/11, such as: Islamist movements—al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran’s regime—originated in the lethal link between Islamism and Nazism; the Arabs have inherited “eliminatory anti-Semitism” from the Nazis; jihadism and jihadist anti-Semitism are the greatest threats to the world today. According to Achcar, his book is “a fantasy-based narrative pasted together out of secondary sources and third-hand reports.”²³

In Küntzler’s view, responsibility for the Palestine-Israel conflict lies entirely with the Palestinians and Arabs:

… it is not the escalation of the Middle East conflict that has given rise to anti-Semitism; it is rather anti-Semitism that has given rise to the escalation of the Middle East conflict – again and again…. In fact, what we are seeing is the revival of Nazi ideology in a new garb.²⁴

This is yet another version of the myth that Israel acts only in response to Arab aggression. In fact, following the conquest of land and expulsion of its native Arab inhabitants, Israel again and again inflicted great harm on Arabs and Muslims—primarily the Palestinians, but also those living in the border states—through actions that cannot be attributed to Israel’s need to survive. Consider the annexation of Jerusalem, a city sacred to Islam; the occupation of the Palestinian territories and of the Golan Heights; and wars such as that against Lebanon in 2006, supposedly a response to the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers that resulted in 1,200 Lebanese deaths, almost all of them civilians.

One example provides strong evidence that Arabs have not inherited the Nazis’ exterminatory will. The 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, re-endorsed unanimously by the Arab League in 2007,²⁵ calls upon Israel to withdraw from all the territories occupied since 1967, and for the establishment of a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital. The Arab countries would then commit to establishing normal relations with Israel and provide security for all the states of the region. Israel is entreated to accept the initiative to “[enable] the Arab countries and Israel to live in peace and good neighborliness and provide future generations with security, stability and prosperity.” The initiative calls for “a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem,” but expresses support for any negotiated settlement between Israel and Palestinians.

It is difficult to find exterminatory anti-Semitism in all this. Unsurprisingly, Israeli politicians have ignored the initiative.

All signs point to the fact that Israel has never wanted an equitable peace settlement. Israeli governments since Israel’s beginnings, including Labor governments, have all acted to further the goal of a Greater Israel empty of Palestinians.

The how and why of pro-Israel watchdogs on campuses

Pro-Israel propaganda outlets like Frontpage Magazine carry little weight with scholars of the Middle East, but they are significant actors in sustaining the upside-down view of the Israel-Palestine conflict in America. They use intimidation to inhibit free speech on campuses, and poison the well of public discourse.

They advise students to take notes and report on professors, which especially intimidates junior, untenured faculty. They post on their websites telephone numbers and e-mail addresses of departments and faculties which get harassed by angry phone calls and swamped by hate mail.

Pipes and Horowitz encourage confrontation and creating disturbances, followed by complaints that their freedom of speech was curtailed. So here is Gail Rubin’s account of the Q&A part of Achcar’s talk at UC, Davis:

… challenging questions were not welcomed during the Q & A. I was abruptly censored while attempting to establish facts to challenge Mr. Achcar’s skewed conclusion that the Grand Mufti’s anti-Semitism had only a minimal impact on both Jews and Arabs. Professors Miller and Biale angrily told me the questions were insulting and to either stop or leave the room.

In fact, according to Jewish Studies Director, Professor Diane Wolf, Rubin was called on to ask her question, read a prepared script with no relation to Achcar’s talk, and then asked him whether he wasn’t blaming the Holocaust on the Jews. As he started to express that he was shocked and offended, she tried to re-read her statement. At this point, Professor David Biale and others told her to be quiet and Professor Susan Miller explained that in an academic environment, we wait for the speaker’s response to a question. She should leave if she could not abide by those rules. So the questioner was stopped only when she interrupted Achcar to repeat her statement.

In an interview after Achcar’s program, Professor Emily Gottreich, Vice Chair of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Berkeley, commented that if these campus pro-Israel activists were truly interested in engaging in academic dialogue, they would express their disagreements directly to the scholar in a public forum or to departmental chairs or program directors; instead, they appeal directly to donors, who tend to be neither Middle East experts nor particularly well-versed in the rules of academic discourse, to withdraw funding; or they approach university presidents or chancellors with accusations of anti-Semitism and “biased” scholarship.

Campus Watch and Horowitz’ Freedom Center are only two pieces in a large network of pro-Israel pressure groups operating on campuses. The Israel on Campus Coalition includes no less than 33 independent organizations, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and Anti-Defamation League (but not Horowitz’ or Pipes’ organizations, whose work may not quite fit the coalition’s image). The coalition works “to engage leaders at colleges and universities around issues affecting Israel, and to create positive campus change for Israel.”

Why this vast deployment of resources on campuses? The answer is straightforward. A recent document by the David Project, dedicated to ensuring that “effective support for Israel thrives on campuses and in our communities,” states: “AIPAC has had a successful track record in building campus ties to future members of Congress and campus leaders.”²⁶ To-morrow’s leaders are on campuses today, so the thinking goes, and they must be reached by Israeli propaganda as early as possible.

Changing Americans’ view of who Palestinians are

Philip Weiss, founder and co-editor of Mondoweiss.net, a website of news about Israel/Palestine, recounts a Skype-mediated “meeting” with youth in Gaza: “Most of the questions were from young men. They were smart but slightly abstract questions … Then Rawan Yaghi sat at the microphone and asked, What can be done to change Americans’ view of who Palestinians are?”

Weiss writes of being overcome with emotion by this “poised young woman wearing wire-rimmed glasses, 18 years old … There was such delicacy to her manner and her question … I struggled against upwelling emotions to answer her question. ‘`This is the biggest question of all, and I don’t know the answer.’”

For all of us living outside the prison of Gaza, this young woman’s question should come as a call to remember the immense harm created by prejudice, ignorance, and demonization. Voices like Gilbert Achcar’s must be heard on campuses and in larger public arenas.

1. Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America, Center for American Progress, August 2011.
2. Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust, p. 33.
3. Israel Gershoni, “Beyond Anti-Semitism: Egyptian Responses to German Nazism and Italian Fascism in the 1930s” (EUI Working Paper no. RSC 20001/32, San Domenico, 2001, p.6.
4. Nissim Rejwan, The Jews of Iraq: 3000 years of history and culture. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985.
5. Benjamin Stora, L’armée d’Afrique: Les oubliés de la Libération, ‪Volume 692 of Textes et documents pour la classe TDC. ‪C.N.D.P., 1995.
6. Nissim Rejwan, Arabs aims and Israeli attitudes. The Leonard Davis Institute, Davis Occasional Papers, No 77, 2000.
7. “Israel Washes Away the Sins of Former Army Chief of Staff,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2005.
8. Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust, p. 274.
9. Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice. Reissued with new afterword. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. p. 259.
10. Achcar, p. 275.
11. Achcar, p. 273.
12. Achcar, p. 291.
13. Achcar, p. 130.
14. Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust, p. 26.
15. “Israeli intolerance shows up on Internet, in Knesset, on the street,” Los Angeles Times, January 23, 2011.
16. Tomer Velmer, “Student’s answer on civics test: Death to Arabs,” YNet Magazine, January 19, 2011.
17. Nurit Elhanan-Peled, Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education. Library of Modern Middle East Studies, 2012.
18. “The Inequality Report,” Adalah, March 2011. See also “New Discriminatory Laws and Bills in Israel,” June 2011. Both can be downloaded from Adalah.
19. “Survival of the Fittest? An Interview with Benny Morris,” with 
Ari Shavit, Logos 3.1, Winter 2004.
20. Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, p. 5.
21. Maxime Rodinson, Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?, New York: Monad Press, 1973.
22. “In the Straightjacket of Anti-Zionism,” on the website of Engage, “a resource that aims to help people counter the boycott Israel campaign.” Küntzel’s book Jihad and Jew-hatred, translated by Colin Mead, was published by Telos Press Publishing (2008).
23. Achcar, p. 169-170.
24. From a talk given at Yale University, “Hitler’s Legacy: Islamic Antisemitism in the Middle East.”
25. Arab Peace Initiative.
26. “A Burning Campus? Rethinking Israel Advocacy at America’s Universities and Colleges,” 2012.

Prime Minister Meles Zenawi Asres of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) rules Ethiopia with a heavy hand of control, restricting free assembly — a right written into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) — inhibiting the freedom of the media and denying the people freedom of expression in manifold ways.

Media freedom is a basic pillar of any democratic society. Freedom of political expression, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press are essential elements of a democracy. Whilst media independence throughout the world is contentious at best, autonomy from direct State ownership and influence is a crucial element in establishing an independent media.

In Ethiopia not only are television and radio owned and controlled by the state but also access to information, as is made clear by Human Rights Watch (HRW) in its report “One Hundred Ways of Putting Pressure: Violations of Freedom of Expression and Association in Ethiopia,” which states:

The independent media has struggled to establish itself in the face of constant government hostility and an inability to access information from government officials.

The report continues:

Since the 2005 elections in Ethiopia the government has systematically introduced tighter and tighter methods of control.  Over the past five years the Ethiopian government has restricted political space for the opposition, stifled independent civil society, and intensified control of the media.

Owning Information

Since the end of Ethiopia’s civil war in 1991, privately owned newspapers and magazines have been appearing, and despite heavy regulation by the Meles government, this area of Ethiopian media is expanding. The print media, however, is of little significance due to the low literacy of the adult population (48%). With high levels of poverty and poor infrastructure making distribution difficult, newspapers are not widely circulated or read; consequently, the main source of information for the majority of people is the state-owned television and radio, which serve as little more than a mouthpiece of propaganda for the EPRDF.

Internet media is also restricted, with access to the web the lowest in Africa. Research & Markets found:

Ethiopia has the lowest overall teledensity in Africa. The population is approaching 90 million, but there are less than 1 million fixed lines in service, and a little more than 3.3 million mobile subscribers. The number of internet users is dismal — below 500,000 at the end of 2009.

The World Bank puts the figure a little higher at 7.5%.

In another demonstration of democratic duplicity, the EPRDF controls all telecommunications. Internet and telephone systems must run through the State-owned Ethiopian Telecommunications Corporation.  A World Bank Report, released in 2011  states that  82.40 percent of Ethiopians in 2010 live in rural areas and have no access at all to the world wide web.

By maintaining monopoly control of telecommunications, the Ethiopian Government is denying most of the population access to another key area of mass information. This is an additional infringement of basic democratic principles of diversity and social participation, as Noam Chomsky wrote:

The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations.

The EPRDF regime is, in fact, a dictatorship wherein its citizens are unable to speak freely, organize political activities, and challenge their government’s policies through peaceful protest, voting, or publishing their views without fear of reprisal.

Law Breakers

Freedom of thought, of expression, and of information are basic requirements under the UDHR.

Article 19 states:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Although the UDHR is not, in itself, a legally binding document, it provides moral guidance for states and offers a clear indication of what we, as a world community, have agreed are the basic requirements of correct governance and civilized living.

As stated in the preamble:

It is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law.

However, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), a sister document to the UDHR, provides such legal protection and is indeed legally binding. There we find Article 19, paragraph 1:

Everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference.

And paragraph 2:

Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.

Ethiopia ratified this international treatise on June 11, 1993, and is therefore legally bound by its articles. By imposing tight regulatory controls on media inside and indeed outside of Ethiopia — the case of ESAT TV based in Holland, whose satellite signal is repeatedly [illegally} blocked by the EPRDF -- the government is in violation of international law.  Furthermore, by restricting the freedom of the media and inhibiting any hint of dissent, the regime is also in contradiction of its own constitution. Article 29, entitled rather optimistically “Right of Thought, Opinion and Expression” states:

1. Everyone has the right to hold opinions without interference;

2. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression without any interference. This right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any media of his choice;

3.  Freedom of the press and other mass media and freedom of artistic creativity is guaranteed. Freedom of the press shall specifically include the following elements: (a) Prohibition of any form of censorship. (b) Access to information of public interest.

Clear and noble words, indeed democratic in content and tone; however, words that sit filed neatly upon the shelf of neglect and indifference that serve only as a mask of convenience and deceit allowing the betrayal of the many to continue. Human Rights Watch states:

The 1995 constitution incorporates a wide range of human rights standards, and government officials frequently voice the state’s commitment to meeting its human rights obligations. But these steps while important, have not ensured that Ethiopia’s citizens are able to enjoy their fundamental rights.

State Suppression

In 2009 the EPRDF passed two inhibiting pieces of legislation that embody some of the worst aspects of the government’s descent towards greater repression and political intolerance. The controversial CSO law is, according to HRW, one of the most restrictive of its kind, and its provisions will make most independent human rights work impossible.

A “counterterrorism” law was introduced at the same time; this second piece of repressive legislation allows the government and security forces to prosecute political protesters and non-violent expressions of dissent as terrorism. Since the introduction of these internationally criticised laws, the UN Jubilee Campaign in its report “Human Rights Council Universal Periodic Review Ethiopia” recommends the adoption of this law [emphasis mine] be repealed.”  The umbrella term “terrorist”, meaning anyone who disagrees with the party/state line, continues to be used and manipulated as justification for all manner of human rights violations and methods of suppression and control.

What defines a terrorist or an act of terrorism remains vague and ambiguous, enabling the Meles regime to construct definitions that suit them at any given time. Amongst other travesties of justice, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reveals that the legislation, “permits a clamp down on political dissent, including political demonstrations and public criticisms of government policy, it also deprives defendants of the right to be presumed innocent.“

A primary function of the media in a democratic society is to examine and criticise the government and provide a public platform for debate and participation. This law denies such interaction and freedom of expression, is in violation of the ICCPR, and contravenes the much-championed Ethiopian constitution — idealised images of goodness remaining stillborn.

The anti-terror law is a pseudonym for a law of repression and control, made and enforced by a paranoid regime, determined to use all means in its armoury to quash any dissent and maintain a system of disinformation and duplicity. Media organisations that disagree with the EPRDF party line run the risk of being branded “terrorists” under this law, arrested and imprisoned.

Dawit Kebede, editor-in-chief of Awramba Times, says:

The law provides a pretext for the government to intimidate and even arrest journalists who fall afoul of its wording. Kebede said the regulations were a government campaign to oppress all forms of dissident activity.

This new law inhibits the ability of the media to report anything that is deemed critical of the current government. All opposing voices to policy are stifled; journalists are frightened, and the facility to expose and criticize the many serious violations of human rights, and provide a balanced view of the issues facing the country, are denied. The rights to freedom of expression and association are restricted, all independent voices have been virtually silenced and freedom of speech and opinion are denied. Human Rights Watch makes clear its concern over the past five years that the Ethiopian government has restricted political space for the opposition, stifled independent civil society, and intensified control of the media.

Control flows from fear.  The greater the dishonesty, corruption and greed, the more extreme the controls become. Under the EPRDF governance, Ethiopians are subjected to a range of human rights abuses and violations.  Political opposition has been unofficially banned, making this democracy sitting in the Horn of Africa a single party dictatorship. The UN, in its human rights report, finds “resistance to opposition has become the primary source of concern regarding the future of human rights in Ethiopia” and confirms the view of HRW that “The CSO law directly inhibits rights to association, assembly and free expression.”

The Meles regime seeks, as all isolated corrupt dictatorships do, to centralize power, deny dissent and freedom of expression and suppress the people by intimidation, violence and fear, creating an atmosphere of apprehension, extinguishing all hope of justice, true human development and freedom from tyranny. Disempowerment is the aim.  The means, crude and unimaginative, are well known: keep the people uneducated, deny them access to information, restrict their freedom of association and expression and keep them entrapped.

Demanding justice

The people of Ethiopia, without an effective media, have no voice. The controls that deny media freedom, and the people the freedom of association and expression, guaranteed under the Ethiopian constitution and international law, must be repealed, and the will of the people must be done for justice and the rule of law underlies their demands for freedom, peace and the observation of their basic human rights.

So it should not be surprising if the BDS movement itself experiences turmoil. For several years now, the UK Palestinian Soldarity Committee (PSC) has conducted a policy of calling leading activists such as Paul Eisen, Gilad Atzmon and Israel Shamir — all Jewish — anti-Semitic for daring to point out that those who persecute Arab Muslims and Christians are not just Zionists but are invariably Jewish. That the Jews who have opted to take Israeli citizenship are increasingly racist, belligerent settlers who use their new identity to dispossess, terrorise and murder Palestinians, with the intent of forcing them to leave even the remaining 12 per cent of the land once called Palestine.

These Jews have given Judaism a bad name, causing some “good Jews” to critique their own religious heritage and even disown it, such as American highschooler and winner of the 2012 Martin Luther King Jr Writing Award Jesse Lieberfeld, who came to realise, “I was grouped with the racial supremacists… I was part of a delusion.” For these Jews, Judaism today had been perverted by Zionism. Paying tribute to Jesse, ex-Israeli Gilad Atzmon said, “Journeying from choseness is a life-struggle. From time to time you may feel lonely but you are never alone. Humanity and humanism are there at your side — for all time.”

Atzmon, born and bred in Israel, with holocaust victims in his family, is the latest victim of the UK PSC, which earlier ostracised Eisen for his Der Yassin Remembered group honouring martyred Palestinian Muslims and Christians of the 1948 Nakba, when thousands of Palestinians were killed and hundreds of thousands made permanent refugees.

After being ostracised, Eisen and Shamir dismissed the “gatekeepers” in the movement, and carried on with their analysis and organising from the sidelines, sidelines which are growing just as fast as, if not faster than the mainstream and are now firmly centred on popularising a one-state solution to solve the Palestine-Israel problem.

Atzmon continued to lock horns with the UK PSC establishment, hoping to change it, though it is dominated by the likes of Tony Greenstein with his J-Big (Jews boycotting Israeli goods). No doubt Atzmon’s Sabra heritage steeled him for battle with those supporters of the Palestinians who see the movement as more a way to fight anti-Jewish sentiment (caused by Zionism) than to actually achieve victory for the Palestinians. He decided to write an analysis of his Jewish heritage and how it was transformed over the past century entitled The Wandering Who?¹ His book became a bestseller and he has been touring America and Europe regularly, speaking out bravely and making his gilad.co.uk a must read for all who care about both Palestine and “the plight of the Jews”.

Jewish intellectuals such as Ilan Pappe are following Atzmon’s footsteps and leaving Israel, disgusted with the cynicism and duplicity of the entire Israeli establishment. Atzmon has attracted many admirers — too many, it seems — from among the more mainstream critics of Israel. Richard Falk and John Mearsheimer — both Jewish — endorsed Atzmon’s book, Mearsheimer recommending that the book “should be widely read by Jews and non-Jews alike”.

On 13 March, near the end of Atzmon’s latest tour of the US speaking to pro-Palestinian groups, Electronic Intifada editor Ali Abunimah published a letter at the US Palestinian Community Network (PCN) signed by 23 Palestinian activists, including Columbia University professor Joseph Massad and Omar Barghouti, a founder of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Committee for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel and author of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights (currently doing an MA in philosophy at Tel Aviv University). The letter called for “the disavowal of the racism and anti-Semitism of Gilad Atzmon”. Abunimah effectively excommunicated Atzmon from participating in pro-Palestinian activities of the US PCN, as he was by the UK PSC. Atzmon wound up his tour the next day with an interview with (Jewish) history professor Norton Mezvinsky of Connecticut State University, at Washington’s Mount Vernon Place United Methodist Church, where he rebutted the charges against him.

But just as Muslims are loudly called on to disown Islamic terrorists such as Al-Qaeda, so must Jews disown their own Judaic terrorists, reasons Atzmon, who has been leading the way in this politically incorrect battle. Now that the dust has settled, and support for Atzmon has poured in, the letter in retrospect looks like an exercise in hasbara gone wrong. Conspicuous in their absence among signatories are leading Israel critics Noam Chomsky, Norman Finklestein, Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, The Progressive’s Matt Rothschild, Tikkun’s Michael Lerner, OpEd’s Rob Kall, and US Congress hopeful Norman Solomon.

It is possible to critique Atzmon for downplaying the imperialism behind Israel’s founding and support, which Abunimah does: “Our struggle is with Zionism, a modern European settler colonial movement, similar to movements in many other parts of the world that aim to displace indigenous people and build new European societies on their lands.” However, there is nothing wrong with critiquing the problem from a cultural point of view, and the guilty culture just happens to be Jewish. Sadly, there is more than one way to skin the Palestinian cat.

Shamir took the debate a logical step further by posing the question, “To disavow or debate Abunimah”. He was attacked by Abunimah a decade ago, when he “hunted me out of the pro-Palestinian movement, saying that without Shamir, they will win sooner.” After a decade of unrelenting Israeli crimes, Shamir advised Massad, Barghouti and other Arab signatories, “Our Arab brothers will do well if they will stand out of this debate: let the Jews fight out the battle for their identity. As it happens, Gilad is their strongest champion on the Jewish side, they should cheer, not discourage him.”

Perhaps what prompted the letter was fear that BDS was just not mainstream enough. This was the implication behind a dismissal of BDS by Finkelstein, who just a few weeks before the Abunimah screed, called BDS a “cult” and admonished Palestinians to limit their struggle to the “two-state solution”. While himself exposing the “cult” of the holocaust, calling it an “industry” used to promote Israel’s aggressive colonial agenda, Finkelstein disappointed many admirers by suggesting that BDSers are conspirators intent on wiping poor Israel off the tattered old colonial map. “What is the result? There’s no Israel!”

But ironically, Atzmon and Finkelstein are on the same side this time. They are both pro-Palestinian activists and believers in free speech and open debate, not afraid to point the finger at machinations of their co-religionists. Before writing his ill-fated missive, Abunimah, author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israel-Palestine Conflict, would have done well to ponder Atzmon’s defence of Finkelstein’s criticism of BDSers for their cultishness. “Finkelstein’s criticism of the solidarity movement is largely valid. The recent expulsion of Palestinians and academics from the UK PSC proves that we aren’t just dealing with a ‘cult’ discourse as Finkelstein suggests, far worse, we are actually dealing with a rabbinical operation that exercises the most repulsive Judaic excommunication tactics.”

“Finkelstein is correct when he suggests that the achievements of the solidarity ‘cult’ operations are pretty limited,” continues Atzmon. He looks beyond the gatewatched BDSers and critics such as Chomsky, Finkelstein, and himself — two-state or one — and predicts “that the solidarity movement is already a mass movement … that the Palestinians and the Arabs will liberate themselves.”

The Lobby is no doubt patting itself on the back, having through obvious pressure on prominent activists helped to weaken its foes for the nth time. This tactic is part of the age-old strategy by those in power of “divide and conquer”. Just as Britian and then the US and Israel have worked to divide up the Muslim world to weaken and control it — even mobilising “Islamic terrorists” (not to mention “Judaic terrorists”) in their schemes — so the domestic representatives of imperialism do the same on the homefront, manipulating soft anti-Zionists.

The tactic was used in the Cold War, using liberals and ex-Communists to isolate Communists from movements critical of imperialism. Now as then, it is necessary not to boycott each other, but to work together without responding to provocation. It is to be expected that the bad guys are going to infiltrate progressive movements and try to split them.

When Saudi Prince Faisal grilled Hamas Chief Khaled Meshaal about his alliance with Iran, the Hamas chief explained: “Yes, we have relations with Iran and will do so with whoever supports us. We are a resistance movement, open to the Arabs, to the Muslims and to all countries in the world, and we are not part of any agenda for regional forces.” BDSers may have their differences, but the goal is the liberation of Palestine. Let a hundred flowers blossom.

1. See Al-Ahram Weekly “Jezebel’s Legacy”; Dissident Voice‘s “Into the Mentality of the Occupier/Oppressor” and “Who Is Gilad Atzmon… and, Who Are We?.”

As the Washington Post reports, the mandate was a Republican idea that originated with conservatives: “The tale begins in the late 1980s, when conservative economists such as Mark Pauly, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of business, were searching for ways to counter liberal calls for government-sponsored universal health coverage. Pauly then proposed a mandate requiring everyone to obtain this minimum coverage, thus guarding against free-riders…Health policy analysts at the conservative Heritage Foundation, led by Stuart Butler, picked up the idea and began developing it for lawmakers in Congress. The Heritage Foundation worked with then-Gov. Mitt Romney (R) to pass Massachusetts’ 2006 health reform law, which required all Bay State citizens to purchase coverage.”

Someone from the Heritage Foundation came up to us, wanting to take a photo of our sign. I asked him – does the Heritage Foundation oppose the mandate? He said “yes.” I told him that the idea came out of the Heritage Foundation. He looked confused, mumbled an unclear answer “not since 2006” and walked away.

Of course, Democrats opposed this Republican idea. They saw it for what it is: a massive giveaway to the insurance industry that will lead to their entrenchment and continued domination of heath care. The idea was used by Republicans to oppose the Clinton health plan. Of course, the Clinton’s opposed it. But, by the 2008 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton supported the mandate (by then the insurance industry was a big financial backer of hers), but candidate Barack Obama opposed it. One of his campaign advertisements said: “What’s she not telling you about her health-care plan? It forces everyone to buy insurance, even if you can’t afford it, and you pay a penalty if you don’t.”

So, while I was out there watching groups like the National Organization for Women, who supports single payer favoring this pro-insurance law, as part of a coalition of Democratic Party aligned groups, I thought, what if President McCain had passed this law. My conclusion, we’d have the same people out here protesting, they’d just reverse sides. This was really not about healthcare, it was about Obama vs. the Republicans in this 2012 election year.

The people protesting followed their leader’s orders, said the chants they were told to say, and held the signs they were given to hold, but they were confused. When we talked to people on both sides the partisan confusion was evident.

My colleague, Margaret Flowers, asked two women carrying an Americans for Prosperity sign (a group opposed to Obama’s law) whether they were on Medicare. They said “yes.” “Do you like it?” Again, “yes.” “Do you know Medicare is a government program?” A confused look. “Do you know the Republicans want to end Medicare, make it into private insurance?” “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You probably support Obama”; and they started to walk away. “No, we oppose ObamaCare,” the women stopped and listened again, “We think everyone should have Medicare. Don’t you think it would be a good idea if every American could have the Medicare you have and like?” “Hmm, yes” then, more confusion in their faces.

Then, talking to the Democrats showed equal partisan confusion. I explained: “We oppose the Obama mandate because we want to end insurance control of health care. We support single payer, Medicare for all?” Response: “So do I.” I asked: “Single payer ends insurance, and Obama’s law entrenches insurance more deeply in control of health care, aren’t those opposites?” Response, obviously not understanding what ‘opposite’ means: “It’s a step in the right direction.” I ask: “How can it be a step in the right direction when it is going in the opposite direction?” No longer able to say it is the right direction, spouts another talking point: “This is the best we can get, we can build on this.” Me, trying to figure out what the Democrat thinks there is to build on, asks: “But, if we want to end insurance domination, how do we build on a law that is based on insurance?” Unable to explain it, the Democrat answers: “We can’t get what we want.” I say: “Of course, not, if people like you and organizations like yours who support single payer, spend their time advocating for the insurance industry, we can’t get what we want. But, if people who support single payer work for it we could.” Answer: “But, we have to re-elect President Obama.”

Partisan confusion reigned.

And, sadly partisan confusion dominates our airwaves as well. Of course, the right wing radio continues to attack Obama and confusingly calls a market-based, insurance-dominated health law socialism. But, sadly the “liberal” media sends out equal partisan confusion. We were able to go into Radio Row, where all the liberal radio outlets were interviewing “experts” on health care. The talking points, like in the conversation, were repeated and repeated. When one radio host wanted to interview me, really debate me since he was a Democratic apologist, I sat down. An organizer in the room asked the host to speak with her. She came back and told me I had to leave. This was private property and only people allowed to be here were allowed to be here. I explained I was invited by a station to be interviewed. She explained: “I tell them who to interview. The stations have slots and we fill them.” I asked: “Do you mean only people who support Obama can be interviewed.” She explained “The Republicans do it to.”

So, partisan confusion reigns and it permeates the airwaves leaving many people confused. We need to clear the FOG (Forces Of Greed) and get the truth on the air.

Despite all this supermajorities of Americans have consistently supported single payer, whether inaccurately called socialism or correctly described as “Medicare for all” 60% or more support it. Why? For the same reason that the great salesman President Obama and his superb marketing team have been unable to sell forced purchase of health insurance: Every family, business whether large or small; and every doctor or other health care provider have suffered insurance abuse. Two thirds of those who go bankrupt from a health problem have health insurance. The American experience is that health insurance is expensive, provides inadequate coverage and tries to avoid paying for health care. We all know this. So, no matter what the politicians say – Americans do not trust the health insurance industry.

But, one thing the two parties in Washington agree on – they will protect health insurance at all costs. After-all, they are a great source of campaign contributions – as the two politicians responsible for forcing Americans to buy insurance, President Obama and Mitt Romney, well know.

The lethal handiwork of 23-year-old Mohamed Merah, the Algerian man wanted for the a spate of killings – the deaths of three French paratroopers, three Jewish school children and a rabbi – has propelled the President into a rather extremist, not to mention suspicious, frame of mind. ‘Anyone who regularly consults internet sites which promote terror or hatred or violence will be sentenced to prison.’ For Sarkozy, the internet must be a dark enclave of consultation and plotting, a breeding ground of permanent subversion.  When a person searches out particular sites, suspicion should arise.  Reading the anarchist cook books list of deadly recipes is bound to turn the visitor into a mad bomb throwing deviant.  ‘Don’t tell me it’s not possible.  What is possible for paedophiles should be possible for trainee terrorists and their supporters, too.’

One glaring problem in this line taken by Sarkozy lies in the field of policy itself.  The law becomes the famously touted ass largely through application and definition.  A policy can produce invidious outcomes because of unclear meanings or nebulous terms.  Defining which sites are the arbiters of ‘extremist’ matter is the first priority of authorities.   (Read: any group or subject they don’t like.)  As it is also their deemed prerogative, a good deal of arbitrariness can be thrown in as to what is dangerous and what isn’t; what corrupts and what purifies.  One person’s extremist disposition is another’s mild mannered teddy bear.  After all, the Muppet show has been deemed by such wise men as Fox’s Eric Bolling to be a communist enterprise, while the insipid, child oriented Happy Feet 2 has been dubbed ‘Kiddie Karl Marx’ (Guardian, Dec 6, 2011). Such idiocy is charming, until it turns into the dull, half-witted language of legislation.

Presumably, a regular visitor to opera sites falls foul of the Sarkozy triad – there is very little in that genre that lacks hatred, violence of terror.  High society types awaiting time in the nick because they decided to go through booking online tickets for Tosca.  The cupboard of cultural artefacts would be somewhat threadbare without those not so secret herbs and spices.  The same goes for publications, political promotions and policies.

The focus on layering the internet with a surveillance system in recent years has become more intense.  It has become the medium for recruitment, an easy means of access to nab followers for every single ideology or inclination in current circulation.  A UK parliamentary report by the Home Affairs Committee (January 31, 2012) examining online radicalisation described the effects of what ‘Sheikh Google’ might do in converting and recruiting young men and women.  That committee, however, shied away from a heavy handed approach to those who did dabble on the search engine.

The extremist nonsense Sarkozy is peddling demonstrates a false focus, though the rationale is already part of French law, given the punitive regime of anti-paedophilia rules that involve heavy penalties for regular visitors to prohibited web sites.  The site is less relevant than the visitor.  Curiosity will be criminalised.  A click renders you liable; several clicks, certified.  Lucie Morillon of Reporters Without Borders is rightly asking the question whether Sarkozy intends installing ‘a global internet surveillance system in France’ (Morning Star Online, March 23). In what must have been the understatement of the week, she also observed that, ‘Trying to criminalise a visit – a simple visit – to a Web site, that’s something that seems disproportionate.’

Perhaps more free speech, rather than less, would be a better solution, enabling members to counteract the agents of terrorism with more conviction. For Sarkozy, the heavy stick of law enforcement is proving far more attractive.

Fracking is the controversial method of forcing water, gases, and chemicals at tremendous pressure of up to 15,000 pounds per square inch into a rock formation as much as 10,000 feet below the earth’s surface to open channels and force out natural gas and fossil fuels.

Advocates of fracking argue not only is natural gas “greener” than coal and oil energy, with significantly fewer carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur emissions, the mining of natural gas generates significant jobs in a depressed economy, and will help the U.S. reduce its oil dependence upon foreign nations. Geologists estimate there may be as much as 2,000 trillion cubic feet of natural gas throughout the United States. If all of it is successfully mined, it could not only replace coal and oil but serve as a transition to wind, solar, and water as primary energy sources, releasing the United States from dependency upon fossil fuel energy and allowing it to be more self-sufficient.

The Marcellus Shale—which extends beneath the Allegheny Plateau, through southern New York, much of Pennsylvania, east Ohio, West Virginia, and parts of Maryland and Virginia—is one of the nation’s largest sources for natural gas mining, containing as much as 500 trillion cubic feet  of natural gas.  Each of Pennsylvania’s 5,255 wells, as of the beginning of March 2012, with dozens being added each week, takes up about nine acres, including all access roads and pipe.

Over the expected life time of each well, companies may use as many as nine million gallons of water and 100,000 gallons of chemicals and radioactive isotopes within a four to six week period. The additives “are used to prevent pipe corrosion, kill bacteria, and assist in forcing the water and sand down-hole to fracture the targeted formation,” explains Thomas J. Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research. However, about 650 of the 750 chemicals used in fracking operations are known carcinogens, according to a report filed with the U.S. House of Representatives in April 2011. Fluids used in fracking include those that are “potentially hazardous,” including volatile organic compounds, according to Christopher Portier, director of the National Center for Environmental Health, a part of the federal Centers for Disease Control. In an email to the Associated Press in January 2012, Portier noted that waste water, in addition to bring up several elements, may be radioactive. Fracking is also believed to have been the cause of hundreds of small earthquakes in Ohio and other states.

The law, an amendment to Title 52 (Oil and Gas) of the Pennsylvania Consolidated Statutes, requires that companies provide to a state-maintained registry the names of chemicals and gases used in fracking. Physicians and others who work with citizen health issues may request specific information, but the company doesn’t have to provide that information if it claims it is a trade secret or proprietary information, nor does it have to reveal how the chemicals and gases used in fracking interact with natural compounds. If a company does release information about what is used, health care professionals are bound by a non-disclosure agreement that not only forbids them from warning the community of water and air pollution that may be caused by fracking, but which also forbids them from telling their own patients what the physician believes may have led to their health problems. A strict interpretation of the law would also forbid general practitioners and family practice physicians who sign the non-disclosure agreement and learn the contents of the “trade secrets” from notifying a specialist about the chemicals or compounds, thus delaying medical treatment.

The clauses are buried on pages 98 and 99 of the 174-page bill, which was initiated and passed by the Republican-controlled General Assembly and signed into law in February by Republican Gov. Tom Corbett.

“I have never seen anything like this in my 37 years of practice,” says Dr. Helen Podgainy, a pediatrician from Coraopolis, Pa. She says it’s common for physicians, epidemiologists, and others in the health care field to discuss and consult with each other about the possible problems that can affect various populations. Her first priority, she says, “is to diagnose and treat, and to be proactive in preventing harm to others.” The new law, she says, not only “hinders preventative measures for our patients, it slows the treatment process by gagging free discussion.”

Psychologists are also concerned about the effects of fracking and the law’s gag order. “We won’t know the extent of patients becoming anxious or depressed because of a lack of information about the fracking process and the chemicals used,” says Kathryn Vennie of Hawley, Pa., a clinical psychologist for 30 years. She says she is already seeing patients “who are seeking support because of the disruption to their environment.” Anxiety in the absence of information, she says, “can produce both mental and physical problems.”

The law is not only “unprecedented,” but will “complicate the ability of health department to collect information that would reveal trends that could help us to protect the public health,” says Dr. Jerome Paulson, director of the Mid-Atlantic Center for Children’s Health and the Environment at the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C.  Dr. Paulson, also professor of pediatrics at George Washington University, calls the law “detrimental to the delivery of personal health care and contradictory to the ethical principles of medicine and public health.” Physicians, he says, “have a moral and ethical responsibility to protect the health of the public, and this law precludes us from doing all we can to protect the public.” He has called for a moratorium on all drilling until the health effects can be analyzed.

Pennsylvania requires physicians to report to the state instances of 73 specific diseases, most of which are infectious diseases. However, the list also includes cancer, which may have origins not only from chemicals used to create the fissures that yield natural gas, but also in the blow-back of elements, including arsenic, present within the fissures. Thus, physicians are faced by conflicting legal and professional considerations.

“The confidentiality agreements are worrisome,” says Peter Scheer, a journalist/lawyer who is executive director of the First Amendment Coalition. Physicians who sign the non-disclosure agreements and then disclose the possible risks to protect the community can be sued for breech of contract, and the companies can seek both injunctions and damages, says Scheer.

In pre-trial discovery motions, a company might be required to reveal to the court what it claims are trade secrets and proprietary information, with the court determining if the chemical and gas combinations really are trade secrets or not. The court could also rule that the contract is unenforceable because it is contrary to public policy, which places the health of the public over the rights of an individual company to protect its trade secrets, says Scheer. However, the legal and financial resources of the natural gas corporations are far greater than those of individuals, and they can stall and outspend most legal challenges.

Although Pennsylvania is determined to protect the natural gas industry, not everyone in the industry agrees with the need for secrecy.  Dave McCurdy, president of the American Gas Association, says he supports disclosing the contents included in fracturing fluids. In an opinion column published in the Denver Post, McCurdy further argued, “We need to do more as an industry to engage in a transparent and fact-based public dialogue on shale gas development.”

The Natural Gas committee of the U.S. Department of Energy agrees. “Our most important recommendations were for more transparency and dissemination of information about shale gas operations, including full disclosure of chemicals and additives that are being used,” said Dr. Mark Zoback, professor of geophysics at Stanford University and a Board member.

Both McCurdy’s statement and the Department of Energy’s strong recommendation about full disclosure were known to the Pennsylvania General Assembly when it created the law that restricted health care professionals from disseminating certain information that could help reduce significant health and environmental problems from fracking operations.

•  Assisting on this series, in addition to those quoted within the articles, were Rosemary R. Brasch, Eileen Fay, Dr. Bernard Goldstein, and Dr. Wendy Lynne Lee.

The list of perpetrators comes in two categories – the ‘enemies of the internet’ featuring 12 such prize spots for countries such as Bahrain, Belarus, North Korea, Iran, Syria. Then come the next list of countries deemed ‘worthy of surveillance’. There are a few entrants that may seem surprising, till one realises that history should tell you otherwise.

France deserves its addition because of the aggressive form of censorship the Sarkozy government has been attempting to implement.  In February last year, it made hay on the issue of child protection by drafting the security bill (LOPPSI) and opposing all amendments to it. Jérémie Zimmermann of the group La Quadrature du Net was under no illusions.  ‘Protection of childhood is shamelessly exploited by Nicolas Sarkozy to implement a measure that will lead to collateral censorship and very dangerous shifts’ (The Inquirer, February 11, 2010).  The site of the child is the site of control.  This year it was revealed that a draft executive order had been drafted that would give the government the power to ‘arbitrarily censor any content or service on the Net’ (Index on Censorship, June 27). Oh liberty, you are such an empty word.

Australia has been added to the crowd as worthy of ‘surveillance’. This is hardly surprising – the attitude to censorship in that country, despite a supposedly laidback disposition, is famous.   The governing Australian Labor Party has sham progressive credentials at the best of times, but when it comes to censorship, it’s a happy promoter of ‘mandatory filtering’, attempting to stake out domains of appropriate viewing for its citizens.  As the party’s National Platform notes, “Labor supports the National Classification Code, which classifies content against the standards of morality, decency and propriety accepted by reasonable adults.”
The moment one starts dabbling in the slippery field of classification, expect a tumble into arbitrary prohibitions and bans.

Whether one state is added or removed from the lists is neither here nor there.  States regard the medium of the internet as dangerous, and periodically take steps to restrict access to users using such terms as ‘filtering’ and ‘classification’.  As Ray Bradbury explains, “There is more than one way to burn a book.  And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”  That has been the prerogative of regimes since they came into being, scorching and silencing the undesirable.  Even the United Kingdom, which has interestingly enough managed to duck the naughty list, may yet warrant inclusion if its Digital Bill passes.  Protect copyright and be damned.

States will also, when they need to, enlist corporations who happen to provide services that utilise the internet. BlackBerry will assist in preventing communications coverage if pressed by Britain’s police authorities to respond to a riot.  Google will be supine and feed information about dissidents to the Chinese authorities if they have to.  Corporations will adopt voluntary filtering mechanisms – evidenced by the efforts of Optus, Telstra and CyberOne in Australia.  The scent of money is overpowering.  Their argument is a simple one: they only use such filtering mechanisms to block out material ‘blacklisted’ by Interpol, the sort to make any decently disposed tum turn.  Due process when it comes to what material can be hosted has, and will continue to be, muddied.

In a sense, the term an ‘enemy of the internet’ is a misnomer – in so far as one can be the enemy of phone lines, the telegraph, or the quill pen.  The net is merely a service and medium, and those who have made use of it, be it avid bloggers, addicted tweeters, and diligent stumblers, are also responding to state repression in the grand old tradition.  And that is exactly what makes governments nervous.

Of course, this is more than a purely academic issue for Maher.  In June of 2002, his own ABC television show, Politically Incorrect, was yanked off the air for similar reasons.  When major sponsors (notably Sears and FedEx) withdrew their advertising in protest of Maher’s controversial remarks (interpreted to be “pro-terrorist), the Sinclair Broadcasting Group immediately pulled the plug on the show’s ABC affiliates, and Politically Incorrect was history.

Maher’s objections are interesting.  He argues that if advertisers can dictate what stays on the air and what doesn’t, we have, in effect, relinquished our right to free speech.  If media sponsors are given the final say as to which opinions are allowed to be expressed, and which opinions aren’t, it means we’ve handed over our precious, constitutional right of free expression to the corporations.  Not good.

But there’s a fine distinction here—a distinction between corporate cowardice and consumer muscle.  And the Limbaugh episode is a prime example of the latter.  Without any threat of boycotts, Rush’s advertisers nonetheless fled the show en masse, hypocritically pretending that his comments were so outrageous—so offensive, so repugnant—that they couldn’t bear to be associated with such a program, even though they’d have to be blind, deaf and dumb, and a presidential candidate not to realize this kind of material was the show’s stock in trade.  The only difference? This particular slur got some bad press–culminating in rats deserting a not-yet-sinking ship.

Frightened advertisers fleeing Limbaugh is reminiscent of the Hollywood blacklists of the 1950s, a phenomenon that, surprisingly, has been misunderstood by many.  You still hear people blame the blacklists on HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee), declaring it was HUAC who forbade the studios to hire certain actors and writers suspected of subversive activities.  The opposite was true.  It was the studios themselves who voluntarily initiated the blacklists (ruining careers in the process), fearing that HUAC’s Commie smear campaign might damage their box office.

Boycotts are different.  Boycotts are manifestations of public outrage aimed at specific targets, for specific reasons, with the goal being to change specific policies or practices, with the weapon of choice being the threat of wreaking economic hardship.  While most boycotts fail, some actually do work.

Coors beer (the Coors family helped establish the Heritage Foundation) suffered a public relations setback a few decades ago when Paul Newman, among others, threatened a boycott.  In the late 1970s, an AWPPW-led west coast boycott of Scott Paper did considerable damage to sales (so much damage that some Scott facilities were forced to curtail operations, resulting in AWPPW production workers being laid off).  And wasn’t economic pressure largely responsible for South Africa abandoning apartheid?

Economic leverage isn’t the enemy of free expression; it’s a form of free expression.  Not to pick on Bill Maher (whom I enjoy and watch regularly on HBO), but if a labor union were to launch a successful boycott of a vehemently anti-union company’s products—a boycott that ultimately led to management negotiating a fair labor agreement—would Maher view this as an infringement of the company’s right to free speech?  An infringement of the company’s right to express its rabidly anti-union point of view?

Didn’t Ralph Nader say that the biggest and potentially most powerful lobby in the country—infinitely bigger and badder than the NRA, AIPAC, and U.S. Chamber of Commerce—was the American consumer?

If consumers chose not to buy new shoes for two months, the shoe business would collapse.  If consumers drank only tap water instead of Coke, Pepsi, etc, for two months, the beverage industry would go belly up.  Indeed, this is where the true power of the 99% resides, in our role as consumers.

Clearly, Limbaugh’s sponsors bailing out was an example of grandstanding and gutlessness, and once the smoke settles most of these advertisers can be expected to come crawling back.  But boycotts are different.  What’s wrong with trying to put the economic squeeze on sleaze radio?  For that matter, what’s wrong with trying to kill it? Limbaugh influences millions of people.  If the Acme Widget Company were his main sponsor, wouldn’t launching a national boycott of Acme products make eminent sense?

Let’s not conflate free speech with willful deceit, or political discourse with agitprop, or hate radio with healthy public debate.  They’re not equal.  And let’s not pretend that exerting economic leverage is unethical or off-limits, because it isn’t.  In fact, it may be the only arrow we have in our quiver.

Meanwhile, in the economic and military sphere, the drum beat continues essentially the same as it ever did. There is no doubt who won the battles of the Sixties in those arenas: big business and the Pentagon. Even though union membership is down drastically from its heyday years of the 1960s, a concerted drive to destroy the unions that remain has kicked into high gear. While governments and big business work together to disempower the remaining unions, the demagogues among them work overtime in their attempts to tie every problem the common man and woman has to those workers that dare to fight for their union. Instead of talking honestly about the failures of neoliberalism, right wing corporate shills denounce school teachers and nurses for demanding a decent wage while simultaneously privatizing whatever services they can. Unemployment remains high, especially among black men, who have only known full employment when they were forced to work as slaves. Indeed, the only place where most African-American men are working is in the network of prisons across the USA, where they work for minimal wages while reaping profits for Wall Street corporations that have the taxpayers pay the bills those prisons rack up. It can be reasonably argued that US prisons are the historical successors to those plantations where many of today’s prisoners’ ancestors worked.

September 13, 1971 is a day I will never forget. It was my sixteenth birthday, but that fact serves only as a marker for the unforgettable events of that historical moment. On September 8, 1971 several hundred men at Attica State prison in New York took over a part of the prison. This act was the direct result of a scuffle that occurred in what was known as D Yard. In truth, though, it was the culmination of a months-long campaign for prison reforms in Attica and other prisons in the New York system. It can actually be argued that the campaign in New York was part of a larger campaign that was occurring across the United States. This upsurge in the prison struggle had been fueled by other movements in the US and also by a growing awareness of the role prisons play in the oppression of disenfranchised groups in a society. The assassination of Black Panther George Jackson barely a month before the uprising at Attica served as a vicious reminder of how far the State would go to maintain that oppression.

Back to the story of September 13, 1971. As I sat at the dinner table that evening I simmered with anger. That morning Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York had ordered an assault on Attica which resulted in the deaths of 39 men, mostly prisoners but also including nine hostages. This massacre took place after four days of negotiations orchestrated by the prisoners and conducted by a group of outside observers selected by the prisoners. Suffice it to say, the birthday celebration was muted, a cloud of death hanging over the dining room. I could only imagine how the families of the dead men felt. The primary official representing the state of New York was Correctional Services Commissioner Russell G. Oswald, a liberal within the prison administration. The group of observers was composed of almost two dozen men and included radical attorney William Kunstler, New York State Senator John Dunne, New York City councilman Herman Badillo, members of the Young Lords, Louis Farrakhan, and New York Times writer Tom Wicker.

Almost four years later Wicker would publish an account of the uprising titled A Time to Die. This account is a testament of the times. Wicker was an unabashed liberal when that word defined a certain political and cultural mindset that included support for civil rights, civil liberties, and the consideration that radical and revolutionary leftists not only made some valid points but that they were often right when it came to analyzing the nature of race and class in the United States. His book on Attica stands as one of the best pieces of journalism to come out of the period known as the Sixties. Fortunately, it was recently republished in a paperback edition by Haymarket Books of Chicago. Written in the third person — like much of Norman Mailer’s best journalism — Wicker describes the events that took place in Attica after he arrived there sometime during the night of September 8, 1971. His chronicle reflects the genuine concern for the lives of the prisoners and the hostages and is witness to his growing disbelief that there can ever be a peaceful resolution to the situation. That awareness is accompanied by his acknowledgement that the blame for this does not fall on the prisoners but on those in the New York government apparatus that cannot or will not see the men of Attica as human beings. The tension inside the prison and between and within the various groups involved forces Wicker to reflect on his life growing up in a union anti-segregationist family in the apartheid US South. This personal history and the contrast between the prisoners desire to be treated like humans and the bureaucrats’ determination to deny that desire causes Wicker to forsake his journalistic objectivity in favor of the inmates. In what is certainly one of his finest journalistic moments, after hearing Rockefeller tell him that granting amnesty to the prisoners would undermine the basic tenets of our society, Wicker writes:

Wicker had to stop himself from laughing–not with amusement– at this astounding irony. In a country where so many wealthy or well-represented lawbreakers could go free, where the killers at Kent State and Jackson State were not even prosecuted, where minorities (blacks and Mexican-Americans, for two good examples) suffered from openly prejudiced law in whole regions, where the poor and disadvantaged of all races usually felt the whole weight of the police, the courts, the prisons–in that country, the “equal application of the laws” was to be upheld in the case of the Attica Brothers!

If the Sixties were about freedom, and I believe that they were, then the men in Attica were ready to die for theirs. And many did. There were others in associated milieus that fought for theirs and for men like the Attica Brothers. Poet, writer, counterculture mischief-maker and rock musician Ed Sanders was one of those. His recently released biography Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side is a look at that battle. Sanders could be described as a member of the group of ramblers, mystics, poets, and plain old lunatics that formed a bridge between the Beatnik and hippie/freak culture. Like Neal Cassady, his age and refusal to go along with the dominant culture of the grey-flannel suit led him to places that existed on the fringes of US society, especially white US society. In the search to disengage from the mainstream culture, the men and women involved often went out of their way to offend. Given the Puritan confusion and hypocrisy about all things sexual, it was in that arena that artists and poets often played in when they wished to push the limits outward. William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg — two men who make occasional appearances in Sanders’ jerry-built memoir — knew this territory well. Indeed, by the very fact of their homosexuality, they were already outside of society (like Patti Smith sings in her tune “Rock and Roll Nigger”).

Sanders is the author of one of the best true crime books ever written in the United States. That book, titled The Family, is about Charles Manson and his group of twisted souls. Fug You is primarily about the decade before Sanders published that book. It was a decade that was full of activity for Sanders. He published one of the best known mimeographed poetry and art journals of the period. Like the photocopied zines of the 1980s and 1990s, mimeo journals were the samizdat of the art and poetry countercultures of the period. Sanders journal, known as Fuck You, published Burroughs, Ginsberg and the poets Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, among others. His magazine gained him invites to parties with the burgeoning literary and artistic elite of 1960s New York. This access in turn gave him access to patrons and a ready set of defenders whenever the obscenity police came down on his magazine, as they did somewhat frequently.

All of this, however, was but a prelude to Sanders best known (and most popular) endeavor: the creation of the rock and roll band The Fugs. I gave their first album a few listens while reading this book and am still amazed not only by the fact that they got a recording contract but that they actually broke the Billboard Top 100 a couple times. On top of that, The Fugs played on bills featuring some of the biggest bands of the period. The music The Fugs created was a mixture of straight blues, some rock and roll, a little Indian influence and just plain freakin’ noise. The lyrics were a combination of beat poetry, antiwar visions, visionary hopes, sexist nonsense and just plain babble. Like I said, it’s hard to remember that The Fugs were actually somewhat popular. That fact alone is testament itself to how much the cultural boundaries were being stretched and redefined. As for that sexism, let me clarify.

Sexism was an unfortunate part of the freedom defined by the Sixties. Not because many men were more sexist than many men are now, but because their sexism had never been challenged. The sexual repression that had ruled US popular culture to that point was being broken down. Given the generally sexist nature of the culture, that sexual freedom may have opened up minds, bodies and souls, but it did little to end the objectification of the female person. That task would fall on the feminist movement that rose from the cultural revolution of which Ed Sanders writes about in Fug You.

One could argue that, unlike the sexism of today’s media, which bases itself on the complete commodification of the body while also putting a price tag on the emotion of love, it can be argued that the sexism of the Beats and hippies was a genuine attempt to create a world of Eros referred to in Herbert Marcuse’s classic text Eros and Civilization which visualized a society “based on a fundamentally different experience of being, a fundamentally different relation between man and nature, and fundamentally different existential relations.”

There was a genuine joy in that revolution. It would soon be tempered by the repression from the State, various religious figures and institutions and the military. Sanders memoir captures all of that. He writes snippets of remembrances that together tell a good part of the story. The Living Theatre putting on their play The Brig; the authorities shutting them down. The Human Be-Ins and the attempt to bust Allen Ginsberg for marijuana. The Yippies desire to host a festival of life and the police riot that was Chicago 1968. Sanders book covers the late fifties to 1970. Wicker’s covers four days in 1971. The men in Attica, however, were there for crimes that happened during the same period that Sanders book takes place. Their denouement was a violent end to the Sixties in a much more cataclysmic way than the Altamont concert portrayed in the film Gimme Shelter, or the police murders at Kent and Jackson State. These two books represent elements of the zeitgeist of the Sixties. They also hold both possibilities and warnings for our future.

As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. There is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in just such a twilight that we must be most aware of change in the air — however slight — lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.

– William O. Douglas

“This is a slightly unusual request,” said Dr. Wagner, with what he hoped was commendable restraint. “As far as I know, it’s the first time we have been asked to supply a dissident or ‘truth telling’ website with our Automatic Traversal Algorithm. I don’t wish to be inquisitive, but I should hardly have thought that your — ah — establishment had much use for such software. Could you explain just what you intend to do with it?”

“Gladly,” replied the dissident, adjusting his woolen beret and carefully putting away the mobile-phone with which he had been messaging his co-conspirators. “Your ATA can carry out any standard tree traversal involving up to one hundred million nodes, using the most efficient path. However, for our work we are interested in traversing actual routers and web-servers on the Net, not nodes of a data-structure. As we wish you to modify the code, the software will not only traverse nodes but also execute an instruction on each node.”

“I don’t understand …”

“Here’s my other b-card,” the dissident said, handing Wagner a business-card, a different one from that with which he had introduced himself.

“Hal L. Burton, Ph.D., President, Burton Microprocessor Research?” Wagner finished on a surprised note, reading the business-card. “I see — so that’s how you earn your money then, and I suppose freedissident dot-com is where you spend it.” Wagner warmed to his visitor. “You know, I, I …” he trailed off. After fifteen years of authoritarian rule under FEMA and the so-called ‘USA Patriot Act’, personal freedoms were severely restricted and it was not wise to express admiration for any dissident activity. Still, he said, “Actually, I visit freedissident dot-com quite often. You do great work, you’re gutsy folks.”

Wagner meant it. That website was only about three years old but had quickly developed a reputation for occasionally managing to expose government secrets and lies, and breaking suppressed news-stories. The government had tried to shut it down but had failed.

Burton smiled. “Thank you, Dr. Wagner. Been in and out of prison for it.”

Wagner smiled too, feeling a new respect for his customer. “Hoder. Call me Hoder.”

“Hoder? Nordic?”

“You’re right. Norwegian and German extraction. So tell me, how I can help you — in any way.”

“This is a project on which we have been working for the last three years — since freedissident dot-com was founded, in fact. It is perfectly in keeping with your line of work, so I think you will be able to provide the solution after I explain it,” Burton began.

“Ooo-kay.”

“It is really quite simple. It’s because of the CPU-virus and worm menace that started a few years ago. Remember Stuxnet? — that was the grandpa. My team has made a self-learning firmware patch, a one-time universal patch that takes care of several entire classes of these damn things. Nobody will have to care about any CPU virus or worm for several years, especially with new server-boxes, and therefore new chips, not being available anymore. We want to traverse the Web and apply the patch to every web-server and router.”

“Excellent idea!” Wagner was enlivened. “So you wish to start at triple-a dot-com and work up to, say, uh, … zygote dot-org …”

“Exactly–”

“… not that the actual process would be executed alphabetically,” mused Wagner thoughtfully.

He had seen the immense benefits of Burton’s plan at once; it was the need of the day, literally. Only personal desktop computers were available to Joe Blow; these machines were made such that they could not be used as web-servers. Server-class computers and routers were strictly regulated and were not available to the general public. Apart from the government and the armed forces, servers could be sold only to businesses and they too had to fill out a variety of forms to establish ‘need’, and even so, permits were granted to a minority of applicants. All the personal and independent media websites in the country ran on repaired and re-repaired machines that were over ten years old. Ten years ago, after coordinated hostage-takings and bomb-blasts in Peoria, which were blamed on foreign ‘terrorists’, the Department of Homeland Security had demanded the law regulating servers and routers, and had been given what it had asked for. Wagner knew that it was critically important to take good care of the old machines that the general public and individuals were using, and to minimize their vulnerability to viruses and worms. Personally, he suspected that the N.S.A. was behind many of the viruses that regularly crippled free-thought and dissident websites.

“You know how the Baldur chip works, right?”

“In general, yes,” Wagner nodded. He thought back to the second Bush-Cheney administration when the Baldur chip had been invented and mandated as an etched integrated-circuit on every CPU. First, it had been the V-chip. Then, the RFID chip. It had been only a matter of time before something like the Baldur chip would be proposed, be legislated for electronic devices, and become ubiquitous — every web-server and router carried it now. It provided the means to disable or lock, and re-enable or unlock, any device it was on-board on by means of one kilobit lock or unlock instructions and an accompanying and suitable five kilobit key.

“Because it’s not possible to install a firmware patch when the CPU is operating, what we plan to do is to make two passes: on the first pass, we disable the CPU and install our patch. And on the second pass, we attempt to upgrade to a different version of the firmware patch by applying a delta on the old patch for any CPU that needs it, and re-enable the CPU. I am afraid it would take too long to explain why we need this dual-pass system, even if I knew all the technical details behind it.”

“I’m sure it would,” said Wagner hastily. “Go on. I’m curious about, I mean, how are we supposed to crack those one-K instructions?” Not even any single government branch possessed those two one kilobit instructions’ bit-sequences. Each instruction was split up into three components. The Federal government was the custodian of the lower-order 512-bit-sequence, and the State governments and the Judiciary were the custodians of the higher-order bit-sequence with the 512 bits of each instruction equally split between them. This would be a first, if they pulled it off. And an underground effort, at that.

“We’ve hacked it,” Burton said with a trace of smugness. “That’s what we’ve been working on for the past three years. That, and the universal patch. But for the traversal, you’re the experts. That’s why I’m here.”

“Of course, to successfully unlock a chip, the re-enable code must be accompanied by — doesn’t the key … I mean that doesn’t it have to somehow mesh … in that there has to be a — an equivalence between the bit-wise ORs and the bit-wise ANDs between the one-K disable instruction and the key’s one-K chunks … ?” trailed off Wagner in a querying tone. He was not at all sure as to just how all this worked; he was a through-and-through Language Theory & Automata man. One or two of his specialists would certainly know this Baldur-chip business backwards, however.

Burton laughed. “I’m even more in the dark than you, but we’ve got that part nailed down. My boys are all set with the keys, the instructions, the whole shebang on that end. All we need from you is a guaranteed traversal of every node, every leaf, every router, every web-server on the Net in North America. And then they’ll be safe from these virus-making crazies.”

“Thanks to you.”

Burton smiled. “I wouldn’t say that. Thanks to us, if you must.” Shifting his weight to one side, he pulled out a chequebook from his hip-pocket. “There are just two other points—”

Before he could finish the sentence, Wagner replied, “Don’t even think about it, Hal — we’re in this together.” He smiled at Burton and rose to shake his hand.

The root reason behind these machinations was the fact that the World Wide Web was that greatest of ‘unknown unknowns’ — a random techno-sociological mutation in an otherwise (mostly) ordered and controlled world; an ‘unknown unknown’ whose unforeseen birth and stupendous power to capture and exhibit the evasive and coquettish Truth had thrown off-course, and was hampering, the march towards that unholy concentration of wealth and power — the ‘New World Order’ — which the European-originated money-lending power-elite clans had so carefully been planning for centuries.

This, thought Greg, was the most satisfying thing that had ever happened to him. Chuck and he were both volunteers with an activist movement, ‘Winter Soldiers & Rainy-day Patriots’ — an apt twist of a two-century-old American concept — to restore (true) Republican government, and so the nature of this project and the linkage with freedissident.com gave him a good feeling. His thoughts drifted to the erosion of civil liberties. Besides a question of ideals, he had personal reason to be concerned: he had been detained in prison for a fortnight without any charges, simply for submitting a withering short-story about the government to a publisher — someone there had probably ratted on him. A number of laws contradicting and subverting the still-constitutionally ‘guaranteed’ free-speech were on the books now. These anti-constitutional laws had various sections — ‘dissent,’ ‘incitement,’ ‘sedition,’ and so forth. They had either been in existence since 2001 by way of un-American legislation or had been enacted during Bush-Cheney II or Clinton-Lieberman I. He was a boy when it had all started, but he knew that except for a few (true) patriots who invoked Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin, the majority of the populace, apathetic and afraid, had not bothered to challenge those repressive Totalitarian laws.

Greg heard the heavy wooden door slam in the wind as Chuck joined him on the balcony.

“Dude! Clean compile,” Chuck said. The software they had been working on that day had built successfully.

“Sounds good! Seems like we’ll beat the schedule. You told Shrub?” ‘Shrub’ was their private nick-name for Sam W. Jaffe who was nominally partnering them from Burton’s team. On their very first day, he had delivered a near-monologue about a documentary he had seen on the San ‘Bush-men’ of the Kalahari Desert. He had gone on a little too long for Greg’s liking, and had finished by telling Greg and Chuck that, in his opinion, ‘the Bush-man’s way of life is thoroughly depraved, degenerate, and inhuman.’ After that, Greg had started referring to him as ‘Shrub.’

“Yeah, he’s happy. I’m likin’ this so far. Wanna go get some coffee?”

“Sure.”

They walked back into the office and out to the corridor.

“You seem kinda … a little subdued …” ventured Chuck after a couple of minutes, as they were descending in an elevator.

“Thinking about this project made me think of the Unpatriotic Act, FEMA, and all the shit that came after that,” said Greg, and cut loose with a few obscenities. “It’s perverse to have called something so un-American and anti-patriotic the ‘Patriot Act’!” he said loudly, and punched the elevator door as it was opening.

“Well, one reason was to fool the public into buying it, so that they would not protest against it,” said Chuck matter-of-factly. “Doing anything on New Year’s?” he asked hurriedly as they turned left at the Christmas tree in the main lobby, wanting to get Greg’s mind off the USA Patriot Act.

“Maureen and I are just getting together with a few friends. And being grateful we’ve made it a quarter of the way into the century … without blowing everyone up, despite all the carnage and mayhem. Hey, you and Janie, if you don’t have plans, why don’t you join us?”

“Aw-ight, thanks dude. I’ll tell her. Guess she’ll give you guys a call,” answered Chuck as they entered the cafeteria.

He picked up a bar of chocolate from the packaged foods rack. “Wonder which of the F3 this benefits,” he groused.

“Huh? F3? — what are you talking about?” Greg said, not comprehending.

“Dude! You mean you don’t know?! The F3 — that’s Cargill, ADM, and Monsanto — they’ve a lock on all foodstuffs. Throughout the Americas. Happened during Clinton-Lieberman II. Not even a giant like McDonald’s gets its beef now without it passing through one of the F3.” Chuck kept up with the minutiae of economic developments much more than did Greg who was naturally inclined to ideologies and abstract concepts.

“Oh!” Greg sighed and shook his head in disgust. He thought back to the second Hillary Clinton-Joseph Lieberman administration and the merger of the two political parties. Soon after their increasingly lockstep economic policies had become undeniable and obvious, the show ‘Democracy’ had been dispensed with and the Democrats and the Republicans had made their marriage official. It had ostensibly been ‘to foster inclusiveness, put an end to partisanship, and bring all Americans together under one tent.’ Exalted sentiments, tawdry reasons … and Totalitarian phraseology. The new combined party — the aptly-named ‘Federalists’ — pointed to the disorganized, little-known Constitution Party as evidence of a thriving ‘Democracy’. Standing at the packaged-foods rack, Greg subconsciously smiled wryly and shook his head in the midst of his ruminations that were triggered by Chuck’s little nugget, causing one or two people nearby to stare at him. The strange part of it all was that even though large bodies of voters would agree amongst themselves that they had voted for a Constitution Party candidate, that candidate would somehow almost never win the election. The Max McKinney crisis of the previous election was evidence of that. But the strangest thing was that frequently the media’s ‘scientific polls’ too would be at odds with an honest person’s investigation of reality. Everyone and their dog would tell you that they had voted for populist, popular activist Green, yet the ‘polls’ would show capitalist, well-connected businessman Gray holding a ‘twenty percent lead.’ It was as if normal, sane people were saying one thing to their friends and families but saying something else to these ‘pollsters’… .

“Howdy guys,” replied Sam, walking into their office. “Hal just sent me a secure message. He’s not sure if you’ve been told but absolute secrecy is essential for this project; if any governmental agency — any snoop — gets wind of it, they’re going to try to halt it, sabotage it, whatever.”

“You bet,” answered Chuck. “Hode — that’s our president, Dr. Hoder Wagner — told us. Yeah, I can imagine that the Pentagon warlord, the A-G — all those Anti-American dictatorial creeps — would not like web-servers and routers getting virus and worm-proofed.”

Their concerns were well-founded. For the past two decades, the government had maintained a network of informants within the general public, reminiscent of the long-gone U.S.S.R.

“Mum’s the word,” Greg chimed in. “So, where does Dr. Burton keep himself?”

Sam made no answer. Greg and Chuck stared at him, then glanced at one another.

“He usually, er, he has another concern that … that he spends his, um, time at,” said Sam uncertainly.

“If you mean freedissident dot-com, we know about it,” said Greg.

Sam looked relieved. “Well, I wasn’t sure you did. Yes, these days he’s usually over there. That setup is in a basement, a townhouse near Tysons Corner.” Tysons Corner was an expensive commercial and semi-residential area in Northern Virginia, about half-an-hour’s drive from Washington D.C.

After a pause, Chuck said, “It’s odd that they — the government — didn’t take down at least some part of the Web by fiat. What I mean is that I’m surprised they haven’t really tried.”

“I suppose they know that … that if they messed with the backbone or the routers, the Web would go underground,” offered Sam. “People possess routers and web-servers. Activists would create an alternate mini-Web … like a bits-and-pieces Web.”

“You’re right, we could patch up something, hmmm …” Greg mused. “Yeah, one-oh-nine-B, cable hookups, plain old copper … all underground,” he continued; he was thinking out loud more than talking to Sam. “Though I wouldn’t have thought that they’d, I mean the Feds, woulda been able to think around that curve,” he finished, addressing Sam now.

“Well, I’ll leave you guys to your work,” Sam said, walking to the door. “The Web is a prized freedom and this project is important. In fact, it should have been done years ago — previous generation should’ve taken care of it.” Sam winked at them conspiratorially as he left their office.

“Shrub’s a funny guy,” said Chuck. “But he’s awright.”

“The previous effin’ generation was complacent. Complacent! Those dumb-asses kept blabbering about America being the most free country in the world even though that wasn’t true and even as our freedoms were gradually being … being chopped down, like a bloody forest being clear-cut,” said Greg, turning back to his computer. “Our freedoms are like the species: once plentiful, now declining.”

“Nice, that’s a good analogy, partner. Hey, how many species are there?” enquired Chuck. Responding to his own question, he continued, “After these climate-change-related extinctions, I think there’s, hmm … The Nine Billion Names of God … I mean, er, names of God’s creations,” he corrected himself, having taken a stab at flowery speech and felt embarrassed at the results.

“Uh, not billion, but million,” Greg said. “Nine million species.”

“Oh, yeah … ‘scuse me!” Chuck laughed at his mistake. “Though our freedoms have vanished at a rate far faster than the species,” he mused, on the same bent. “Ya know, I hacked into a Fed server one night and hit paydirt.”

“Welcome to the club,” grinned Greg. “But what do you mean, ‘paydirt’?”

“Yeah, was gonna tell you — it had a bunch of Top Secret white-papers and research reports. One was about freedoms, I’ll never forget that one. A complete list, and then some, of all the freedoms that man has and has had. Sociologists have determined that there’s precisely nine thousand freedoms.”

“Like?” prodded Greg curiously, swivelling in his chair to face Chuck.

“We-e-ell, it had all types of … of details; stuff about Paine and Mill and Nietzsche, and sociometrics and ethnograms and biostatistics … and I don’t know what — government’s technocrats have waded through all kinds of crap. They’ve concluded that 21st century humans have, or can have, exactly nine thousand freedoms. Like, just take one freedom, Communication. From plain talking to coded speech to music to … um, yes, ritual gift-giving to, what was it … gypsy-camp markers to smoke-signals, would you believe we have, if I recall correctly, exactly six-hundred and-seventeen modes of Communication? At least that’s what that research report says.”

“Six-seventeen? What were some of the others? I mean the other modes of Communication?”

“Gawd, I dunno. I remember they’ve, like, enumerated different ‘elemental’ freedoms within … what was it, a ‘group-level’ freedom, and those are within a ‘top-level’ freedom. Like ‘eye movements,’ ‘head movements,’ aah … yes, ‘muscle tone,’ ‘foot shifting,’ ‘finger-tapping’ and so on fell under ‘Body Language,’ which itself falls under a ‘top-level’ freedom, ‘Communication.’ Man, it’s freaky, I tell ya. Supposed to be a ‘research report’, but what with its different volumes it’s really like a book. It’s over three thousand pages.”

Sam appeared in the doorway of their office, looking a little flushed. “Hey, guys. Just on the news. The invasion got underway.”

“Oh, great! Now we’re killing Norwegians!” exclaimed Greg, opening a web-browser and going to news.yahoo.com.

“What’s the government-controlled media gonna call this? After all the ‘Oil Wars’, now the ‘Water Wars’?” muttered Chuck morosely.

“Um, yeah,” answered Chuck sheepishly.

Seeing Greg’s querying expression, a sly, insinuating grin spreading on his face, Chuck continued, “Hey, I found it in my pocket! I don’t know — perhaps it fell in … perhaps Janie put it there. So what?” he ended on a petulant note.

Greg clapped Chuck on the shoulder and laughed out good-naturedly at his defensiveness, setting Chuck laughing too.

“So nothing … dude!” he said, in a friendly way. “That first dynlib we built, the one for the disable-and-patch, it’s still just ‘oh dot d-n-l.’ We needed a name for it. I’ll call it ‘Mistletoe’.” Greg was referring to the dynamic-library which would, at run-time, disable or lock the CPUs on the first-pass and apply the anti-virus/anti-worm patch.

They turned back to their workstations, still working but easing off for the day.

“Damn!” said Chuck suddenly. “Hey, we gotta stress-test that random key-sequence generator I wrote before we leave for the day.” Glancing at the time, he continued, “Oh hell, Greg, Hode will be here soon. We should’ve started testing it earlier today.”

“Already banged the hell out of it. It’s good to go.”

“Oh … you did? Cool! Ya know, I wonder though that there’s no test-team. I mean what’s Hode thinking, and that guy Burton? We’re testing each others’ stuff. Should’ve had a couple of good QA guys.”

“Well … I suppose Hode knows that what we write doesn’t need testers,” said Greg with a touch of conceit. Grinning and crooking an eyebrow at Chuck, he continued, “I mean, in these past few projects, how many bugs — I mean material defects — have been found in what you and I have written? All that’s happened is that the QA guys have wound up getting an inferiority complex because they couldn’t find a single, real bug!”

Chuck smiled and shook his head, and both of them ended up laughing at Greg’s hot-shot ego-stoking. Though egotistical, his vanity was not misplaced; neither was Chuck’s caution: in the three projects that they had worked on together, the testers actually had felt dispensable — Greg and Chuck were not only exceptionally talented, they were also very careful with their coding and debugging. Yet the lack of an independent, professional Quality Assurance unit in any software project considerably increased the chances of a calamitous defect being discovered post-deployment — when the software went ‘live.’

After some time, Greg rose from his chair and stretched. However, with the first step he took, he stumbled, and awkwardly and noisily toppled across a chair. Startled, Chuck got up. Grasping the edge of the table, Greg got back on his feet and voiced an oath or two.

“Dude! You okay?” enquired Chuck. “You know I’ve seen you do this before … like, stumbling, lurching — maybe there’s a balance problem?”

“Yup, there is. Inner-ear problem. In fact, that’s what saved me from my — ah — ‘elective service’,” replied Greg, holding on to the table and grimacing at the words ‘elective service.’ “Not that I’d have enlisted, I’d rather rot in prison than kill innocents abroad.” Except for the spoilt brats of the super-wealthy and powerful, who somehow received unlimited deferments or took refuge in the National Guard, all males had to enrol compulsorily with the armed forces. The draft was back in force in the good ol’ U.S. of A. Except that it was not called ‘the draft’ any more. It was called ‘Elective Patriotic Service.’ Such Orwellisms were consistent with the by-then usual government practice of redefining old terms and inventing new ones to befog the minds of the people.

“Oh — okay.” Chuck looked on with some concern as Greg settled himself in his chair. “I was deferred because of my sciatica. Same here; I’d have chosen prison over getting brainwashed by the armed forces into massacring other peoples.”

He went on, slowly, “Ya know, it’s the armed forces themselves who shoulda bailed us out of this horror. Before it got to this point.” He was voicing a thought more than talking to Greg, blankly gazing into the distance.

“I can’t understand why the national guard, the army — they all … they all attack us, arrest us, when we simply demonstrate,” said Greg. “Are they crazy? Just for holding up signs?! Don’t they understand that we’re doing it for them besides for us? They’re the ones who get traumatized and sick and maimed for life, if not killed, in these wars and invasions!”

“That’s the way it goes — you know,” Chuck replied softly, resignedly. “The oligarchy and the Zioneocons, they make sure to recruit Afros and Hispanics from poor neighbourhoods, and those they call ‘hicks’ and ‘trailer-trash’. They’re expendable — cannon-fodder — to the powers-that-be.”

After a moment of silence, Greg said passionately, “Yes. Young guys all of them, and what a waste. Those stupid, stupid lame-brains. They’re made to feel special by being told they’re heroes, by being given their purple hearts and silver stars. Heroes on their two-bit military pensions, with amputated limbs, strange illnesses. And shattered consciences … or, or brutalized humanities from the horrors they perpetrate on innocent humans. But those corporate plutocrats and Zioneocons — the scum of humanity — they make their millions off those wars and laugh all the way to the bank.” Though conscientious and a true patriot as was Chuck, Greg was seldom quite so bitter.

Chuck said nothing; he knew that staying on the subject would only get Greg wound up. Greg was right, he thought. The public had at last realized that the mega-corporation’s main function was simply to be a front behind which the super-wealthy and the privileged few hid to further their narrow interests and accumulate ill-gotten wealth, and that the ‘humanitarian’ and ‘pre-emptive’ wars had been nothing other than wars of loot and plunder for American corporate officers, stake-holders, and Zioneocons. Those ‘pen for hire’ writers who had sung to their tune earlier in the century had been rewarded with book contracts, positive publicity by the corporate-controlled media, and outright payoffs disguised as ‘grants’. But the few courageous writers who had exposed the truth had seen their works damned with faint praise or trashed altogether. And the writers themselves had had their names smeared and been hit with ruinous lawsuits; and those residing overseas had even been murdered by U.S. puppet-regimes or C.I.A. hit-men. Chuck shook his head as he gazed vacantly at his monitor, lost in his thoughts. Murdering writers had become a frighteningly commonplace activity for the American government after they, in concert with Royal Dutch Shell, had murdered Nigerian author Ken Saro-Wiwa early in the century. Neither had had to face the consequences of their crime, for the American people had remained blissfully ignorant and unconcerned. They systematically had been deceived by the controlled media into believing that Arabs, Afros, drugs, ‘terrorists’, and other such hobgoblins hiding in the bush were the enemy, so as to divert their attention while the power-elite and the Zioneocons had been proceeding stealthily with their treacherous conquest of the U.S.A. and its economic structures and financial systems, all the while subverting the ideals of the founding fathers. American citizenry had finally woken up to reality, but it was nearly too late now… .

Chuck’s thoughts were suddenly but poetically interrupted by Greg; still in a fit of passion, he burst out in declamatory tones: “You would not tell with such high zest, to children ardent for some desperate glory, That old Lie! Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori!” He spat the words, with venom and bitterness.

Startled for a second time by Greg in twenty minutes, Chuck began “What was th—” when the door opened. It was Wagner.

“Hello, men,” he said, briskly walking into the room. “Now there’s a set of domains we don’t want to hit,” he said, coming up to them. “No dot-gov or dot-mil sites and apart from those, the ones written on this list. Doable, right?”

He showed them a printout; they looked at it. It had several hundred host-names or ‘domains’. Many of them were easily recognizable as being those of the largest and most powerful corporations and the rest were those of large corporate-controlled media, wealthy political foundations, and such.

“Can-do,” said Chuck, brow furrowed. “Just curious why.”

“Talked with Hal earlier today; he brought up a good point. We don’t want to virus-proof the government’s or military’s computers! And if these giant transnationals or big-media get hit with viruses and go down for a while, screw ‘em,” Wagner said with distaste.

“Oh yeah — cool!” replied Chuck. Greg grinned and nodded approvingly.

“Good. I just emailed it to both of you; encrypted of course. Stick it where needed. So, you guys ready? Meeting starts in thirty minutes.”

“So? How goes it?” Wagner asked as they walked up to the elevators.

“How goes it? Great!” said Chuck. “To be honest, Hal’s guys have done all the donkey work. Greg and I have the easy part and we’re ahead of schedule. Web’s gonna get vaccinated now, thanks to the Baddler — I mean the Baldur chip. Jeez, what a weirdo name — why, why would they call it that!”

“It’s the name of some god … North European, perhaps; a god of beauty, light, and stars, I think,” Greg said, trying to be helpful, interpreting Chuck’s rhetoric literally. “And that’s apropos — you know, aren’t some websites stars of freedom dotting the vast night-sky of, of ignorance and obfuscation? …and web-servers dot the miles and miles of fibre, and … twinkle with knowledge and information.”

“That’s pretty, Greg,” nodded Chuck appreciatively and Wagner concurred.

Greg chuckled and said that he hadn’t meant for it to come out the way it did as they entered an elevator.

Greg, Chuck, and Sam were having coffee and doughnuts in the office, a very early breakfast. They had reached the office by 3:45 a.m. on Monday and had set off the live run at four.

“Let’s see what the latest is from Norway … and also how that standoff with Brazil is developing,” said Greg, turning to his computer and bringing up a web-browser on his monitor.

“You guys think and talk a lot about wars and stuff,” commented Sam.

Greg looked at Sam and then looked through him. His face broke into a half-smile, a joyless smile; his eyes communicated the pain born of a compassionate humanity and carried a jadedness unnatural to their age of thirty-two years. He spoke very softly. “Sam, we Americans have been talking of warfare and dealing in wanton wickedness for over a century. We wouldn’t have to be talking about it and confronting it now if folks at the beginning of only this century hadn’t gotten things as totally out of hand as they did.”

Nobody replied.

“You know,” said Chuck, changing the subject, “I wonder why they asked us to randomize the keys the way they did. I mean, all the CPUs are going to be disabled for what — two, three hours? Nobody’s going to be able to crack any one-K key in even months so we might as well have used the same key for every CPU.” Chuck sounded perplexed. He looked at Sam.

Sam looked at Chuck, tilted his head, and shrugged. “That’s what Dr. Burton and his chief programmer decided.”

“I suppose they had a reason,” said Greg. “Or maybe they just didn’t think of it. Anyway, we’ll find out when Hal comes in this morning — we can ask him.”

“If he knows, if there was a reason,” said Chuck, still bemused.

“Speak of the devil…” said Sam as Burton walked in the door.

“Greg? Chuck? Pleased to meet you,” Burton said, pleasantly shaking hands with them. He gave each of them a business-card.

“Hal I. Burton, Ph.D.,” said Chuck, mis-reading the business-card.

“That’s ‘L’, not ‘I’,” corrected Burton.

“Oh! Yes, sorry. What’s the ‘L’ stand for?” Chuck asked amiably, trying to make small talk.

“My middle-name? Oh, that’s kind of embarrassing!” laughed Burton. “Blame my classicist parents! And their flights of fancy. But anyway, it’s Loki.”

“Huh! Loki. Never heard that name before.”

Greg, however, had. He frowned and smiled wryly to himself. ‘Baldur’. ‘Mistletoe’. And now ‘Loki’. A peculiar coincidence … eerie, in fact… .

Six military policemen silently entered the office and stood along a wall. Greg and Chuck, quite perplexed, stared at them, looked into their faces. Not that they found any variety or even individuality: each man had the blank, glazed, obedient face of an automaton who does as he is told; the face of an ever-increasing number of Americans, in truth.

“Change of plans, boys. We’re not starting the second pass this morning,” said Burton, as two men appeared in the dim corridor outside the door.

Greg and Chuck now looked at these two new arrivals. One of the men was elderly and squat and had a shuffling gait, the other seemed equally elderly but walked with a jaunty strut. They came into the office. Both men were remarkably ugly; their countenances bespoke the arrogance and corruption of unrestrained and untrammelled abuse of power.

“We are going to have to delay that second pass; indefinitely,” the ugly squat man said. Greg and Chuck realized with a sense of confusion that this new visitor was the Attorney-General, Sandler ‘Sandy’ Farm.

“And that’s strictly confidential, strictly confidential,” the ugly jaunty man offered, flashing that roguish grin he doled out like spare change to the fawning, vacuous hacks and flacks of the American media. He shook hands in a faux-friendly manner with Greg and Chuck. They were struck dumb, for this was the Secretary of War, Ron S. Field.

“After all, you are working for the Government of the United States of America so your absolute secrecy is required,” said Farm. His usually sullen — literally ashen — face was beaming, even cheery. “But I thank you gentlemen most sincerely for bringing this project to a successful closure.”

“I guess I can tell you now why we used different bit-sequences so as to manufacture unique five-kilobit keys for every CPU that’s being locked,” Sam said. He wore a smirk and it made him look both stupid and crafty at the same time. “Even if some bunch of idealists somehow cracks the standard re-enable instruction, it would take literally years of cracking for them to figure out the five-K key with which one particular CPU has been locked. And if they do, so what? You can’t use that same key to unlock any other — virtually any other — CPU.”

Chuck looked at Greg, not making full sense of it. Greg returned his gaze.

“You’re very smart engineers, breaking into government computers and reading our white-papers and research reports,” said Field. Nodding at Chuck, he continued, “If you had read that one all the way through — I mean ‘Mankind’s Nine Thousand Freedoms’ — you would have found out that here in America, fewer than several hundred freedoms now remain for the riffraff … I mean for the common man. The top-level freedom to think straight — ‘Unconstrained and Noise-free Cognition,’ they call it — that freedom’s, of course, the fundamental one, and it plus all its derivatives has been off the table for … what, over fifty years now.”

Everyone remained silent. Field went on, addressing both Greg and Chuck, “A small group of people have been working on this project to create voluntary free-slaves for more than two centuries — since shortly after the country was founded, in fact. It is somewhat alien to your idealistic way of thought. And the Web, now –’The World-Wide Web’ is the linchpin freedom.”

“The Web was the linchpin freedom, was the linchpin!” Farm shrieked, punching the air in quite an uncharacteristic spasm of excitement. “That’s why — Yes, yes! — I, I wanted to be here! … when i-i-it it-happened!” he babbled, and started laughing in a manner that was quite maniacal. His face was twitching and his eyes were bulging and glinting as he cackled uncontrollably.

“What … what do you mean?” asked Chuck, distracted and repulsed by Farm’s demeanour. He was still not comprehending, or perhaps not wanting to comprehend. Greg realized in a flash that there would be no second pass. They had been taken. He fell back limply in his chair.

Burton answered. His demeanour too had changed, though in a different way. His very face seemed to have undergone a transformation — as if a snake had moulted its old skin. He looked triumphant, but apart from that emotion, base cunning, greed, and evil had manifest themselves, as if settling into their rightful home after a necessary absence. “I’ll tell you what he means. The Web and the Internet started off as the ARPANet. It was not meant for –and I’m not even sure how … the rabble managed to get it. But we know how to scaremonger the little people, we know how to control you, even if the process is slow and gradual. We’re the rulers, we want the Internet back, and this time we’ll keep it for ourselves. Forever,” he said, leaving nothing to interpretation.

“All right,” said Field, now wearing a cold, disdainful smile. “Time to clear out. You’ll be debriefed at a location in Fort Meade.”

“Hoder’s waiting there,” said Burton, smiling the smile of the serpent.

Someone switched off the lights. The room was now lit only by the corridor lighting seeping in and the glare of six or so computer monitors.

Chuck walked a step or two past Greg, and started to whistle but gave it up immediately. This roomful of hostile strangers silhouetted in the dim light of the monitors did not encourage such ebullience. Greg remained seated, he felt light-headed and nauseous. There was one thing whose loss he was never going to be able to get used to… .

At a signal from Burton, two military policemen walked up to Chuck and Greg to escort them out.

Chuck glanced at his watch. “Should take only an hour more,” he murmured over his shoulder to Greg. Then he added, in an afterthought, “Wonder how many hosts have been hit? It should be halfway through about now.” He felt a sense of desolation, a stark desolation, as he said that.

Greg didn’t reply so Chuck turned around to see why. Just a moment earlier, Greg had swivelled his chair to a nearby workstation, opened a web-browser, and typed in ‘news.yahoo.com’. Chuck could just see his face, a pale, drained oval staring at the monitor.

“Look,” whispered Greg, and Chuck looked at the monitor. (There is always a last time for everything. Even the Web.) Well knowing that all was lost, Greg had acted on emotion in bringing up that website, just for the sake of looking at it once more. But it was not to be. The familiar white-and-blue home-page loaded only partially before the web-browser froze –

‘Error: Server not responding.’

Across America, without any fuss, the Web was shutting down.

There have been a number of books written about this underground press. The granddaddy of them all is most certainly Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press by retired Northwestern University professor Abe Peck, who began his journalism career as a member of Chicago’s groundbreaking Seed. More recent endeavors include John McMillan’s Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America and the just-released On the Ground: An Illustrated Anecdotal History of the Sixties Underground Press in the U.S. Edited by Sean Stewart, On the Ground is essentially an oral history that features the recollections of several people that were involved with underground papers from around the United States. Unlike McMillan’s work which runs toward the academic side of things, Stewart’s text has a populist feel to it. The recollections are straight from the speakers’ mouths; sometimes angry, sometimes humorous and always honest.

The best part of the book are the graphics. As I read through the memories of the folks Stewart spoke with for On the Ground I was repeatedly surprised at how well I remembered various illustrations and photographs Stewart reprinted throughout the text. Like the papers his interviewees are remembering, the most striking thing about On the Ground is the layout. Even though I know the book was composed on a computer screen, the book looks as if it were laid out via the old cut and paste method by folks possibly stoned on weed and a day or two with minimal sleep–just like many issues of almost every paper Stewart discusses.

Being in the Movement and the counterculture was generally an upbeat experience. So was being in the Sixties underground media. Most folks were young and full of hope and those that were not necessarily young in years were where it counted–in their approach to life. Reporters did not cover stories as much as they took part in them and then wrote about it afterward. As Abe Peck says about working at The Seed: “We were very determined and unless something terrible happened–like [the murder of] Fred Hampton–up, just pretty upbeat.” Politics was omnipresent, whether it was at a very political paper like The Black Panther or a paper that had a more countercultural bent like The LA Free Press. This was because, as far as the authorities were concerned, everyone involved with the underground press–writers, printers, cartoonists, sellers and readers–were on the wrong side of the law and had to be watched. Sometimes, they were dealt with by methods legal and otherwise. This meant things like the stores selling papers being harassed by police and vigilantes; the withdrawal of advertising because of pressure from the FBI and other agencies; and assaults against persons involved by cops and others.

When Richard Nixon took over the White House in 1969 the repression of the Movement and counterculture intensified. Naturally, this meant that the media that represented these phenomena would be under greater attack. Black Panther papers were destroyed enroute to cities across the country and even to military bases overseas. Storefronts that newspapers worked out of were firebombed by vigilantes and shot at by police. Obscenity charges were brought against newspapers that then tied up the papers’ funds in court costs. High school underground press writers were thrown out of school and administrators suspended students selling and reading those papers. Although the reasons given for the expulsions usually had to do with attendance and other disciplinary infractions, the reality was that high school disciplinarians resented the threat to their authority and power. A friend of mine in Montgomery County, Maryland was suspended from the progressive John F. Kennedy High School for selling The Washington Free Press on campus. The issue in question featured a cartoon of a judge that had been involved in efforts to shut down the paper. The drawing showed the judge masturbating. Underneath the drawing was the phrase (made popular by the TV show Laugh-In) “here com da judge.” The cartoon was a response to a series of rulings made by the judge forbidding the distribution of the Free Press on high school grounds. These rulings and the school board decisions that preceded them were being challenged by the ACLU.

As the 1960s turned over into the 1970s, many folks that had been on the front lines began to retreat for the sake of their sanity. Others just fell into the trap of individualism and self-satisfaction–an easy trap to fall into in the US of A. By 1974 or thereabouts, the curse of identity politics had taken over much of the political discourse on the left and effectively limited the reach of the Movement as people separated according to their gender, sexuality, and ethnic origins. Intentionally or not, this trend hastened the demise of the underground press and the movements it was a part of. However, its legacy remains. There are many websites and even some print journals that are more than observers of the protests and movements they report on. Journalist Alice Embree notes that “The underground press was the connective tissue; it spread the news …” When the papers began to fail, the connectiveness was lessened. The underground press was a vital part of what happened in the sixties. Sean Stewart’s wonderfully edited text On the Ground lets the reader know how and why that remains true. The striking graphics and compelling recollections in this text are at once a popular history and an inspiration.

It takes some chutzpah – or, at least, epic self-delusion – for Israel’s prime minister to be lecturing the Arab world on liberalism and democracy at this moment.

In recent weeks, a spate of anti-democratic measures have won support from Netanyahu’s right wing government, justified by a new security doctrine: see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil of Israel. If the legislative proposals pass, the Israeli courts, Israel’s human rights groups and media, and the international community will be transformed into the proverbial three monkeys.

Israel’s vigilant human rights community has been the chief target of this assault. Yesterday Netanyahu’s Likud faction and the Yisrael Beiteinu party of his far-right foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, proposed a new law that would snuff out much of the human rights community in Israel.

The bill effectively divides non-governmental organisations (NGOs) into two kinds: those defined by the right as pro-Israel and those seen as “political”, or anti-Israel. The favoured ones, such as ambulance services and universities, will continue to be lavishly funded from foreign sources, chiefly wealthy private Jewish donors from the United States and Europe.

The “political” ones – meaning those that criticise government policies, especially relating to the occupation – will be banned from receiving funds from foreign governments, their main source of income. Donations from private sources, whether Israeli or foreign, will be subject to a crippling 45 per cent tax.

The grounds for being defined as a “political” NGO are suitably vague: denying Israel’s right to exist or its Jewish and democratic character; inciting racism; supporting violence against Israel; supporting politicians or soldiers being put on trial in international courts; or backing boycotts of the state.

One human rights group warned that all groups assisting the UN’s 2009 report by Judge Richard Goldstone into war crimes committed during Israel’s attack on Gaza in winter 2008 would be vulnerable to such a law. Other organisations like Breaking the Silence, which publishes the testimonies of Israeli soldiers who have committed or witnessed war crimes, will be silenced themselves. And an Israeli Arab NGO said it feared that its work demanding equality for all Israeli citizens, including the fifth who are Palestinian, and an end to Jewish privilege would count as denying Israel’s Jewish character.

At the same time Netanyahu wants the Israeli media emasculated. Last week his government threw its weight behind a new defamation law that will leave few but millionaires in a position to criticise politicians and officials. Mr Netanyahu observed: “It may be called the Defamation Law, but I call it the ‘publication of truth law’.” The media and human rights groups fear the worst.

This monkey must speak no evil.

Another bill, backed by the justice minister, Yaacov Neeman, is designed to skew the make-up of a panel selecting judges for Israel’s supreme court. Several judicial posts are about to fall vacant, and the government hopes to stuff the court with apppointees who share its ideological world view and will not rescind its anti-democratic legislation, including its latest attack on the human rights community. Neeman’s favoured candidate is a settler who has a history of ruling against human rights organisations.

Senior legislators from Mr Netanyahu’s party are pushing another bill that would make it nigh impossible for human rights organisations to petition the supreme court against government actions.

The judicial monkey should see no evil.

At one level, these and a host of other measures – including increasing government intimidation of the Israeli media and academia, a crackdown on whistleblowers and the recently passed boycott law, which exposes critics of the settlements to expensive court actions for damages – are designed to strengthen the occupation by disarming its critics inside Israel.

But there is another, even more valued goal: making sure that in future the plentiful horror stories from the Palestinian territories – monitored by human rights organisations, reported by the media and heard in the courts – never reach the ears of the international community.

The third monkey is supposed to hear no evil.

The crackdown is justified in the Israeli right’s view on the grounds that criticism of the occupation represents not domestic concerns but unwelcome foreign interference in Israel’s affairs. The promotion of human rights – whether in Israel, the occupied territories or the Arab world – is considered by Netanyahu and his allies as inherently un-Israeli and anti-Israeli.

The hypocrisy is hard to stomach. Israel has long claimed special dispensation to interfere in the affairs of both the EU and the United States. Jewish Agency staff proselytise among European and American Jews to persuade them to emigrate to Israel. Uniquely, Israel’s security agencies are given free rein at airports around the world to harass and invade the privacy of non-Jews flying to Tel Aviv. And Israel’s political proxies abroad – sophisticated lobby groups like AIPAC in the US – act as foreign agents while not registering as such.

Of course, Israel’s qualms against foreign meddling are selective. No restrictions are planned for right wing Jews from abroad, such as US casino magnate Irving Moskowitz, who have pumped enormous sums into propping up illegal Jewish settlements built on Palestinian land.

There is a faulty logic too to Israel’s argument. As human rights activists point out, the areas where they do most of their work are located not in Israel but in the Palestinian territories, which Israel is occupying in violation of international law.

Privately, European embassies have been trying to drive home this point. The EU gives Israel preferential trading status, worth billions of dollars annually to the Israeli economy, on condition that it respects human rights in the occupied territories. Europe argues it is, therefore, entitled to fund the monitoring of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. More’s the pity that Europe fails to act on the information it receives.

Given the right’s strengthening hand, it can be expected to devise ever more creative ways to silence the human rights community and Israeli media and emasculate the courts as way to end the bad press.

Israelis are obssessed with their country’s image abroad and what they regard as a “delegitimisation” campaign that threatens not only the occupation’s continuation but also Israel’s long-term survival as an ethnic state. The leadership has been incensed by regular surveys of global opinion showing Israel ranked among the most unpopular countries in the world.

The Palestinians’ recent decision to turn to the international community for recognition of statehood has only amplified such grievances.

Israel has no intention of altering its policies, or of pursuing peace. Rather, Netanyahu’s government has been oscillating between a desperate desire to pass yet more anti-democratic legislation to stifle criticism and a modicum of restraint motivated by fear of the international backlash.

A cabinet debate last month on legislation against human rights groups focused barely at all on the proposal’s merits. Instead the head of the National Security Council, Yaakov Amidror, was called before ministers to explain whether Israel stood to lose more from passing such bills or from allowing human rights groups to carry on monitoring the occupation.

Deluded as it may seem, Netanyahu’s ultimate goal is to turn the clock back 40 years, to a “golden age” when foreign correspondents and western governments could refer, without blushing, to the occupation of the Palestinians as “benign”.

Donald Neff, Jerusalem correspondent for Time magazine in the 1970s, admitted years later that his and his colleagues’ performance was so feeble at the time in large part because there was little critical information available on the occupation. When he witnessed first-hand what was taking place, his editors in the US refused to believe him and he was eventually moved on.

Now, however, the genie is out the bottle. The international community understands full well – thanks to human rights activists – both that the occupation is brutal and that Israel has been peace-making in bad faith.

If Israel continues on its current course, another myth long accepted by western countries – that Israel is “the only democracy in the Middle East” – may finally be shattered.

• A version of this story was first published in the National, Abu Dhabi

Then he did something that is alien to United States corporate media culture. He behaved as an actual journalist and asked a tough, pertinent, no-holds-barred question. Here it is, as relayed by Husseini’s blog:

I want to know what legitimacy your regime has, sir. You come before us, representative of one of the most autocratic, misogynistic regimes on the face of the earth. Human Rights Watch and other reports of torture, detention of activists, you squelched the democratic uprising in Bahrain, you tried to overturn the democratic uprising in Egypt and indeed you continue to oppress your own people. What legitimacy does your regime have – other than billions of dollars and weapons?¹

Prince Turki, former Saudi intelligence supremo, former pal of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, former Saudi ambassador to the US, reacted by changing the subject.²

Were this to happen in the Middle East, Husseini would have been duly kidnapped by Saudi intel, tortured and snuffed out. Ask the remains of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. For much less — saying out loud in an Arab League meeting that King Abdullah was a traitor because he was encouraging the George W Bush administration to invade Iraq — the House of Saud did everything in its power, for years, to make sure Gaddafi was taken out.

Turki exhibits all the trademark democratic credentials of the House of Saud. He refers to the push for democracy in the Arab world as “Arab Troubles”.

After the Turki shoot

According to Husseini, on the same day of the news conference he received “a letter informing me that I was suspended from the National Press Club ‘due to your conduct at a news conference’. The letter, signed by the executive director of the club, William McCarren, accused me of violating rules prohibiting ‘boisterous and unseemly conduct or language’.”

Husseini, communications director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, which showcases critical journalism from all over the world, is a calm, thoughtful man with impeccable credentials. The accusation is not only bogus — it is downright pathetic.

Was this a one-off? Obviously not. Flashback to January 2009, at the same National Press Club, during a news conference by then-Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni. When Livni was asked a tough question — once again by Husseini — the mike was cut, and the conference abruptly terminated. My cameraman, Sebastian Pituscan, was there with me.³

So this is how the much-lauded “freedom of the press” myth in the US actually works. If you perform the job of an actual journalist, telling truth to power, forget about attending press conferences at the White House, Pentagon or State Department. You won’t even be admitted in the building.

If you are an official from a “valuable ally” — such as the House of Saud or the regime in Israeli — you are assured a tough question-free pulpit anywhere you choose, especially if you’re fluent in English.

But if you are an official from a “rogue” regime, the maximum you can aspire is to be humiliated in public, as it happened to Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad at Columbia University in New York. Especially if you don’t speak English, and most of what you say is lost in translation.

On the other hand, if you are a travelling US corporate media hack, you can get away with murder.

Example. During the Asian financial crisis, in 1997 and 1998, I went to countless press conferences where parachuted US hacks intimidated Asian leaders as if they were a bunch of hooligans (the hacks, not the leaders). Perky chicks emerging from some two-bit journalism school in the flyover states treated then-Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad as if he was a child rapist, because he had established capital controls.

Mahathir turned out to be right — as Malaysia overcame the crisis much earlier than those, such as Indonesia, Thailand and South Korea, that surrendered to the International Monetary Fund’s dreadful “adjustments”.

In 1989, Chinese students protesting in Tiananmen Square were hailed by US media as heroes standing up to tyranny. In 2011, American students protesting all across the country against financial tyranny are “lazy”, “bastards”, both, or downright criminalized.

United States corporate media could not possibly admit that repression in Tahrir Square by Egyptian riot police is exactly the same as repression in New York, Oakland, Portland or Boston by American riot police.

Still there’s no word from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization about setting up a “humanitarian” no-fly zone over selected Occupy sites in US cities. They are still consulting with the House of Saud.

1. See the blog.
2. Video of the exchange.
3. The exchange is here.

School superintendents placed it in restricted sections of their libraries.

It is the most challenged book four of the past five years, according to the American Library Association (ALA).

“It” is a 32-page illustrated children’s book, And Tango Makes Three, by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson, with illustrations by Henry Cole. The book is based upon the real story of Roy and Silo, two male penguins, who had formed a six-year bond at New York City’s Central Park Zoo, and who “adopted” a fertilized egg and raised the chick until she could be on her own.

Gays saw the story as a positive reinforcement of their lifestyle. Riding to rescue America from homosexuality were the biddies against perversion. Gay love is against the Bible, they wailed; the book isn’t suitable for the delicate minds of children, they cried as they pushed libraries and schools to remove it from their shelves or at the very least make it restricted.

The penguins may have been gay—or maybe they weren’t. It’s not unusual for animals to form close bonds with others of their same sex. But the issue is far greater than whether or not the penguins were gay or if the book promoted homosexuality as a valid lifestyle. People have an inherent need to defend their own values, lifestyles, and worldviews by attacking others who have a different set of beliefs. Banning or destroying free speech and the freedom to publish is one of the ways people believe they can protect their own lifestyles.

During the first decade of the 21st century, the most challenged books, according to the ALA, were J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, apparently because some people believe fictionalized witchcraft is a dagger into the soul of organized religion. Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series was the 10th most challenged in 2010. Perhaps some parents weren’t comfortable with their adolescents having to make a choice between werewolves and vampires.

Among the most challenged books is Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the vicious satire about firemen burning books to save humanity. Other books that are consistently among the ALA’s list of most challenged are Brave New World (Aldous Huxley), Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut), The Chocolate War (Robert Cormier), Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck), I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou), Forever (Judy Blume), and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain), regarded by most major literary scholars as the finest American novel.

Name a classic, and it’s probably on the list of the most challenged books. Conservatives, especially fundamental religious conservatives, tend to challenge more books. But, challenges aren’t confined to any one political ideology. Liberals are frequently at the forefront of challenging books that may not agree with their own social philosophies. The feminist movement, while giving the nation a better awareness of the rights of women, wanted to ban Playboy and all works that depicted what they believed were unflattering images if women. Liberals have also attacked the works of Joel Chandler Harris (the Br’er Rabbit series), without understanding history, folklore, or the intent of the journalist-author, who was well-regarded as liberal for his era.

Although there are dozens of reasons why people say they want to restrict or ban a book, the one reason that threads its way through all of them is that the book challenges conventional authority or features a character who is perceived to be “different,” who may give readers ideas that many see as “dangerous.”

The belief there are works that are “dangerous” is why governments create and enforce laws that restrict publication. In colonial America, as in almost all countries and territories at that time, the monarchy required every book to be licensed, to be read by a government official or committee to determine if the book was suitable for the people. If so, it received a royal license. If not, it could not be printed.

In 1644, two decades before his epic poem Paradise Lost was published, John Milton wrote a pamphlet, to be distributed to members of Parliament, against a recently-enacted licensing law. In defiance of the law, the pamphlet was published without license. Using Biblical references and pointing out that the Greek and Roman civilizations didn’t license books, Milton argued, “As good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable create [in] God’s image,” he told Parliament, “but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the image of God.” He concluded his pamphlet with a plea, “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”

A century later, Sir William Blackstone, one of England’s foremost jurists and legal scholars, argued against prior restraint, the right of governments to block publication of any work they found offensive for any reason.

The arguments of Milton and Blackstone became the basis of the foundation of a new country, to be known as the United States of America, and the establishment of the First Amendment.

Every year, at the end of September, the American Library Association sponsors Banned Book Week, and publishes a summary of book challenges. And every year, it is made more obvious that those who want to ban books, sometimes building bonfires and throwing books upon them as did Nazi Germany, fail to understand the principles of why this nation was created.

The school was going to make the Presidential speech available to students, but allow the partisan and/or bigoted parental crowd to shield their probably already-sheltered offspring from anything threatening the pale (as in white, conservative and “good”) worldview that they themselves espouse and do everything in their power to instill in their children.

The image of former President George W. Bush (looking dazed and meek) sitting in a classroom full of kids while the terrorists attacked on 9/11, came to mind. Had that school contacted all their pupils’ parents to make sure it was okay to let Bush into their school for a press op? How would those children and or parents have been treated if they had refused to give their Commander-in-Chief audience?

Do they have a Gitmo for children?

When I first got the notice that children’s middle school was taking precautions regarding President Obama’s speech, I wasn’t surprised. I simply viewed it as another step in the baneful ossification of the Republican electorate. Fox News doesn’t encourage an informed American worldview. Dissenting voices confuse things. Contradictory viewpoints are anathema.

It’s much easier to despise President Obama if you ignore him. It’s much easier say he’s not an American or a Christian if you don’t listen to him speak. It’s much easier to claim he’s a Muslim and a terrorist if you’ve never watched him try to communicate his thoughts.

As long as all you expose yourself or your kids to is the opinions and views expressed by Fox News (or Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck), it’s easy to maintain a conservative worldview because the indoctrination settles over you in layers, day after day, week after week. Eventually the sediment of close-mindedness ossifies and neither you nor your sheltered children have much of a chance of viewing President Obama as anything other than a dangerous interloper who must the enemy.

This kind of rigidity is not conducive to cognitive, much less intellectual development. Intelligence needs to be well-rounded, tested and, if possible, demonstrable. Single, slanted sources (as we now know from the lead up to the Iraq War) are not reliable or trustworthy.

If you don’t like President Obama, that’s your prerogative. I’m not a huge fan myself of late. If you don’t want to watch the address he makes to our children, fine. Ignore it. But don’t demand that your kids go to school or be at school with their eyes half-closed and their minds half open. They should be trusted to decide these things for themselves. We should love them enough to give them a chance.

My kids are too young to have sedimentary worldviews and I don’t want their minds or spirits fossilized before they’ve had a chance to be properly formed—by them—not me.

The problem with the “American conversation” these days is that we are not conversing. Too many people on both sides are simply talking to themselves or talking only amongst themselves.

This is the kind of atmosphere that usually makes it easier to lynch folks. This is the form of tunnel vision that created McCarthyism. This is the stunted thought process Nazi Germany was born of.

Closed minds and hearts may be more American than open minds and hearts these days. But they shouldn’t be. Especially when it comes to our children.

It reminds me of the old Eastern contemplation that asked “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”

Right now the sound of one hand clapping is Fox News.

Right now the sound of one hand clapping is either side of any issue only listening to what it has to say.

For the first time, Western publics – or at least those who can afford a computer – have a way to bypass the gatekeepers of our democracies. Data our leaders once kept tightly under wraps can now be easily searched for, as can the analyses of those not paid to turn a blind eye to the constant and compelling evidence of Western hypocrisy. Wikileaks, in particular, has rapidly eroded the traditional hierarchical systems of information dissemination.

The media – at least the supposedly left wing component of it – should be cheering on this revolution, if not directly enabling it. And yet, mostly they are trying to co-opt, tame or subvert it. Indeed, progressive broadcasters and writers increasingly use their platforms in the mainstream to discredit and ridicule the harbingers of the new age.

A good case study is the Guardian, considered the most left wing newspaper in Britain and rapidly acquiring cult status in the United States, where many readers tend to assume they are getting access through its pages to unvarnished truth and the full range of critical thinking on the left.

Certainly, the Guardian includes some fine reporting and occasionally insightful commentary. Possibly because it is farther from the heart of empire, it is able to provide a partial antidote to the craven coverage of the corporate-owned media in the US.

Nonetheless, it would be unwise to believe that the Guardian is therefore a free market in progressive or dissident ideas on the left. In fact, quite the contrary: the paper strictly polices what can be said and who can say it in its pages, for cynical reasons we shall come to.

Until recently, it was quite possible for readers to be blissfully unaware that there were interesting or provocative writers and thinkers who were never mentioned in the Guardian. And, before papers had online versions, the Guardian could always blame space constraints as grounds for not including a wider range of voices. That, of course, changed with the rise of the internet.

Early on, the Guardian saw the potential, as well as the threat, posed by this revolution. It responded by creating a seemingly free-for-all blog called Comment is Free to harness much of the raw energy unleashed by the internet. It recruited an army of mostly unpaid writers, activists and propagandists on both sides of the Atlantic to help brand itself as the epitome of democratic and pluralistic media.

From the start, however, Comment is Free was never quite as free – except in terms of the financial cost to the Guardian – as it appeared. Significant writers on the left, particularly those who were considered “beyond the pale” in the old media landscape, were denied access to this new “democratic” platform. Others, myself included, quickly found there were severe and seemingly inexplicable limits on what could be said on CiF (unrelated to issues of taste or libel).

None of this should matter. After all, there are many more places than CiF to publish and gain an audience. All over the web dissident writers are offering alternative analyses of current events, and drawing attention to the significance of information often ignored or sidelined by the corporate media.

Rather than relish this competition, or resign itself to the emergence of real media pluralism, however, the Guardian reverted to type. It again became the left’s thought police.

This time, however, it could not ensure that the “challenging left” would simply go unheard. The internet rules out the option of silencing by exclusion. So instead, it appears, it is using its pages to smear those writers who, through their own provocative ideas and analyses, suggest the Guardian’s tameness.

The Guardian’s discrediting of the “left” – the left being a concept never defined by the paper’s writers – is far from taking place in a fair battle of ideas. Not least the Guardian is backed by the huge resources of its corporate owners. When it attacks dissident writers, they can rarely, if ever, find a platform of equal prominence to defend themselves. And the Guardian has proved itself more than reluctant to allow a proper right of reply in its pages to those it maligns.

But also, and most noticeably, it almost never engages with these dissident writers’ ideas. In popular terminology, it prefers to play the man, not the ball. Instead it creates labels, from the merely disparaging to the clearly defamatory, that push these writers and thinkers into the territory of the unconscionable.

A typical example of the Guardian’s new strategy was on show this week in an article in the print edition’s comment pages – also available online and a far more prestigious platform than CiF – in which the paper commissioned a socialist writer, Andy Newman, to argue that the Israeli Jewish musician Gilad Atzmon was part of an anti-semitic trend discernible on the left.

Jonathan Freedland, the paper’s star columnist and resident obsessive on anti-semitism, tweeted to his followers that the article was “important” because it was “urging the left to confront antisemitism in its ranks”.

I have no idea whether Atzmon has expressed anti-semitic views – and I am none the wiser after reading Newman’s piece.

As is now typical in this new kind of Guardian character assassination, the article makes no effort to prove that Atzmon is anti-semitic or to show that there is any topical or pressing reason to bring up his presumed character flaw. (In passing, the article made a similar accusation of anti-semitism against Alison Weir of If Americans Knew, and against the Counterpunch website for publishing an article by her on Israel’s role in organ-trafficking.)

Atzmon has just published a book on Jewish identity, the Wandering Who?, that has garnered praise from respected figures such as Richard Falk, an emeritus law professor at Princeton, and John Mearsheimer, a distinguished politics professor at Chicago University.

But Newman did not critique the book, nor did he quote from it. In fact, he showed no indication that he had read the book or knew anything about its contents.

Instead Newman began his piece, after praising Atzmon’s musicianship, with an assumptive reference to his “antisemitic writings”. There followed a few old quotes from Atzmon, long enough to be intriguing but too short and out of context to prove his anti-semitism – except presumably to the Guardian’s thought police and its most deferential readers.

The question left in any reasonable person’s mind is why dedicate limited commentary space in the paper to Atzmon? There was no suggestion of a newsworthy angle. And there was no case made to prove that Atzmon is actually anti-semitic. It was simply assumed as a fact.

Atzmon, even by his own reckoning, is a maverick figure who has a tendency to infuriate just about everyone with his provocative, and often ambiguous, pronouncements. But why single him out and then suggest that he represents a discernible and depraved trend among the left?

Nonetheless, the Guardian was happy to offer its imprimatur to Newman’s defamation of Atzmon, who was described as a conspiracy theorist “dripping with contempt for Jews”, despite an absence of substantiating evidence. Truly worthy of Pravda in its heyday.

The Atzmon article appeared on the same day the Guardian carried out a similar hatchet job, this time on Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks. The paper published a book review of Assange’s “unauthorised autobiography” by the Guardian’s investigations editor, David Leigh.

That Leigh could be considered a reasonable choice for a review of the book – which he shamelessly pilloried – demonstrates quite how little the Guardian is prepared to abide by elementary principles of ethical journalism.

Leigh has his own book on the Guardian’s involvement with Wikileaks and Assange currently battling it out for sales in the bookshops. He is hardly a disinterested party.

But also, and more importantly, Leigh is clearly not dispassionate about Assange, any more than the Guardian is. The paper has been waging an all-but-declared war against Wikileaks since the two organizations fell out over their collaboration on publishing Wikileak’s trove of 250,000 classified US embassy cables. The feud, if the paper’s talkbacks are to be believed, has finally begun to test the patience of even some of the paper’s most loyal readers.

The low point in Leigh’s role in this saga was divulging in his own book a complex password Assange had created to protect a digital file containing the original and unedited embassy cables. Each was being carefully redacted before publication by several newspapers, including the Guardian.

This act of – in the most generous interpretation of Leigh’s behaviour – gross stupidity provided the key for every security agency in the world to open the file. Leigh has accused Wikileaks of negligence in allowing a digital copy of the file to be available. Whether true, his own role in the affair is far more inexcusable.

Even given his apparent ignorance of the digital world, Leigh is a veteran investigative reporter who must have known that revealing the password was foolhardy in the extreme. Not least, it clearly demonstrated how

Assange formulates his passwords, and would provide important clues for hackers trying to open other protected Wikileaks documents.

His and the Guardian’s recklessness in disclosing the password was compounded by their negligent decision to contact neither Assange nor Wikileaks before publication of Leigh’s book to check whether the password was still in use.

After this shabby episode, one of many from the Guardian in relation to Assange, it might have been assumed that Leigh was considered an inappropriate person to comment in the Guardian on matters related to Wikileaks. Not so.

Instead the paper has been promulgating Leigh’s self-interested version of the story and regularly impugning Assange’s character. In a recent editorial, the paper lambasted the Wikileaks founder as an “information absolutist” who was “flawed, volatile and erratic”, arguing that he had chosen to endanger informants named in the US cables by releasing the unredacted cache.

However, the paper made no mention either of Leigh’s role in revealing the password or of Wikileaks’ point that, following Leigh’s incompetence, every security agency and hacker in the world had access to the file’s contents. Better, Wikileaks believed, to create a level playing field and allow everyone access to the cables, thereby letting informants know whether they had been named and were in danger.

Leigh’s abuse of his position is just one element in a dirty campaign by the Guardian to discredit Assange and, by extension, the Wikileaks project.

Some of this clearly reflects a clash of personalities and egos, but it also looks suspiciously like the feud derives from a more profound ideological struggle between the Guardian and Wikilieaks about how information should be controlled a generation hence. The implicit philosophy of Wikileaks is to promote an ever-greater opening up and equalisation of access to information, while the Guardian, following its commercial imperatives, wants to ensure the gatekeepers maintain their control.

At least Assange has the prominent Wikileaks website to make sure his own positions and reasons are hard to overlook. Other targets of the Guardian are less fortunate.

George Monbiot, widely considered to be the Guardian’s most progressive columnist, has used his slot to attack a disparate group on the “left” who also happen to be harsh critics of the Guardian.

In a column in June he accused Ed Herman, a leading US professor of finance and a collaborator on media criticism with Noam Chomsky, and writer David Peterson, of being “genocide deniers” over their research into events in Rwanda and Bosnia. The evidence was supposedly to be found in their joint book The Politics of Genocide, published last year, and in an online volume, The Srebrenica Massacre, edited by Herman.

Implying that genocide denial was now a serious problem on the left, Monbiot also laid into journalist John Pilger for endorsing the book and a small website called Media Lens that dedicates itself to exposing the failings of the corporate media, including the work of the Guardian and Monbiot.

Media Lens’ crime was to have argued that Herman and Peterson should be allowed to make their case about Rwanda and Bosnia, rather than be silenced as Monbiot appeared to prefer.

Monbiot also ensnared Chomsky in his criticism, castigating him for writing a foreword to one of the books.

Chomsky, it should be remembered, is co-author (with Herman) of Manufacturing Consent, a seminal book arguing that it is the role of the corporate media, including liberal media like the Guardian, to distort their readers’ understanding of world events to advance the interests of Western elites. In Chomsky’s view, even journalists like Monbiot are selected by the media for their ability to manufacture public consent for the maintenance of a system of Western political and economic dominance.

Possibly as a result of these ideas, Chomsky is a bete noire of the Guardian and its Sunday sister publication, the Observer.

He was famously vilified in 2005 by an up and coming Guardian feature writer, Emma Brockes – again on the issue of Srebrenica. Brockes’ report so wilfully mischaracterised Chomsky’s views (with quotes she could not substantiate after she apparently taped over her recording of the interview) that the Guardian was forced into a very reluctant “partial apology” under pressure from its readers’ editor. Over Chomsky’s opposition, the article was also erased from its archives.

Such scurrilous journalism should have ended a young journalist’s career at the Guardian. But ridiculing Chomsky is standard fare at the paper, and Brockes’ career as celebrity interviewer flourished, both at the Guardian and the New York Times.

Nick Cohen, another star columnist, this time at the Observer, found time to mention Chomsky recently, dismissing him and other prominent critical thinkers such as Tariq Ali, the late Harold Pinter, Arundhati Roy and Diana Johnstone as “west-hating”. He blamed liberals and the left for their “Chomskyan self-delusion”, and suggested many were “apologists for atrocities”.

Monbiot’s article followed in the same vein. He appeared to have a minimal grasp of the details of Herman and Peterson’s books. Much of his argument that Herman is a “genocide belittler” depends on doubts raised by a variety of experts in the Srebrenica book over the figure of 8,000 reported executions of Bosnian Muslims by Serb forces at Srebrenica. The authors suggest the number is not supported by evidence and might, in fact, be as low as 800.

Whether or not the case made by Herman and his collaborators is convincing was beside the point in Monbiot’s article. He was not interested in exploring their arguments but in creating an intellectual no-go zone from which critical thinkers and researchers were barred – a sacred genocide.

And to achieve this end, it was necessary to smear the two writers as genocide deniers and suggest that anyone else on the left who ventured on to the same territory would be similarly stigmatised.

Monbiot’s treatment of Herman and Peterson’s work was so slipshod and cavalier it is hard to believe that he was the one analysing their books.

To take just one example, Monbiot somehow appears to be unable to appreciate the careful distinction Herman’s book makes between an “execution” and a “death”, a vital differentiation in evaluating the Srebrenica massacre.

In the book, experts question whether all or most of the 8,000 Bosnian Muslims disinterred from graves at Srebrenica were victims of a genocidal plan by the Serbs, or casualties of bitter fighting between the two sides, or even some of them victims of a false-flag operation. As the book points out, a post-mortem can do many things but it cannot discern the identities or intentions of those who did the killing in Srebrenica.

The authors do not doubt that a massacre, or massacres, took place at Srebrenica. However, they believe we should not accept on trust that this was a genocide (a term defined very specifically in international law), or refuse to consider that the numbers may have been inflated to fit a political agenda.

This is not an idle or contrarian argument. As they make clear in their books, piecing together what really happened in Rwanda and Bosnia is vital if we are not to be duped by Western leaders into yet more humanitarian interventions whose goals are far from those claimed.

The fact that Monbiot discredited Herman and Peterson at a time when the Guardian’s reporting was largely cheering on the latest humanitarian intervention, in Libya, was all the more richly ironic.

So why do the Guardian and its writers publish these propaganda articles parading as moral concern about the supposedly degenerate values of the “left”? And why, if the left is in such a debased state, can the Guardian’s stable of talented writers not take on their opponents’ ideas without resorting to strawman arguments, misdirection and smears.

The writers, thinkers and activists targeted by the Guardian, though all of the left, represent starkly different trends and approaches – and some of them would doubtless vehemently oppose the opinions of others on the list.

But they all share a talent for testing the bounds of permissible thought in creative ways that challenge and undermine established truths and what I have termed elsewhere the “climate of assumptions” the Guardian has helped to create and sustain.

It hardly matters whether all or some of these critical thinkers are right. The danger they pose to the Guardian is in arguing convincingly that the way the world is presented to us is not the way it really is. Their very defiance, faced with the weight of a manufactured consensus, threatens to empower us, the reader, to look outside the restrictive confines of media orthodoxy.

The Guardian, like other mainstream media, is heavily invested – both financially and ideologically – in supporting the current global order. It was once able to exclude and now, in the internet age, must vilify those elements of the left whose ideas risk questioning a system of corporate power and control of which the Guardian is a key institution.

The paper’s role, like that of its right wing cousins, is to limit the imaginative horizons of readers. While there is just enough left wing debate to make readers believe their paper is pluralistic, the kind of radical perspectives needed to question the very foundations on which the system of Western dominance rests is either unavailable or is ridiculed.

Reading the Guardian, it is possible to believe that one of the biggest problems facing our societies – comparable to our compromised political elites, corrupt police authorities, and depraved financial system – is an array of mainly isolated dissidents and intellectuals on the left.

Is Atzmon and his presumed anti-semitism more significant than AIPAC? Is Herman more of a danger than the military-industrial corporations killing millions of people around the globe? And is Assange more of a menace to the planet’s future than US President Barack Obama?

Reading the Guardian, you might well think so.

Republican politicians clearly plan to make the Obama administration’s strained relations with Israel an important campaign issue in the Presidential race. By doing so, they hope to portray the President as insufficiently supportive of the Jewish state. These Republicans will take their cue from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which utilizes a network of wealthy donors who generously contribute to both parties’ campaign coffers, provides free educational guided tours of the Holy Land and arranges audiences with Israeli officials for many members of Congress and their families. Led by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and his democratic counterpart, Steny Hoyer, more than 80 House members are traveling to Israel as guests of AIPAC’s educational arm during the August recess, a time when you would expect most lawmakers to be back home consulting with constituents anxious about their economic future.

Republicans are not alone in their opposition to President Obama’s Middle East policies. Most Democratic politicians, who are equally beholden to AIPAC, have expressed discomfort with the administration’s handling of relations with the Netanyahu government.

Eric Cantor (R-Va.) told Politico, “… there are a lot of questions unanswered as to where this president stands on Israel.”¹ Many Democrats concur with the Republicans, although most are presently reluctant to publicly criticize Mr. Obama. The Politico web post also quotes an unnamed Democratic source admitting, “There’s a lot of anger about that [Obama’s Israel policy] both in the Obama administration and campaign and DNC [Democratic National Committee].”

Although Obama raised expectations that he could broker a just and enduring peace between Israelis and Palestinians, his record to this point has been abysmal. Neither side is talking to the other, and there are no prospects for negotiations in the near future. George Mitchell, who was Obama’s envoy and adviser to the region, resigned months ago, apparently out of frustration with the President’s unwillingness to press Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu harder on negotiating permanent settlement with the Palestinian Authority. No new envoy has been appointed. Obama’s chief advisor now appears to be Dennis Ross. Placing Ross in charge of Israel policy indicates that Obama has lost any desire to tangle with the Israelis and their U.S. loyalists.

Despite the President’s recent retreat from confrontation with the Israelis or maybe because of it, the some Republicans sense they can reap political rewards by questioning Obama’s loyalty to our “important ally.” These politicians can rely on the U.S. media to assist them in this endeavor by continuing to depict the conflict from the Israeli standpoint.

The issues that will probably be raised in the election are: Obama’s initial demand that Israel freeze settlement activity in the occupied territories (which has been withdrawn), his call last May to use the pre-1967 borders as a basis for negotiations, and his administration’s supposed softness toward the alleged Iranian nuclear threat to Israel. Republicans may also demand that Obama cut off U.S. funding to the Palestinian Authority (PA) if it persists in seeking statehood at the United Nations in September. Discontinuing financial assistance to the PA was part of a recent resolution which was passed by both the House and the Senate.

In the context of the sound bites that comprise much of political campaigning, these arguments could damage Obama even though all are easily refuted. If evacuating some settlements is to be an integral component of the peace talks, it is reasonable to stop their expansion before the negotiation. Obama’s statement concerning the 1967 lines in no way implied that Israel should return to the pre-1967 borders, as many of his detractors claim. The President’s position on Iran and his willingness to support an Israeli attack on its nuclear facilities are not all that clear. Finally, even Israel does not want the U.S. to withdraw its financial support from the PA because that money pays the Palestinian police, who suppress armed resistance against the Jewish state.

Obama thought he could resuscitate the Oslo peace process and build on previous agreements made during the Clinton administration. His incentive for bringing the parties together is that it would improve U.S. relations with the Arab and Muslim world. However, he found that Israeli political reality had shifted markedly since the Clinton years. Both the government and the population are presently quite comfortable with continuing the occupation. The West Bank provides Israelis with a captive market for exporting consumer goods, it is a good source of cheap labor (although fewer Palestinians are allowed to work inside the Green Line than were in the past), and is a source of water and other natural resources. It is difficult to assess the net economic effect of the occupation since Israel does not publish statistics on its costs and benefits.

In addition, a growing number of Israelis and most politicians in the ruling Likud party now believe that they are the rightful sovereign in the territories. This all means that even if the Netanyahu government enters into negotiations, its demands will be more unreasonable than the Israeli demands were during the failed Camp David negotiation in 2000 or the terms worked out between former Prime Minister Olmert and PA President Abbas just before Netanyahu took power.

The pro-Israel lobby is more powerful today than it was ten years ago. It exercises a tighter control on the U.S media. In 2003 the pro-Israel media watchdog CAMERA organized protests in 33 cities claiming that the programming of National Public Radio (NPR) was overly critical of Israel. The Boston station reportedly lost 1 million dollars as a result of the campaign. NPR coverage of the conflict has shifted markedly toward the Israeli viewpoint since those demonstrations. The Congress, ever beholden to AIPAC, has become more insistent that the executive branch not challenge the Israelis. The time is approaching when the political consensus may not even pay lip service to “the two-state solution.”

The Middle East policy and peace negotiations Obama initially championed were designed to improve U.S. foreign relations with Arab nations and the vast majority of the world that supports ending the Israeli occupation. The peace treaty that Obama desires is based on what President Clinton proposed in 2000. It is a treaty that severely restricts the sovereignty of a future Palestinian state by limiting its control of borders, foreign policy and defense capabilities. These are just a few of the unresolved problems. Thus it is not at all clear that any Palestinian government could sign such an agreement, or whether it would be accepted by the Palestinian people.

The Republican attack upon Obama’s Israel policy will place him in an uncomfortable position. Many members of his own party are urging him to defuse the GOP criticism by backing away from brokering a Middle East peace. They will tell him to refrain from even sparse and weak public criticism of Israel. The Democrats are afraid that any friction between Obama and Israel will cost them and the President dearly in campaign contributions and at the ballot box in 2012.

The President may stand behind his policies and explain that what he is attempting to do is in the best interest of the U.S. and Israel. If he does so, he can count on the support of the Jewish pro-peace lobby JStreet. Its assistance will, however, be small consolation in the face of the combined strength of AIPAC, Congress and the media.

President Obama has demonstrated that he is extremely reluctant to challenge powerful political forces. He has consistently demonstrated an ability to adopt positions he has previously opposed in order to appease powerful interests. Under these circumstances, it is easy to envision the President embracing the extreme pro-Israel stance of Congress and AIPAC. It is more difficult imagining him continuing to defend his policies and chasing a U.S.-brokered two-state solution that after almost two decades appears increasingly out of reach.

If the President concedes in the upcoming debate on Israel, and becomes more Bush-than-Bush on this issue, as he has become on many others, it will reposition the public discourse on Israel and Palestine toward a truly delusional and hopeless place. Will the U.S Presidency become as beholden to Israel as the US Congress? Will this set a precedent for a future total and unequivocal surrender to the pro-Israel lobby by the U.S. executive? The day soon may be upon us when the weak admonition, “it is not helpful,” in regard to massive illegal Israeli settlement construction will be interpreted as a bold and out-of-bounds attack on our strong ally and friend, Israel.

It has been a dream of the pro-Israel lobby to transform the U.S. presidency into an institution that is as subservient to its dictates as the United States Congress has become. Unfortunately, there may never be a better time than between now and the 2012 election to realize this terrifying vision. If the election debate weakens the Presidency, it will solidify Israel’s hegemony over the territories it occupied in 1967 and make U.S. relations with the Arab world much more difficult.

1. Marin Cogan and Jake Sherman, “Hill Fight Simmers Over Palestinian Statehood Vote,” Politico, August 8, 2011.

Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers and TV channels have supported all the US-UK wars over the past 30 years, from Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands war in 1982, through George Bush Senior and the first Gulf War in 1990-91, Bill Clinton’s war in Yugoslavia in 1999 and his undeclared war on Iraq in 1998, George W Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, with Tony Blair on his coat tails, and up to the present, with Barack Obama continuing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and now adding Libya to his tally of seven wars.

The consequences in Iraq include a million dead people, four million refugees, a devastated country and the West’s corporate capture of huge oil resources.

David Swanson observes correctly that ‘Murdoch has blood on his hands’ and reminds readers of Article 20 of the UN International Covenant on Political and Civil Rights: ‘Any propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law.’

Murdoch admitted his complicity during a televised debate at the World Economic Forum in Davos when he said that his media empire had tried to shape public opinion in support of the Iraq war. That he largely failed in his aim, thanks to the scepticism of the public towards the incessant war-mongering, does not detract from the scale of his wrongdoing.

The Hall Of Shame: Samples From The Archives

Consider some of the evidence of the Murdoch empire’s attempts to manipulate the public. The Sun screamed ‘BRITS 45 MINUTES FROM DOOM’ on its front page following Tony Blair’s ‘dodgy dossier’ of September 2002. When UN weapons inspectors led by Hans Blix found no evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the Sun’s hysterical headline was ‘HE’S GOT ‘EM. LET’S GET HIM’. Once the war was underway, the Sun and News of the World were full of propaganda about the need to get behind ‘our boys’ (and girls). In the United States, Fox News was perhaps even worse: a primitive mix of ‘patriotism’ and vitriol directed against even mild dissenters.

The Times could be relied upon to put a more genteel sheen on the propaganda. Michael Gove, then a Times journalist, now Secretary of State for Education, wrote:

We have no alternative but to launch a pre-emptive war against Iraq to prevent Saddam completing his drive to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Massive military force must be deployed to remove Saddam’s regime. (Gove, ‘We need Bush and not Saddam calling the shots,’ The Times, August 28, 2002)

Gove remains in close contact with his former colleagues. George Eaton reports in the New Statesman this week:

The Education Secretary listed 11 meetings at which executives from the company [News Corp] were present, including seven with Rupert Murdoch. Gove met the News Corp head more times than any other minister and had dinner with him twice last month.

Gove’s wife, Sarah Vine, works for News International.

In 2004, after Fallujah had been subjected to a brutal US onslaught leaving at least 800 civilians dead, a Times editorial declared: ‘the US military had to act decisively or fail those entitled to its protection.’ (Leading article, ‘Taking Fallujah,’ The Times, November 10, 2004)

In 2006, the prestigious Lancet journal published a paper estimating the Iraq war death toll at around 650,000. The study was led by researchers from the world-renowned Johns Hopkins University and followed standard epidemiological practice for estimating mortality in war. John Tirman, who commissioned the Lancet study, notes in a recent article that ‘the Murdoch media machine did its part in attempting to discredit the household surveys’ which formed the basis of the paper:

The reaction to the Johns Hopkins estimate of 650,000 “excess deaths” came in for savage treatment, trashed as a “political hit” in Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal. This campaign against the scientists had a chilling effect.

The ‘chilling effect’ meant the corporate media failed to give the study the prominence it deserved. But awkward silences and embarrassed shoe-gazing is standard behaviour when we, the good guys, are doing the killing.

Like most newspapers, The Times and Sunday Times have published good journalism: Michael Smith’s excellent investigative reporting on the Downing Street Memos springs to mind. So too does Jerome Starkey’s work to expose the horrific killing of Afghan schoolchildren in night-time raids led by US forces. The Times editors were, however, on hand to portray the atrocity in the required context of a ‘just war’: ‘The legitimacy of the cause in Afghanistan is called into question by civilian deaths. The conflict needs to be conducted with regard for the native population.’

Not content to justify war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Murdoch press has lined up Iran in its crosshairs. In 2006, Times columnist Gerard Baker donned his fatigues and boots to declare: ‘The unimaginable but ultimately inescapable truth is that we are going to have to get ready for war with Iran.’

In 2008, The Times once again came under the Media Lens spotlight for its unbalanced coverage on Iran. Our analysis of the output of the paper’s then chief foreign commentator, Bronwen Maddox, did not go down well. In fact, we received threats of legal and police action from Alastair Brett, then legal director of Times Newspapers Limited. This was the first time we had been subjected to such outrageous threats. Peter Wilby, former News Statesman editor, suggested it was ‘an extraordinary reaction’ from the giant newspaper group, while Noam Chomsky said pithily that the Times reaction was ‘pretty sick’.

In 2010, Times propaganda over the Iranian nuclear ‘threat’ was ramped up yet again when the paper published documents which, it confidently asserted, showed Iran’s intention to develop a trigger for a nuclear weapon. In fact, the authenticity of the documents was highly questionable, with some intelligence experts claiming they were forgeries most likely created as part of an attempt to further boost war fervour against Iran.

Meanwhile, The Times continued to shore up Western foreign policy in its attack on WikiLeaks in an editorial last October:

Nowhere in WikiLeaks’s self-serving self publicity is there a judgment of what the organisation is achieving for the Iraqi nation, and what it hopes to achieve… Its personnel are partisans intervening in the security affairs of Western democracies and their allies, with a culpable heedlessness of human life. (Leader, ‘Exercise in Sanctimony; The release of military files by WikiLeaks is partisan and irresponsible,’ The Times, October 25, 2010)

The Times managed to miss the target by a full 360 degrees. It is the corporate media, not WikiLeaks, which demonstrates a ‘culpable heedlessness of human life’ in its endorsement of the West’s fixed foreign policy: to attack, bomb, invade, torture and steal based on any pretext that can be fed to the public.

The above is but a tiny sample of the abysmal historical record of News International. Journalist Neil Clark correctly noted of Murdoch’s papers that ‘no other newspaper group has as much blood on its hands when it comes to propagandising for illegal and fraudulent military conflicts.’

His Master’s Voice: Cues From The Boss

In 2001, reporter Sam Kiley left The Times following ‘pro-Israeli censorship’ of his reporting. Why the censorship? Kiley believed the explanation lay in Murdoch’s heavy investment in Israel and close friendship with the then Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon. Indeed, Murdoch has travelled to Israel numerous times and met many of its leaders. Kiley said:

In the war of words, no newspaper has been so happy to hand the keys of the armoury over to one side than the Times.

The Times foreign editor and other middle managers flew into hysterical terror every time a pro-Israel lobbying group wrote in with a quibble or complaint and then usually took their side against their own correspondent.

He added: ‘No pro-Israel lobbyist ever dreamed of having such power over a great national newspaper.’

Robert Fisk, now at the Independent, explained that he too left The Times after interference with his reporting on the Middle East:

The end came for me when I flew to Dubai in 1988 after the USS Vincennes [a US Navy guided missile cruiser] had shot down an Iranian passenger airliner over the Gulf. Within 24 hours, I had spoken to the British air traffic controllers at Dubai, discovered that US ships had routinely been threatening British Airways airliners, and that the crew of the Vincennes appeared to have panicked. The foreign desk told me the report was up for the page-one splash. I warned them that American ‘leaks’ that the IranAir pilot was trying to suicide-crash his aircraft on to the Vincennes were rubbish. They agreed.

Next day, my report appeared with all criticism of the Americans deleted, with all my sources ignored. The Times even carried an editorial suggesting the pilot was indeed a suicider. A subsequent US official report and accounts by US naval officers subsequently proved my dispatch correct. Except that Times readers were not allowed to see it.

Fisk said that he believed Murdoch did not personally intervene. However: ‘He didn’t need to. He had turned The Times into a tame, pro-Tory, pro-Israeli paper shorn of all editorial independence.’

In March 2009, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) honoured Murdoch with their ‘National Human Relations Award’. In his speech, Murdoch declared his own version of Middle East reality, including this gem: ‘In Iran, we see a regime that backs Hezbollah and Hamas now on course to acquire a nuclear weapon.’

So Murdoch’s editors and columnists can be in no doubt of where the boss stands on the ‘threat’ of Iran. News Corp employees would also do well to heed the master’s views on Israel, made clear in the same speech: namely, that the state is an integral part of the West as ‘defined by societies committed to freedom and democracy’. Only weeks after the brutal onslaught by Israeli forces in Gaza, with around 1400 Palestinians killed including over 400 women and children, Murdoch had this to say to his audience:

My friends, I do not pretend to have all the answers to Gaza this evening. But I do know this: The free world makes a terrible mistake if we deceive ourselves into thinking this is not our fight.

In the end, the Israeli people are fighting the same enemy we are: cold-blooded killers who reject peace … who reject freedom … and who rule by the suicide vest, the car bomb, and the human shield.

Against such an enemy, I will not second-guess the decisions of a free Israel defending her citizens. And I would ask all those who support peace and freedom to do the same.

Murdoch’s pro-Israeli position is reflected in his newspapers. According to Isi Liebler, an Australian Jewish community leader who now lives in Israel, Murdoch’s ‘affection’ for the state ‘arose less out of his conservative sensibility than from his native Australian sympathy for the underdog fending off elites seized by conventional wisdoms’. Liebler added: ‘He’s met Israelis, he’s been to Israel, he’s seen Israel as the plucky underdog when the rest of the world saw Israel as an occupier.’

But the pro-Israel lobby is now ‘warily watching the unfolding of the phone-hacking scandal that is threatening to engulf’ his media empire. ‘Murdoch’s sudden massive reversal of fortune’ has ‘supporters of Israel worried that a diminished Murdoch presence may mute the strongly pro-Israel voice of many of the publications he owns.’

One recent article in the Jewish Chronicle was even headed, ‘Is this curtains for pro-Israel Murdoch?’

The Farcical Faustian Pact

Andrew Neil, a former Murdoch editor, once said that although the media mogul would not intervene directly at The Times or the Sunday Times, ‘he does regard himself as someone who should have more influence on these papers than anyone else.’

During his time as Sunday Times editor, Neil ‘was never in any doubt what the News Corp boss thought about issues.’ It obviously helped that Neil and Murdoch ‘share[d] a common worldview’; indeed this is a requirement for all editors and proprietors: ‘An editor has to be on the same planet [as the paper’s owner]. You don’t have to be on the same continent or the same country for all of the time but you need to be on the same planet.’

When it came to Murdoch’s tabloid press, direct intervention by the owner did take place: ‘If you want to know what Rupert Murdoch really thinks read the editorials in the Sun and the New York Post because he is editor-in-chief of these papers.’

Neil continued: ‘There is no major geopolitical position that the Sun will take whether its attitude to the euro or to the current European treaty or to whom the paper will support in the upcoming general election. None of that can be decided without Rupert Murdoch’s major input.’

In 1999, News of the World exposed the former Tory MP Jeffrey Archer as a liar and perjurer, which led to him being imprisoned. But Murdoch had not wanted the Archer scoop to be published and sacked the editor Phil Hall for defying him. It was a clear example of what happens to editors who step out of line.

The threat of proprietorial interference, then, is always present; whether directly (Murdoch’s tabloid press) or by knowing exactly what the owner’s views are and conforming to them (Murdoch’s ‘quality’ press). Denying or downplaying all of this, even in defiance of the clear ‘evidence’, is ‘in everyone’s interests’, said Neil, adding: ‘It suits the editors and proprietors to continue this farce.’

This is not limited to the Murdoch press. Throughout the corporate media, editors and proprietors enter a ‘Faustian pact’ to pretend that interference does not happen; editors do not want to be seen ‘as puppets of proprietors.’ But, in effect, that is what they are.

Thus, it is important to look beyond the Murdoch media empire at the wider context of the scandal engulfing News International, a corrupt police force and a supine political establishment. Seumas Milne made some good observations along these lines in the Guardian recently:

These revelations [of phone hacking] should ram home the reality that Britain has become a far more corrupt country than many realise. Much of that has been driven by the privatisation-fuelled revolving door culture that gives former ministers and civil servants plum jobs in the companies they were previously regulating.

Milne notes that several ‘opportunities’ to clean up this corruption ‘have come and gone’:

First the official deception of the Iraq war, then the collapse of a deregulated banking system, then the exposure of systematic sleaze in parliament revealed a growing crisis in the way the country is run. Now that crisis has been shown to have spread to the media and police. Official Britain isn’t working. Sooner or later, pressure for change will become unstoppable.

It is hard to argue with Milne’s article. But he is silent, for obvious reasons, about the Guardian’s important role as a liberal gatekeeper that helps preserve the established order. As we have repeatedly pointed out in our media alerts and books, this role is a crucial missing ingredient in any serious discussion of the nexus of power, politics and the media. As ever, we have to look to someone commenting from beyond the confines of the self-regarding Guardian for the unvarnished truth. John Pilger is one such voice:

the truth is, Britain’s system of elite monopoly control of the media rests not on News International alone, but on the Mail and the Guardian and the BBC, perhaps the most influential of all. All share a corporate monoculture that sets the agenda of the “news”, defines acceptable politics by maintaining the fiction of distinctive parties, normalises unpopular wars and guards the limits of “free speech”. This will be strengthened by the illusion that a “bad apple” has been “rooted out”

Even if Murdoch’s empire were to collapse, there would still be no free press, no responsible corporate news agenda and no brave new world of media democracy. For these to take root, the stranglehold of corporate media and corporate politics needs to be broken. That will happen only when enough people demand change.

He who is most noble is he who raises his voice for those silenced by oppression.
– Jonathan Azaziah¹

…the public wants what the public gets
– The Jam²

Twenty years ago when I first arrived in Japan I taught English to a Tokyo University associate professor in engineering. The young and normally reserved man sometimes complained about his boss who was a professor in nuclear engineering and gave him troublesome tasks at the office. I once asked him what he thought about earthquake-prone Japan using nuclear power and he replied, “it’s crazy.” Of course, Tokyo University is the hub of Japan’s nuclear power industry and most executives for TEPCO are graduates (as are many top politicians) from Japan’s most elite university.

Today, “four out of five Japanese want to see Tokyo abandon nuclear power in the wake of the Fukushima atomic crisis…”³ But any professional in industry, government or media would have no chance of career advancement if they spoke out against nuclear power. This problem is well documented in an article from Speigel, the German news magazine, which details the insidious and poisonous nuclear tentacles that penetrate the most important aspects of Japanese society.⁴

As a recent Japanese news editorial points out, a small cabal of criminals think they literally own the country and will not allow democracy or the free market to interfere with their aims to control the energy system:

[I]n adopting a scheme for paying damages to the victims of the accidents at Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, the government has ended up guaranteeing the survival of Tokyo Electric Power Co. the operator of the stricken plant. Radioactive substances from Tepco’s Fukushima No. 1 plant have contaminated surrounding cities, farms, forests and the ocean….

The federation’s staunch opposition to separation of generation and transmission was shown in its rejection of adoption of the “Smart Grid” system that the U.S. is eager to promote — a electricity network that can efficiently and stably deliver electricity supplies by intelligently integrating the behavior of power generation entities and power users. The federation quibbled, saying the Japanese transmission system was “already smart enough.” It fears that the Smart Grid might open the way for outsiders to enter the electricity market, thus breaking the monopoly of the nation’s 10 utilities….

The power industry is also reluctant to build facilities to change the frequency of the alternating currents, so that electricity generated in the western half of the country, where electricity’s frequency is 60 hertz, can be transmitted to the eastern half of Japan where electricity’s frequency is 50 hertz, or vice versa — even though such interchangeability would inevitably reduce regional imbalances of supply….This reluctance is based on a fear that the interchangeability issue may strengthen the argument for separation of power generation and transmission.⁵

About ten years ago I attended a press conference on the dangers of Japan’s nuclear power stations, which was held at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Tokyo. It was well attended due to the deadly Tokaimura nuclear accident which had just occurred in 1999. An audience member asked Kenji Higuchi — a journalist and teacher who has written several books about the dangers of nuclear power — why a documentary film about him and the dangers to Japan’s nuke workers, Nuclear Ginza,⁶ was not allowed to be shown on Japan’s government news station, NHK. “It was squashed from the top down.” I have shown the film many times over the years to my university students, but I can’t reach millions of people.

Fast forward to June of 2011 when Higuchi gave a lecture at a small but prestigious college in Tokyo. One conscientious Japanese professor at that college has been alerting his students to the nuke issue and promoting Higuchi’s books. My contact who attended the meeting of only 10 people said that it was Higuchi’s belief that he was not allowed a larger venue because he is too direct in his speaking manner and names the companies that are complicit with the Nuclear Industry. The students’s parents who work for some of those companies might not like hearing such bold criticisms. Higuchi also surmised that the government has implicitly threatened universities not to touch on the nuclear issue in any critical way, such as allowing anti-nuke rallies on their campuses.

I teach part-time at this particular college and have freely published many articles there, but for the first time my submission which was to be on the nuke disaster was turned down because the issue was deemed “too sensitive.” It is noteworthy that one of the more academically open, meaty and progressive-minded schools in Tokyo is now telling people to keep their mouths shut. When I wrote a reply to the editor asking that if I would submit to peer review they would still consider my article, I received no response.

At another school which has an elite science and engineering department, my first year students have responded well to my cynical jokes about nuclear power. When I open the windows in the morning and say, “hey let’s let in the fresh air and radiation, it’s good for you,” everyone nervously chuckles while shaking their heads. The students provide very sensible and conscientious written comments to the articles I give them to read about the nuclear situation.

On the other hand, by second year many students realize that if they are in certain fields of study, it will not do well for their careers to criticize nuclear power. When we had discussions about energy issues, many gave articulate defenses of the various forms alternative energies available and how they should be developed– but in the end some groups said, “but we still think nuclear is the best!”

There is another aspect to this problem, it is simply “air headedness.” When choosing topics for presentations, some groups came up with the uninspiring and disputatious topic of “global warming,” while others choose “beer,” “chocolate,” “television,” and so on. Not real substantive stuff. One teacher suggested to me the reason many students to do not want to think about Fukushima is because Japan previously considered itself superior to its neighbors and has now taken it on the chin. This is sore subject for Japanese pride and Fukushima was a rude awakening reminding Japanese that they are merely human after all. Another explanation may be more postmodern and universal: 3D-HDTV = Triple Dumbing – High Deafening Talmud Vision. Too much “bread and circuses” and “dread and circumcision” has damaged our humanity and empathy for nature and others.

The censorship of critics of the Nuke Industry can be seen at all levels. For example, even “[a] government official who released a book on May 20 criticizing the government’s response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster has been asked to leave his post…. [Mr.]Koga has… pushed for changes to the country’s energy policy, such as a separation of electric power generation and transmission fiercely opposed by power companies…”⁷ Obviously this fellow was looking for an early retirement and was “asked” to leave his prestigious career for telling the truth.

In the meantime, as the Fukushima nuclear reactors which have had “corium” meltdowns continue to irradiate the nearby environment– which ultimately puts all of Japan’s inhabitants in danger– we are being told to “forget about it and go back to sleep.” Yet we can see many hopeful signs of concerned citizens nationwide organizing to address the dangers of spreading radiation and to eventually put an end to nuclear power generation in Japan.

1. Mask of Zion
2. The Jam – Going Underground
3. Most Japanese wish to scrap reactors
4. Japan’s Nuclear Cartel
5. Power industry’s chokehold
6. Nuclear Ginza Japan’s secret at-risk labor force
7. Ministry official who released book criticizing gov’t over nuke crisis asked to resign