Prosecutors had demanded that the juvenile, a 17-year-old from Nazareth in northern Israel, be convicted of endangering a vehicle on the road, a charge that carries a punishment of up to 20 years’ imprisonment, as a way to deter other members of Israel’s Arab minority from committing similar offences.

But Judge Yuval Shadmi said discrimination in the Israeli legal system’s treatment of Jewish and Arab minors, particularly in cases of what he called “ideologically motivated” offences, was “common knowledge”.

In the verdict, he wrote: “I will say that the state is not authorised to caress with one hand the Jewish ‘ideological’ felons, and flog with its other hand the Arab ‘ideological’ felons.”

He referred in particular to the lenient treatment by the police and courts both of Jewish settler youths who have attacked soldiers in the West Bank and who violently resisted the disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005, and of religious extremists who have spent many months battling police to prevent the opening of a car park on the Sabbath in Jerusalem.

Abir Baker, a lawyer with Adalah, a legal group for Israel’s 1.3 million-strong Arab minority, said the ruling was the first time a judge in a criminal court had acknowledged that the state pursued a policy of systematic discrimination in demanding harsher punishments for Arab citizens.

“We have known this for a long time, but it has been something very hard for us to prove to the court’s satisfaction,” she said. “Now we have a legal precedent that we can use to appeal against convictions in similar cases.”

The youth was arrested during a protest on a road near Nazareth a few days after Israel launched its operation in Gaza last December.

Dozens of demonstrations took place in Israel during the four-week attack, leading to the arrests of 830 protesters in what human rights groups described as often brutal Israeli police action.

The overwhelming majority of those arrested, say the rights groups, were Arab citizens, despite the participation of Israeli Jews. Adalah reported that 250 protesters were subsequently indicted, almost all of them Arabs and half of them minors.

Judge Richard Goldstone, in his United Nations fact-finding report into the Gaza assault published in September, wrote that he had been “struck” by the fact that despite many counter-demonstrations by right-wing Jews that had turned violent the police appeared to have made “no arrests” in those cases.

He also noted that, according to the information he had seen, most Arab protesters had been refused bail and held in detention for lengthy periods, even in cases where they faced relatively minor charges.

Of the court system, Mr Goldstone concluded that “the element of discrimination between … and differential treatment of Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel by the judicial authorities, as reflected in the reports received, is a substantial cause for concern”.

The ruling by the Nazareth juvenile court appeared to confirm those findings.

Mr Shadmi wrote in his verdict that, in recent years, the Israeli authorities had been “working on two fundamentally different enforcement levels in relation to crimes perpetrated by [Israeli] minors”.

He pointed out that in cases of violence by Jewish youths against the security services, legal proceedings were usually frozen or cancelled before the indictment stage. He said he had not heard of a single instance of a Jewish minor being sent to prison for such offences, even though most Arab minors were convicted and jailed.

The judge admitted that he had nearly been swayed by prosecution demands for a lengthy jail term for the youth, who cannot be named because of his age. But ultimately, he said, he had been persuaded by the defence’s argument that similar cases of “ideological violence” involving Jewish youths — such as settler attacks on soldiers — rarely, if ever, merited jail terms.

“If the state feels that ideological offences justify relatively forgiving enforcement for minors, then this should be the policy towards all minors regardless of nationality or religion.”

Earlier this year the justice ministry recommended that 40 Jewish settlers convicted of resisting the disengagement from Gaza be pardoned on the grounds that their acts “were prompted by an unusual historical event and that the perpetrators are not felons”. According to Israeli media reports, many of the settlers arrested over the dissengagement will never be brought to trial.

Mr Shadmi ordered the Nazareth youth to refrain from committing any offence against the police for two years against a bond of $1,300. In a procedure mainly reserved for juvenile offences, he sentenced the youth to 200 hours of community service without convicting him.

The verdict was greeted with surprise by the youth’s family. The father told the Israeli media: “Thank God we had a judge like him, who is not motivated by racism. This may lead the state of Israel to understand that it’s time to stop treating the Arab population like enemies.”

The prosecution announced that it would appeal against the decision.

Gideon Fishman, a sociology professor at Haifa University who has made a study of criminal sentencing policies in Israel, said he was not aware of research into discriminatory policies by prosecutors towards juvenile offenders. However, he said he was sure that there was systematic bias.

“The judge is right to raise his voice against a policy that is more lenient towards Jewish offenders. This is a policy being pursued by state prosecutors intentionally and not by accident, and it undermines trust in the system.”

Judge Shadmi referred only to discrimination in sentencing in Israeli criminal courts.

Palestinians from the occupied territories are tried in Israeli military courts under different legal rules and procedures that have been severely criticised by human rights groups.

It made headlines, a fact which tells us more about the role of media as an outlet for government press releases than in communicating genuine news.

Obama’s was hardly a brave or innovative act when you consider that it is a universally-condemned military junta keeping Aung San Suu Kyi penned up.

But when you appreciate the full context of Obama’s call, you may agree with me that it was more a cowardly act than anything else.

A year ago, after eight years of mind-numbing stupidity, countless public lies and bloody war crimes, Obama’s arrival on the American political scene thrilled the world. His intelligence, his grace, and his sense of decency were striking. His like as an American politician, quite apart from his race, had not been seen in the lifetime of many.

But the hopes raised by Obama, like so many flickering little candles in a fierce wind, already are largely extinguished. This polished, educated, liberal-minded and decent man, after only one year in office, has been overwhelmed by America’s military-industrial complex, a terrible machine which grinds on night and day, chewing people in its gears, no matter who is elected ostensibly to be in charge of it.

Much as I resent Burma’s treatment of Aung San Suu Kyi, it shines as genuinely humane compared to America’s treatment of Omar Khadr.

The key facts in the case of this young man, a prisoner at Guantanamo, are easily told.

Omar Khadr was born to a fundamentalist Muslim, highly political family whose father knew and died fighting for Osama bin Laden. In an era whose ruling myths are a clash of civilizations and a war on terror, Omar would seem to have been doomed from birth.

Under intense pressure from his family, fifteen-year old Omar went to fight in Afghanistan when America invaded it. In doing that, he was doing nothing that tens of thousands of Americans hadn’t done, both as idealists for causes and as soldiers of fortune in countless wars from the Spanish Civil War to the Cuban Revolution or the turmoil of the Congo.

Omar’s experience reminded me a little of American Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July, a story where the need for maternal approval helped drive his destructive participation in America’s Vietnam holocaust (three million Vietnamese slaughtered, many hideously with napalm, and the legacy of soil saturated with Agent Orange and littered with millions of landmines more than justifies that term).

The American claim against Omar is that he shot an American soldier, a medic no less, a fact seemingly almost designed to increase his infamy.

The story, as I heard it in an interview a few years ago with an American soldier, a friend of the dead medic’s, was that after a small firefight, Omar hid himself, then leapt up, heartlessly killing the medic whose only interest was the wounded. Omar was then captured and eventually sent to Guantanamo.

Even were that story true, and it is not, there would still be no excuse for sending a fifteen-year old child to Guantanamo. That act violated all international conventions on the treatment of child soldiers, but then almost everything America has done over the last eight years has violated international conventions, international laws, common decency, and the spirit of its own Bill of Rights.

For years, Omar, like hundreds of inmates at Guantanamo, was held incommunicado: he was allowed no contact with his family, he was allowed no visits from the International Red Cross (again in contravention to international conventions) and he was allowed no legal counsel. Omar was allowed no rights of any kind: being kept shackled in a secret prison ninety miles offshore was considered adequate to efface the entire spirit and meaning of America’s own rights and laws.

We now know that the soldiers who captured Omar, in fact, shot him twice in the back as the frightened boy tried to run. Despite life-threatening wounds and his young age, Omar was consigned to years of imprisonment and torture at Guantanamo. Indeed, his worst torturer, a soldier with a reputation at Guantanamo as perhaps its most vicious interrogator, deliberately contrived his sessions with Omar so that the boy had to sit in a position which pulled at his slowly-healing and painful wounds.

We also know now, evidence having just been published in Canadian newspapers, that Omar could not possibly have killed the medic: Omar was photographed hiding under a pile of rubble as the soldiers passed.

So who killed the medic? One perhaps should recall the case of Pat Tillman, an American football player killed by his own forces in Afghanistan, a case at first covered up the military, but even now full of unanswered questions.

And why did the Americans shoot Omar, twice, in the back? One simply cannot avoid the suggestion that the American soldiers involved acted with cowardice and savagery.

Some readers may object that American soldiers are incapable of such behaviour, but let’s go back to that time in Afghanistan, reviewing some things we now know as facts, and think about what they suggest about the ethos prevailing there when a fifteen-year old was shot in the back and sent to be tortured.

America’s carpet bombing in Afghanistan was destructive beyond anything Americans have ever been told. Just as was the case in the First Gulf War when uncounted tens of thousands of poor Iraqi recruits were bulldozed into the desert after having been literally pulped into tailing ponds of human bits and fluids by B-52s, the true horror of what massive bombing did in Afghanistan was understandably not well advertised..

The public has been led to believe that, compared to the horrors inflicted upon Iraq, the invasion of Afghanistan was almost bloodless. But I learned recently from an expert journalist — an American no less — with many years of experience in that country that a great deal of blood was shed. In Kabul alone, fifty to sixty thousand Afghans died in America’s brutal bombing and artillery cover for its Northern Alliance proxy army, itself a gang of thugs many of whom are not one wit more ethical or civilized than the Taleban.

We knew too, those who cared to search, of the brutal tactics of American special forces in the mountains after the initial “victory”: tales of heavily-armed goons marching into remote towns, throwing stun grenades, breaking down the doors of homes, holding women and children at gunpoint while their male family members were marched away with no explanation. The men were often kept for considerable periods to be “questioned.”

At the least suspicion, air strikes were called in, and in dozens and dozens of cases, those air strikes wiped out whole families or groups of villagers who had done nothing to oppose Americans. They were the victims, thousands of them, of young Americans filled with irrational resentments over 9/11, anxious to prove how good they were with their high-tech killing machines, and let loose on someone else’s country.

And we knew, at least again those who cared to search, the story of America’s hideous treatment of Taleban prisoners in the early days of occupation, of Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld’s Nazi-like public demand that all prisoners should be killed or walled away forever. One of America’s ghastly allies of the Northern Alliance, General Dostum, took Rumsfeld in deadly earnest: he had his men round up three thousand prisoners, seal them in vans and drive them out onto the desert to suffocate in the heat. The bodies were then buried in shallow mass graves. All this was watched by American soldiers who somehow failed to act the way Jimmy Stewart did in war movies. Instead they picked their noses or smoked cigarettes as they gawked.

We also knew of the terrible tales of boys being raped while American troops never lifted a finger to help them. In a strict fundamentalist country like Afghanistan, where young women are kept guarded and almost hidden, the sexual behaviour of men often takes on the character of that common in prisons everywhere: that is, young and vulnerable men are brutally raped and often treated as “bitches” by older, tougher prisoners.

Only recently, I heard the horrible stories of a Canadian soldier with post traumatic stress who told of seeing a boy with blood running down his legs as two Afghan allies raped him. The soldier could do nothing and was told later only to buck it up. He told too of a translator, a hired Afghan, gleefully relating to him about the way he liked to use a knife on boys he raped.

We all saw the ghastly pictures from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Only now we know far uglier pictures and recordings have been suppressed, images and sounds of young Iraqis being raped and sodomized by American soldiers at the prison.

Those facts give us some realistic sense of the atmosphere in Afghanistan when American soldiers shot Omar in the back, falsely accused him of killing a medic, and sent a fifteen-year old boy off to years of torture.

Omar remains a prisoner in Guantanamo, although the torture mercifully has stopped, but it was announced only a couple of days ago that he would be among those who would stand trial in New York.

Trial for what? For trumped-up charges of murder? Trial for acts in war? Trial for being an abused child soldier? Trial under American laws which never applied to Afghanistan? A trial where every scrap of government evidence is tainted with years of torture and human-rights abuse? Where the government doing the trying itself has acted against countless laws and treaties in invading and occupying two countries?

If there were one breath of decency left in America’s establishment, Omar and the other abused prisoners would all be released and allowed to live the rest of their lives in peace. They are no threat to anyone, most did nothing deserving imprisonment, and those who may have committed something we would regard as a crime have been viciously punished already.

Only days ago, Obama’s White House Counsel Greg Craig was let go. Craig, an old friend of the President’s, had promised to make his administration the most transparent in history. Craig was the main force behind the Obama’s promise to close Guantanamo in one year.

Well, there is no sign Guantanamo is to be closed any time soon, and the policy’s chief advocate is gone. But more importantly, when we speak of American torture chambers, it is easy to forget that Guantanamo is only the most publicized of many. What horrors go on at places like America’s secret base at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean or at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, or in a number of other locations, all part of the CIA’s vast international torture gulag, is anybody’s guess.

Obama has not uttered a whimper about the CIA’s euphemistically-named extreme rendition, a practice whereby thousands of people have been kidnapped off streets and sent bound to some of the world’s hell-holes for months of torture. Afterwards, having been discovered innocent of anything, they find themselves dumped in some obscure place like Bosnia without so much as an apology for their treatment.

Obama told people repeatedly during his campaign that American forces in Iraq would be withdrawn promptly, saying “you can bank on it,” and people believed him because Obama did not vote in the Senate for that illegal war, but most of America’s soldiers remain there still.

Obama appointed a commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, who has a background swirling with suggestions of black operations and dirty business, and now that ghastly man has said he needs forty-thousand more troops.

American Predator drones, guided by buzz-cut, faceless men with computer screens in locked rooms in America, now frequently invade Pakistan’s airspace. One can just imagine them hooting and pumping their arms like young men playing a computer game when one of their terrible Hellfire missiles strikes its target, the home of someone not legally charged with anything, killing everyone who happens to be nearby.

No, I only wish the ugly stain on America’s flag was keeping a dissident under house arrest.

How are we to understand this? Heartless, bloodthirsty people with no moral compass? Bored, diminished people with no interests beyond the most immediate and dramatic sensations? A deeply divided and class based society in which some humans were considered human and others were rejected from the human family? A society that valued on the basis of some artifice and not the living condition?

I remember the shock that attended my first learning of gladiators; not the moment itself (most likely associated with a Hollywood film), but the sensation of disbelief laid over by the certainty of actuality; an incomprehensible abyss separating two clearly true and incompatible things. It is a sensation that has revisited me many times and that is as poignant today as at its first occurrence.

‘There must have been something wrong with the Roman people, with their leaders and societal trendsetters.’ This was as far as my thinking went for many years. The details of a world in which slavery was common place; where war was conducted ‘man on man’ from arm-length distances with knives; where the elite didn’t do any work other than to manage their social relations and wealth; a supporting caste saw to the delivery and distribution of goods and services; and a vast population of poor supplied the muscle and struggled with daily survival needs; this was all foreign to my small town experience and formal education about the rights and plights of humanity. Understanding that place and time has become more and more important as my own immediate society begins to look more and more like the Roman society that I could not comprehend as a child (not only the Romans, they just stand as the pinnacle example).

I am not making the facile comparisons of real gladiators with the WWF or wage slavery with the indentured slavery of Rome. It is rather a whole set of designs and behaviors adapted to our time and technologies: it is a descent into meanness of spirit and narrowness of vision; it is about easy fear and easy escape from fear; it is about all the normal and expected human behaviors made bigger and more concentrated than a society can stand.

Rome is only a metaphor. I don’t really care about Rome. It is now, yesterday and tomorrow that I care about. “Think of the children” is not trite. If you believe this trite and simple minded, then I would happily remove your head with a short sword. The people of Rome were not thinking of the children. The elite made their children into monsters. We are making our children into monsters; because children will be made into the image of their society. The children, in their biological wisdom fight back until they are ultimately overwhelmed with materialism and the incomprehensible abyss; they do give up. Giving up means that the human body and mind are distorted into some, primarily, economic form and are left to express what is left of their humanness in twisted and destructive ways like depression, obsession with powerful biological drives and (mostly) passive violence.

In Rome the people had each other. In today’s world we have media. Nothing of consequence was delivered into the homes of the Roman citizen, and so they had to come out. There was money to be made by giving them a place to go. For our world there is money to be made, vastly more, by delivering into the home something to do. This changes things.

I believe that the concentrating effect of mass activities led to the bloody arena, but it was forces like those that we experience today that supplied the push. We are able, today, to design and deliver all manner of distraction. While Rome did have pictures, it did not have moving ones. Movement requires real bodies; real bodies in real movement bleed real blood. We might be a very long time away from real killing as public entertainment, but we are fully in the world of the twisted. Our media, be it information media or the distracting media, is filled with images of power; power abused, power used, power vastly more accessible than it is in our daily lives: it is in the gun, it is in the martial artist, it is in the wealthy, it is in the supernaturally stimulated, it is in the ruthless and the mad. And it is to power which we, like remora, wish to attach ourselves no matter how tenuously.

A design begins to reveal itself. As the people feel power in their own lives they do not support and sustain the power of their leaders, but rather expect them to function as organizers and suppliers of the services of governance. As the people feel less and less power the more they grow the image of power in others to whom they may attach in some fashion – primarily that of believing the powerful to be representatives of their needs and safety. This draws out the most distorted of behaviors the way a poultice is supposed to draw out the puss from a sore.

The individuals drawn to power over others are never those who can be trusted with such power. Some people will accept the need to take on a responsibility, but to actively seek authority over other human beings is a pathology rather than a vocation. In a world where everyone has personal power in their own lives sufficient to see themselves as in charge of their destiny, those who seek more power must simply serve to attain some sense of authority; and they will always be ‘brought up short’ by their community when they overstep (which they will do consistently).

If the people become less personally powerful, due to some perturbation in their world, an opening is made for the power-hungry to begin the process described above. And such perturbations always come. So it is that human societies have cycled through egalitarian and despotic governance. Despotism will, like a bad parasite, kill its host, the people will be thrown back onto their own resources and, in being personally powerful again, require governance that supports the community and not just the interests of the leadership.

Another dynamic is that the power-hungry are certain to come to an understanding of the role of distributed personal power in their quest for power over others. Since it is to their advantage to reduce both the real power (difficult) and the perceived power (much easier) of the people, ‘those who would be King’ make such reduction a major goal. They are supported in that effort by all the parts of the society that are disbenefited by empowered, self-possessed individual citizens.

From here we can return to Rome, to the Coliseum, to the cheap seats, to the psychological needs and state of a people without sufficient power to control their lives. No one person or group of people conspired to create a stadium, a city, an empire full of people whose dependencies reduced their personal power to such a low point that the most basic needs for security and safety sought a source of power outside of themselves. It was the combination of population growth, economic growth and design, rapid social change exacerbated by the very process of empire; and the release of the power-hungry (amplified by the systemic real powerlessness of a society out of control) to dominate others.

It was not the blood on lascivio agri that drew the Romans to the stadiums; it was the hole in their souls, hollows left by the loss of their immediate and daily capacity to be in charge of their own life experience.

It is not the mature pleasure in CSI, NCIS, Law and Order, The Terminator, Batman and the others in the endless string of blood sport “entertainments” that fills the couches and the lazy-boys in isolated living rooms across the nation; it is the holes in our souls.

I think of the prescient observers of the decline of their Rome looking desperately for some salvation, something to change the course of events. Eventually even they must have said, “Let’s just get this over with.” Our situation today is different in a number of regards. One is the desperation of facing a biological limit for all of our actions, but another is that the tools of our distractions have the potential to communicate rapidly and clearly with huge numbers of people. Our direction is actually changeable.

The Great Many have been diminished in their sense of power, even as they still retain real power if they could recognize their own best self-interests and organize around them. And the dangers are not 100 years, 300 years in the future: the barbarians are at the gates in the form of ecological collapse. Those “leaders” who refuse to see the immediacy of our dangers are, everyone, benefited in the moment by that refusal. The acquired ‘helplessness’ of the Great Many must be recognized for the terrible, perhaps insurmountable, problem that it is and must be given the deepest consideration, but assuming that it is addressable:

The present world is not Rome, but has come to its own and new place driven by the same human forces. Getting it wrong this time will not simply lead to the rise of Constantinople and the empires of a new Middle East, but will shock the biosphere and change all of life on earth.

Advertising Age is reporting that, due to its fear of a backlash arising from “parental concerns that [its] advertising and packaging was preying on fears of the H1N1 virus,” Kellogg Company, the billion-dollar-a-year profit engine that peddles Cocoa Krispies and other junk food, is removing preposterous “anti-oxidant” claims from Cocoa Krispies boxes.

Here is Kellogg’s official announcement:

Kellogg Company today announced its decision to discontinue the immunity statements on Kellogg’s Rice Krispies cereals.

Last year, Kellogg Company started the development of adding antioxidants to Rice Krispies cereals. This is one way the Company responded to parents indicating their desire for more positive nutrition in kids’ cereal.

While science shows that these antioxidants help support the immune system, given the public attention on H1N1, the Company decided to make this change. The communication will be on pack for the next few months as packaging flows through store shelves. We will, however, continue to provide the increased amounts of vitamins A, B, C and E (25% Daily Value) that the cereal offers.

We will continue to respond to the desire for improved nutrition, and we are committed to communicating the importance of nutrition to our consumers.

Let’s run that through our handy-dandy, unpatented Consumer Trap Marketing-to-English Translator, shall we?

The results:

Kellogg Company today announced its decision to discontinue the immunity statements on Kellogg’s Rice Krispies cereals. Meanwhile, we won’t tell you here that by “Rice Krispies,” we also mean “Cocoa Krispies.” Including that fact would disclose that we are basically selling candy here.

Last year, Kellogg Company started the development of adding antioxidants to Rice Krispies and Cocoa Krispies cereals. This is one way the Company responded to parents‘ indicating their desire for vulnerability to deceptive claims about more positive nutrition in kids’ cereal lives.

While science* shows suggests that these antioxidants may help support the immune system, given the public attention on that we know our vitamin-sprayed sugar crunch doesn’t have a prayer of preventing H1N1, the Company decided to make this change. The communication will be on pack for the next few months as packaging flows through store shelves. After all, it would cost us money to remove them now. We will, however, continue to provide spray on the increased amounts of vitamins A, B, C and E (25% Daily Value) that the cereal offers continues to provide us with an excuse for passing our product off as [wink, wink, make air quotes] “part of a nutritious breakfast.”

We will continue to respond to ignore both the desire for improved nutrition and the nutritional and economic inferiority of our mega-processed and packaged product to plain old whole-grain bread, and we are committed to communicating the importance suppressing knowledge of nutrition and home economics to among our consumers targets.

Fuck you, and goodnight.

* When science is even conceivably on our side, it is absolute truth. Climate change? Dangers of excessive sugar intake? Needs more research.

In a radical free-market culture, when hope is precarious and bound to commodities and a corrupt financial system, young people are no longer at risk: they are the risk.

– Henry Giroux, p. x.

If youth once constituted a social investment in the future and symbolized the promise of a better world, they are now entering another stage in the construction of a global social order in which children are increasingly demonized and criminalized… p. 29.

As the politics of the social state gives way to the biopolitics of disposability, the prison becomes a preeminently valued institution whose disciplinary practices become a model for dealing with the increasing number of young people who are considered to be the waste products of a market-mediated society. p. 82.

Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability?
By Henry A. Giroux
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (2009)
ISBN: 978-0-230-61329-4
ISBN10: 0-230-61329-2

It need not be said, though I find it necessary to restate, that Henry Giroux is one of the most important public servants the last 100 years have produced. In his expansive three decade plus academic career, Giroux has written over 35 books, contributed to countless scholarly journals, and received numerous educational honors.

But perhaps what most makes this former high school basketball star distinct is his tireless advocacy on behalf of the frail, the vulnerable, the disposable.

Giroux has focused much of his writing over the fragile existence disenfranchised populations are largely relegated to. Giroux’s “critical sympathy” to the often forgotten, as Georgetown professor Michael Eric Dyson once mentioned, is what pushes him time after time to engage issues many of his peers would rather stay far away from — for fear of sanction, resentment, or job loss.

In that spirit of deep moral determination and fervent conviction, comes his latest work: Youth in a Suspect Society, which, above all else, is an attempt to interrogate the increasingly hostile future our society is preparing, with no sense of shame or irony, for its next tenants — young people.

Giroux wastes no time condemning the “assault against youth” being waged by all those blind to the radical realities of reproof youth, and especially those of color, are being confined to by way of policy and legislation. An example of this is provided in the case of Deamonte Driver, a seventh grader from Prince George’s County, Maryland, who “died because his mother did not have the health insurance to cover an $80 tooth extraction.”

Under the Lyndon Baines Johnson administration, Giroux writes, there was at least a “willingness to fight for the rights of children, enact reforms that invested in their future, and provide the educational conditions necessary for them to be critical citizens.” But all advancements made in that era were rolled over as one neo-conservative administration after the other found its way into the White House. And the most devastating of them, in theory and practice, Giroux insists, was the 43rd one.

But government alone isn’t responsible, he notes, because anti-Youth legislations couldn’t be established as law without a media complex that has “habitually” reinforced representations, however false, of young people as “variously lazy, stupid, self-indulgent, volatile, dangerous, and manipulative.” It’s important to note that these suggestions “do more than degrade young people and resonate with their underlying marginality and disposability”; they also “legitimate the passage of draconian measures, policies, and laws at the highest levels of government.”

So, it then makes sense when schools become transformed into secondary stations for police officers, military personnel, and other agents of the State.

The message: Kids and, especially, Youth are a threat to society — a threat which must be watched with close scrutiny, dealt with diabolically, and, when necessary, punished with the power of the law.

Students are, as a result, targeted and treated as potential criminals, paving way for a society in which “children who commit a rule violation as minor as a dress code infraction or slightly act out in class can be handcuffed, booked, and put in a jail cell.”

In Youth in a Suspect Society, Giroux also takes special time out to dive deeper into the challenges confronting children, as they try to navigate a world where giant corporations see them as nothing but disposable commodities – to be bought and sold.

Children, Dr. Giroux writes, “constitute the primary index through which a society registers its own meaning, vision, and politics.” And today’s children are having to become more accustomed to a speed-driven society; a society that treasures punctuality over poignancy, and impatience over incandescence. Thus, kids are being encouraged to revel in “the suspension of judgment, the inability to think critically, [and] the avoidance of responsibility.” (Never mind that these very kids are still ultimately barraged with blame for low test scores or poor performance on state standardized tests.)

Kids would also have to get used to “a society that measures its success and failure solely through the economic lens of the Gross National Product (GNP)”; a society unable to “define youth outside of market principles determined largely by … market growth and the accumulation of capital.”

This society, children should be aware, sees them not only as an “expansive and profitable market but as the primary source of redemption for the future of capitalism.”

Examples of such thinking abound in Youth in a Suspect Society. Giroux’s meticulous research unearths numerous reports of kids being selected by toy companies to act as representatives (unpaid employees), such as a GIA-sponsored event, Slumber Party in a Box, which enlists “agents” to “invite their friends to an overnight party, hand out free products to them, and then provide ‘feedback through quizzes’ to GIA headquarters.” Corporations have found kids and pre-teens great resources – peer pressure power — to use in expanding their brand — even if it commodifies the non-market value of friendship.

Giroux also turns a sharp gaze on pro athletes like Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, who, he says, appear more interested in inflating their bank account figures than “using their celebrity status for educating young people about character, hard work, the value of sportsmanship, and the sheer joy of athleticism.”

But there’s another angle to this, which hasn’t gotten as much press among progressive circles. As Giroux writes:

More and more youth have been defined and understood within a war on terror that provides an expansive, antidemocratic framework for referencing how they are represented, talked about, and inserted within a growing network of disciplinary relations that responds to the problems they face by criminalizing their behaviors and subjecting them to punitive modes of conduct.

The war on terror and drugs, Giroux asserts, has added a new target: Youth.

This war, unlike the more glamorous cross-national disputes, doesn’t necessarily involve two sides in contentious combat. This war is characterized by “4th grade reading scores and graduation rates [being] used to determine how many prison cells will be built.” This war is against the growing population of “pint-size nihilists” amongst us. Extinguish them!

And so,

Instead of being viewed as impoverished, minority youth are seen as lazy and shiftless; instead of being recognized as badly served by failing schools, they are labeled uneducable and pushed out of schools; instead of being provided with decent work skills and jobs, they are either sent to prison or conscripted to fight in wars abroad; instead of being given decent health care and a place to live, they are placed in foster care or pushed into the swelling ranks of the homeless.

These enemies of our peace are then rightfully placed in schools where the squeaking sound of metal detectors is omnipresent, where police forces are dominant, where arrests, suspensions, and expulsions are as commonplace as being frisked, cussed-out, or strip-searched by security officers on your way to class. These enemies of our peace might be too young to legally “marry, drive a car, get a tattoo, or go to scary movies, but not too young to be put in prisons for the rest of their lives.”

And while we’re at it, let’s make sure they’re excluded from “various forms of student aid,” post-conviction, including but not limited to “welfare payments, Medicaid, veterans’ benefits, food stamps, and… public housing.”

Isn’t it so heartwarming to know that young people growing up have such a splendid future awaiting them?

Giroux calls on “intellectuals” of great courage to “take a stand” against these “collective problems” putting at risk “not only young people and adults… but the very possibility of deepening and expanding democracy itself.” But how many of these intellectuals wouldn’t have to be summoned from the dead?

As he rightly notes, the university has witnessed a radical shift in vision this past decade. Through hysteria whipped up by right-wingers following 9/11, many liberal or left-leaning professors have been silenced or fired to quell the paranoia expressed by some students that they’re being brainwashed. Their professors tried to force upon them “Marxist” and “Socialist” values – values that go by such scary prospects as critical thinking, intellectual freedom, and independent reasoning.

These young people, Giroux writes, have been bamboozled by the likes of David Horowitz, president of the Center for the Study of popular culture, who’ve “hijacked political power and waged a focused campaign against the principles of academic freedom, sacrificing the quality of education made available to youth in the name of patriotic correctness.”

Cheated out of an enlightening educational experience, Giroux contends, are young people, who, in exchange for being provided the tools to “critically engage what they know and to recognize the limits of their own knowledge,” are infantilized by appeasing academics. They are denied “opportunities to engage knowledge critically… [and] assume responsibility for what it means to know something.”

Giroux’s hopes are for a “larger public dialogue about how to imagine a democratic future,” in the context of a Youth-centered pedagogy. Unfortunately, “We have entered a period in which the war against youth, especially poor youth of color, offers no apologies because it is too arrogant and ruthless to imagine any resistance.” Nonetheless, this ambassador of hope reassures: “… [P]ower as a form of domination is never absolute, and oppression always produces some form of resistance.”

And though the laborious work of resistance must engage all sectors of society, Giroux’s call to young people is direct: “[G]o out into the world and actively try to change it.”

Youth in a Suspect Society is an unnerving prophetic call to action. Through tedious research and meditation, Giroux has provided a blueprint that all concerned can use in restoring the faith Youth once had in society — faith planted in the soils of non-privatized, non-corporatized values.

This faith, however, has been uprooted by years of indifference and antipathy, callousness and bellicosity.

Children are now much too aware of the degree of disregard society disses them with. And they respond to it in ways that anger some and amuse others.

But the concrete work of restoring this faith has hardly been addressed, let alone acted upon, before the publication of Youth in a Suspect Society.

I recommend it with inestimable gratitude to Dr. Giroux for his moral vigor and matchless vitality.

We continued this way for I don’t know how many meters, and soon I couldn’t hear anyone behind me, only a murmur that might have been distant voices ahead. Each point of light held the promise of hot sun and desert air, but each time I arrived to find only more tunnel, and a hand imploring me to follow deeper.

Soon my legs were burning with wanting to stand. It became so dark in the long lapses between electric lights that my guide had to take my hand as we felt our way along. So many times I said “Khalas” — I have seen enough. But at each light he would signal that it was just a little further.

Finally, I was finished. I could not remember why I had followed, and why I had continued to follow. I’d lost track of how many lights we’d passed, and had no idea how far the journey back would be. My guide pointed to a light maybe 8 meters ahead, and this light was different. Brighter, and more yellow. I knew this time we’d almost reached our destination, perhaps the end of the tunnel and the relative freedom of Egyptian sun and sand, but I couldn’t continue. “Khalas,” I said, and this time he knew I meant it. I turned and began to feel my way back.

Soon I was tearing through the tunnel, tripping over the uneven floor and scratching my fingers on the packed dirt and sand of the walls. Craggy sections of the ceiling tore at my hijab but I would not slow. My guide grabbed my hips to steady me and force a more even pace, and so I dragged him with me. Finally he pulled me to my knees inside one of the occasional wooden box frames supporting the more than 20 feet of packed sand and dirt above us. He sat down next to me and pushed his open palms up through the air in front of his chest and then down, showing me how to breathe. “Shway,” he said, “slow.”

Nearly everyone I’ve talked to in Gaza has told me that the effects of the siege and the massacre have been worst for women and children and I believe them, but seven meters below the rubble of Rafah and the rumbling of the tractors that push this endless sand away from the mouth of each new tunnel, my thoughts turn to Gaza’s men.

The guide kneeling beside me, and thousands like him, cheat death every day in these tunnels as they journey back and forth between Rafah, Egypt and Rafah, Gaza, one city divided by a border and a cruel siege. And nearly every day, at least one of these men loses his gamble and does not come home. The siege has kept out everything but a painfully short list of humanitarian items. Building materials, a wide variety of foodstuffs, ink and paper, and so many other necessities are not permitted to enter Gaza. If the people of Gaza are to have anything close to a life, to bathe and eat and rebuild and learn, they must purchase this contraband illegally, and someone must illegally import it.

The Israeli government claims that the tunnels must be bombed because they are used to smuggle weapons, but in reality the tunnels are almost always used for anything but. After the massacre the tunnels brought lions and tigers to replace the ones loosed by the attack on Gaza’s largest zoo (Can you imagine? Amid all the bombing and chaos, wild animals running through the streets of Gaza!) Many people have told me the next big project is to smuggle in cars, a necessity in a place where virtually every vehicle is subject to regular breakdowns.

The tunnels provide a necessary lifeline for the people of Gaza, but as my guide patiently awaited the end of my panic attack, I began to realize that they are born out of another necessity: The tunnels offer an opportunity for men to reclaim their place as protectors and providers in a society where occupation and siege make those roles virtually impossible.

A few days earlier, Palestinian psychiatrist Eyad Sarraj told me of a game he plays with his young nephew called “Arab and Jew.” In the game, his nephew would play a Palestinian, chasing Dr. Sarraj around the yard and pretending to throw rocks at him. Not long ago, they played the game again, but this time his nephew insisted on playing the Israeli. Shortly into the game the small boy leapt onto his uncle’s back and began to beat him as hard as he could. Once Dr. Sarraj was able to escape his nephew’s brutal attack, he immediately asked his sister about the change in her son’s behavior. She told him that the child had recently witnessed his father humiliated and severely beaten by Israeli soldiers. Dr. Sarraj tells this anecdote to illustrate a growing trend he’s seen in young Palestinians: As parents, especially fathers, are humiliated, beaten, arrested, and otherwise disempowered in front of their children by Israeli soldiers, they lose their status as protectors in their children’s eyes. Desperate for signs of strength in terrifyingly unstable and dangerous times, young Palestinians find a new role model: the Israeli soldier.

Dr. Sarraj finds the origin of this trend in the Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948, when Israelis began ethnically cleansing Palestinians from their land. Since 1948, the trauma of losing agency over one’s life and living conditions has become, in the words of Dr. Sarraj, “a part of the Palestinian psyche.” This trauma, which has grown with every violent incursion into Palestinian communities, strongly intensified with the first Intifada in 1987, when Israeli soldiers mercilessly beat children armed only with rocks, and also beat and arrested their parents. The psychiatrist notes that many of these children grew up to embrace more violent weapons in the second Intifada in 2000, a response to the brutal abuse and humiliation they’d witnessed. More than 45% of Palestinian children have watched Israeli soldiers beat and/or arrest their fathers, and the trend Dr. Sarraj describes has grown exponentially since the December/January massacre. Since the attacks, more than 75% of the youth of Gaza do not believe their parents can protect them from Israeli soldiers. Surrounded by the rubble of schools, hospitals, and whole neighborhoods, and with virtually no hope of employment upon graduation (the siege-induced unemployment rate is 80%), it is hard for the youth of Gaza to envision much of a future. And it is virtually impossible for their parents, highly educated but lacking agency and employment, to give them hope.

The trauma that is now part of the Palestinian psyche, that forces Palestinian youth to seek the new role model of the Israeli soldier, can be seen at its worst when these children grow up. Dr. Sarraj tells another story from a brief detention in a Palestinian prison. In the cell next to his, he heard a Palestinian guard interrogating a prisoner. The guard’s voice became louder and more frantic as his anger grew, until he began screaming at the prisoner in Hebrew. Dr. Sarraj later learned that the guard had been severely tortured in an Israeli prison. In this moment of uncontrollable anger, the guard became his tormentor.

Stories like these are all too frequent in Gaza, where weddings and graduations are celebrated with a soundtrack of constant Israeli bombing and shelling. My own such story came on a beautiful afternoon on the beach, while eating lunch with a large family. One of the older sons, maybe in his late teens, asked me to follow him to a small tent tucked behind the rows of family tents facing the Mediterranean. The son sat me down at a cheap metal table that had been transformed into a desk, decorated with a poster of young men murdered by Israelis, a couple of notebooks, and a mug holding some pens and a small Hamas flag. The man seated behind the desk and surrounded by young boys anxiously awaiting their next task made it clear that he would interrogate me, and sent one of the boys to find an interpreter on the beach. The son who had brought me beamed at my side, occasionally picking up the Coke my interrogator had presented me, encouraging me to drink more. After about ten minutes my interpreter arrived, another boy in his late teens. My interrogator spoke in a serious voice, but his questions were the same as those I’d received from students and families, curious about my country, a source of so much fascination and suffering for the people of Gaza. “What do Americans think of Palestinians? Who do Americans blame for the ‘war’ in December and January? What does American media say about the people of Gaza, and about Palestinians? What do Americans think of Bush? What will Obama do differently?” Throughout my “interrogation” I could not distract myself from the image of this authority figure, digging his toes into the sand, surrounded by a volunteer staff of young boys, protecting the beach by investigating a camera-toting foreigner from behind his make-shift desk and small Hamas flag.

This story is not representative of my experiences with Hamas. I do not know my interrogator’s official role within the government, if he actually has one, and I expect that the members of Hamas who were tasked with protecting and providing for our delegation would have been angered to learn of my unauthorized interrogation, an inconvenience they would have spared me. But this story stays with me because of the trauma Dr. Sarraj describes, which was palpable long before he described it to me. In detaining and interrogating a foreigner whose American passport can take her anywhere in the world and could have rescued her from the December/January massacre, this man momentarily seized his agency. In front of his young, eager audience, he claimed his place as their protector.

The phenomenon Dr. Sarraj illustrates is not only visible in individuals. One need only look at the devastated building of the Hamas-led Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) to see the Israelis’ humiliation and abuse on a governmental scale. Of all of the destroyed buildings I’ve seen in Gaza, in some ways this one haunts me most. These walls housed a democratically elected government that has endured a vicious siege since 2006, fought off an attempted coup, and has struggled with great patience and flexibility to be seen as legitimate by the global community. All of these pressures combined are enough to destroy a government, but they are magnified exponentially by the horrific massacre that stole the lives of more than 1,400 Palestinians and forced the PLC to meet in a tent behind their largely collapsed building. I think often of the meetings held in this vulnerable tent: I wonder if sometimes the pressures bearing down on these legislators simply become too much, and they are unable to breathe, to force their words out into the hot air of a Gaza parking lot.

Just as the task of protecting and providing for one’s children in Gaza is nearly impossible, the task of Hamas to fulfill the role of protector and provider for 1.5 million people is truly Herculean. Every day the leaders of this government wake up to regular attacks from one of the best-funded militaries in the world and a global misrepresentation as a terrorist organization that took power by force. Because of the horrific Israeli siege Hamas cannot provide rebuilding materials to the people of Gaza, or even feed the people who voted them into power based on the party’s history of providing necessary social services to the Gaza community. The vast majority of food aid that reaches Gaza comes from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), tasked with caring for Gaza’s refugees (80% of the population). While UNRWA supplies vital necessities to the slowly starving people of Gaza, their presence is a constant reminder of what Hamas cannot provide. It would be a lie to say that Hamas is loved by everyone in Gaza. But every action for which Hamas is condemned by western media must be understood in the context of the inhuman Israeli occupation and ethnic cleansing, which have become so commonplace and expected we sometimes forget they exist. With the siege, their complicity in the attempted coup, and the December/January massacre, the Israeli government has stolen the agency of the government the people of Gaza chose.

While Dr. Sarraj’s explanation of the societal effects of trauma explains so much about my interactions in Gaza, about the youth who only want to be photographed pretending to shoot guns at my camera and the gaming centers whose violent advertisements are omnipresent on Gaza’s city streets, the brilliant professor and one-state activist Haidar Eid makes an important counterpoint to Dr. Sarraj’s theory. While Dr. Eid agrees with much of what the psychiatrist describes, he insists that by attributing every action Palestinians take to Israeli-induced trauma, one steals the last ounce of agency Palestinians have. When Palestinians take up arms against their occupiers, or smuggle food and tigers through tunnels, they resist the inhuman Israeli occupation and reclaim some of their agency. As a Palestinian soldier told a delegation member, “What else are we supposed to do? We cannot sit by when they come to kill our families. We have to protect them.”

It has been more than 12 hours since I left the tunnel, and I still can’t catch my breath. Dusty walls of packed earth occupy my eyelids, and whenever I near sleep the walls begin to crumble. When we finally neared the tunnel entrance and I could see real, natural light maybe 15 meters away, we heard a distant rumble. Bombs dropped from Israeli planes perhaps, or a partial tunnel collapse somewhere, or more mechanical digging. All of these things happen almost every day in Rafah, and then there are the near-daily silent threats, like the poisonous gas the Egyptian military releases into tunnel entrances before permanently sealing them. As I scrambled out of the narrow tunnel passage and into the loop of rope that would pull me up to the surface and back to a reality where my American passport and some patience guarantee my safe passage across the Rafah border, I watched my guide shrink below me, before ducking back into the bend of the tunnel and resuming his daily routine.

The findings by Defense for Children International (DCI) come in the wake of revelations from Israeli soldiers and senior commanders that it is “normal procedure” in the West Bank to terrorise Palestinian civilians, including children.

Col Itai Virob, commander of the Kfir Brigade, disclosed last month that to accomplish a mission, “aggressiveness towards every one of the residents in the village is common.” Questioning included slaps, beatings and kickings, he said.

As a result, Gabi Ashkenazi, the head of the armed services, was forced to appear before the Israeli parliament to disavow the behavior of his soldiers. Beatings were “absolutely prohibited”, he told legislators.

Col Virob made his remarks during court testimony in defense of two soldiers, including his deputy commander, who are accused of beating Palestinians in the village of Qaddum, close to Nablus. One told the court that, “soldiers are educated towards aggression in the IDF [army].”

Col Virob appeared to confirm his observation, saying it was policy to “disturb the balance” of village life during missions and that the vast majority of assaults were “against uninvolved people.”

Last week, further disclosures of ill-treatment of Palestinians, some as young as 14, were aired on Israeli TV, using material collected by dissident soldiers as part of the Breaking the Silence project, which highlights army brutality.

Two soldiers serving in the Harub battalion said they had witnessed beatings at a school in the West Bank village of Hares, south-west of Nablus, in an operation in March to stop stone-throwing. Many of those held were not involved, the soldiers said.

During a 12-hour operation that began at 3am, 150 detainees were blindfolded and handcuffed from behind, with the nylon restraints so tight their hands turned blue. The worst beatings, the soldiers said, occurred in the school toilets.

According to one soldier’s testimony, a boy of about 15 was given “a slap that brought him to the ground.” He added that many of his comrades “just knee [Palestinians] because it’s boring, because you stand there 10 hours, you’re not doing anything, so they beat people up”.

The picture from serving soldiers confirms the findings of DCI, which noted that many children were picked up in general sweeps after disturbances or during late-night raids of their homes.

Its report includes a selection of testimonies from children it represented in 2008 in which they describe Israeli soldiers beating them or being tortured by interrogators.

One 10-year-old boy, identified as Ezzat H, described an army search of his family home for a gun. He said a soldier slapped and punched him repeatedly during two hours of questioning, before another soldier pointed a rifle at him: “The rifle barrel was a few centimeters away from my face. I was so terrified that I started to shiver. He made fun of me.”

Another boy, Shadi H, aged 15, said he and his friend were forced to undress by soldiers in an orange grove near Tulkarm while the soldiers threw stones at them. They were then beaten with rifle butts.

Jameel K, aged 14, described being taken to a military camp where he was assaulted and then had a rope tightened around his neck in a mock execution.

Yehuda Shaul, of Breaking the Silence, said soldiers treated any Palestinian older than 12 or 13 as an adult.

“For the first time a high-ranking soldier [Col Virob] has joined us in raising the issue — even if not intentionally — that the use of physical violence against Palestinians is not exceptional but policy. A few years ago no senior officer would have had the guts to say this,” he said.

The DCI report also highlights the systematic use of torture by interrogators from the army and the secret police, the Shin Bet, in an attempt to extract confessions from children, often in cases involving stone throwing.

Islam M, aged 12, said he was threatened with having boiling water poured on his face if he did not admit throwing stones and was then pushed into a thorn bush. Another boy, Abed S, aged 16, said his hands and feet were tied to the wall of an interrogation room in the shape of a cross for a day and then put in solitary confinement for 15 days.

Last month, the United Nations Committee Against Torture, a panel of independent experts, expressed “deep concern” at Israel’s treatment of Palestinian minors.

According to the DCI report, some 700 children are convicted in Israel’s military courts each year, with children older than 12 denied access to lawyers in interrogation.

It adds that interrogators routinely blindfold and handcuff child detainees during questioning and use techniques including slaps and kicks, sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, threats to the child and his family, and tying the child up for long periods.

Such practices were banned by Israel’s Supreme Court in 1999 but are still widely documented by Israeli human rights groups.

DCI says it has been disturbed by reports from several children of a special tiny cell, referred to as No 36, at a detention centre near Haifa. The cell has no windows or ventilation, its walls are dark and a dim light is kept on 24 hours a day.

In 95 per cent of cases, children are convicted on the basis of signed confessions written in Hebrew, a language few of them understand.

Once sentenced, the children are held in violation of international law in prisons in Israel where most are denied visits from family and receive little or no education.

DCI also criticizes “a culture of impunity” among the Shin Bet, noting that not one of 600 complaints of torture filed against its interrogators during the second intifada has led to a criminal investigation.

Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group, reported in November that soldiers too rarely face disciplinary action over illegal behavior.

Army data from 2000 to the end of 2007 revealed that the military police had indicted soldiers in only 78 of 1,268 investigations. Most soldiers received minor sentences.

Academic studies suggest that Israeli soldiers have been routinely using violence against Palestinian civilians, including children, for many years.

In late 2007 Israelis were shocked by the testimonies collected by clinical psychologist Nufar Yishai-Karin from 21 soldiers with whom she shared her military service during the early 1990s.

The soldiers told her of incidents in which bystanders were shot or assaulted. In one of the most disturbing testimonies, a soldier said he had witnessed his commander attacking a four-year-old boy playing in the sand in Gaza.

“He broke his hand here at the wrist. Broke his hand at the wrist, broke his leg here. And started to stomp on his stomach, three times, and left . . . The next day I go out with him on another patrol, and the soldiers are already starting to do the same thing.”

Such revelations have grown in number since the Breaking the Silence began drawing attention to the army’s mistreatment of Palestinians in 2004.

* A version of this article originally appeared in The National, published in Abu Dhabi.

PCHR reviewed IDF killing of Gaza’s children since the beginning of the Second Intifada in September 2000, then focused on the 313 youth deaths during the recent conflict. Its evidence comes from eye-witness accounts of the willful targeting of civilians, including women and children. Also covered are the psychological scars and “alarming scale of physical injuries” leaving some children blind and many others (as well as adults) permanently disabled by the loss of limbs and psychological trauma.

PCHR’s report bears testimony to Israel’s contempt for international laws, its imperial agenda, culture of violence, disdain for peace, genocidal intentions, disparagement of Arabs and Islam, and its scorn for Palestinian lives and welfare.

PCHR presented 13 case studies in its report. Briefly discussed below, they represent a small fraction of the many hundreds killed and thousands more grievously harmed.

Introduction

Since the September 2000 Second Intifada, Israeli forces killed 1179 children, including 865 in Gaza as part of a decades-long policy of collectively punishing millions of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, mostly civilian men, women, and children.

Israel calls self-defense “terrorism” and justifies its actions as responses to militant missile or other attacks. PCHR’s investigations “have consistently undermined these claims,” and condemns all killing, especially of children.

In September 2006, the London Independent’s Donald Macintyre headlined his story: “Gaza: The children killed in a war the world doesn’t want to know about.” He wrote about more than 37 children under 18 killed since June 25 during Israel’s Operation Summer Rain, according to PCHR figures, out of an overall 228 total, mostly civilians.

He highlighted a “forgotten war in the Middle East” with young boys, girls and adults blown apart by Israeli shells and missiles, but who notices. He said the IDF attacks heavily populated areas indiscriminately on the pretext of fighting a “terrorist infrastructure.” He stressed that “attention (was) diverted from Gaza as Israel launch(ed) a full military invasion of southern Lebanon” yet civilian deaths mounted in both areas. He listed by name Gazan children under 18 killed and by what means — from airstrikes, while playing football, missiles, shrapnel, tank or artillery shells, and shot in the head or chest at close range. Khitam Mohammed Rebhi Tayey was one — age 11. Aya Salmeya another — age 9.

Israel rarely responds to public outrage or investigates its crimes, including against children. The few times it does turn into whitewashes. After 11 days on March 30, 2009, military advocate general Avichai Mandelblit closed the IDF’s inquiry into Israeli soldiers’ accounts of Operation Cast Lead crimes and dismissed them as unfounded.

International Humanitarian Law (IHL) Protection for Children

Various laws apply, including the Fourth Geneva Convention and UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). As protected persons, they’re to be safeguarded against willful killing, coercion, corporal punishments, torture, collective penalties and reprisals.

CRC was the first legally binding international instrument incorporating all human rights for children, including civil, cultural, economic, political and social. They’re now universally agreed on non-negotiable standards and obligations supporting their rights.

CRC’s Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict took effect on February 12, 2002. Israel ratified it on July 18, 2005 and CRC in 1991. The Optional Protocol strengthens children’s rights, recognizes that they require special protection, and condemns their being targeted in armed conflicts, especially in schools, hospitals or at home. Israel is legally bound under both laws and Geneva, yet disdains them repeatedly, especially by “willful killing” through indiscriminate attacks or deliberately targeting civilian areas or structures.

Truth and Lies: Operation Cast Lead and Civilian Deaths

Besides vast destruction and mass population displacement, 313 children were killed among the 1414 who died over a 23-day period. Of the 5300 injured (many seriously), 1606 were children. In all cases, the vast majority were noncombatants.

Of the children killed:

• most were at home or nearby;
• around one-third were girls and the rest boys;
• almost 15% were under age 5 and another one-fourth between 5 and 10;
• the remainder were between 11 and 17;
• the “overwhelming majority” were killed in densely populated residential areas;
• 46% were killed in northern Gaza;
• 38% in Gaza City;
• 9% in Khan Yunis and Rafah and 7% in less densely populated areas.

Israel used conventional and illegal weapons. The former included missiles, artillery and tank shells, mortars, and automatic weapons.

Others included:

• white phosphorous that burns flesh to the bone and can be fatal; it’s use is prohibited in civilian areas;
• flechettes that are 4cm long darts used as anti-personnel weapons; they penetrate to the bone and can cause multiple horrific injuries; up to 8000 of them can be packed into one artillery shell; on explosion, they travel at high speed in multiple directions up to around 300 meters; and
• various other internationally prohibited weapons that PCHR investigations uncovered and condemned.

Its case studies show a consistent failure of Israeli forces to protect civilian lives, especially those of children. They document indiscriminate attacks against densely populated neighborhoods in grave violation of international laws.

To safeguard civilians and non-military areas and structures, IHL requires that precautions be taken in any attack, and civilian protection is paramount. Israel pays no heed and attacks indiscriminately in grave violation of the law.

Case Study One: The Olaiwa Family

Gaza City’s Isma’il (age 7), Mo’men (age 13), Mo’tassem (age 14) and Lana Olaiwa, (age 9) and their mother Amal were killed when an artillery shell struck their home on January 5, 2009. Three other family members were injured, including Amal’s husband, Haider, and her eldest son, Muntasser.

Two survivors were too badly injured to be interviewed. PCHR spoke to Fadwa Olaiwa, Haider’s sister, who lived two floors below. She said that 42 extended family members lived in the four-story house. The shell killed five of them in their kitchen where Amal was cooking.

When Fadwa heard the explosion, she ran upstairs and saw what happened. She found Amal decapitated by the refrigerator and the other bodies close by. Haider, Muntasser and Ghadir were taken to Gaza City’s al-Shifa Hospital. Haider sustained permanent facial and jaw injuries. Ghadir’s right arm was seriously injured. She and her father’s hearing were badly damaged. Muntasser had serious liver and stomach shrapnel wounds requiring two operations. Metal is still embedded in his right leg, and he continues to undergo treatment.

PCHR investigations confirm that no combatants or military targets were close by at the time of the attack. Artillery shells were fired indiscriminately, have a range of up to 60 km, and were used against entire areas, including civilian ones. This attack and many others like it constitute war crimes on two counts under Articles 8(2)(b)(ii) and (iv) of the International Criminal Court Statute.

Case Study Two: the al-Dayah Family

In the Zaytoun district of eastern Gaza, 22 family members were killed when a bomb struck their home — including 12 children and a pregnant woman. The explosion destroyed the house and buried many of the family inside. Only two family members survived, 28-year old Aamer and his brother Rida. Those killed included:

• Fayez Musbah Hasham, age 60
• Kawkab Sa’id Hussein, age 57
• Radwan Fayez Musbah, age 22
• Sabrin Fayez Musbah, age 24
• Raghda Fayez Musbah, age 34
• Eyad Fayez Musbah, age 36
• Rawda Hilal Hussein, age 32
• Ali Eyad Fayez Musbah, age 10
• Khitam Eyad Fayez Musbah, age 9
• Alaa’ Eyad Fayez Musbah, age 7
• Raba’a Eyad Fayez, age 6
• Sharaf Al-Din Eyad Fayez, age 5
• Mohammed Eyad Fayez, age 7 months
• Ramez Fayez Musbah, age 27
• Safaa’ Saleh Mohammed, age 20
• Baraa’ Ramez Fayez, age 1.5
• Salsabil Ramez Fayez, age 5 months
• Tazal Isma’il Isma’il Mohammed, age 28 and 8 months pregnant
• Amani Mohammed Fayez, age 6
• Qamar Mohammed Fayez, age 5
• Arij Mohammed Fayez, age 3, and
• Yousef Mohammed Fayez, age two

On February 3, 2009, PCHR interviewed Aamer al-Dayah (who was home) and his brother, Rida who was outside the house when attacked. Aamer said 24 family members shared seven apartments in the building. When it was struck, the force knocked Aamer unconscious, and he awakened under rubble. Rida was at a nearby mosque at the time. He rushed home, freed Aamer and his twin brother Radwan inside, still alive but only barely until he died on January 9.

Both survivors told PCHR that the explosion flung some family members meters outside their home while others inside were burned beyond recognition. They had no advance warning of an immanent attack, but PCHR fieldworkers learned there was military activity nearby. However, all al-Dayah family members were civilians. The IDF attack gravely breached international law and constitutes two war crime counts under Articles 8(2)(b)(ii) and (iv) of the International Criminal Court Statute.

According to IHL principles, Israeli forces used excessive and disproportionate force against a known civilian target resulting in the death of 22 al-Dayah family members — a crime Palestinians will long remember.

Case Study Three: the al-Battran family

On January 16, six al-Battran family members were slaughtered in their al-Bureji refugee camp home by an Israeli aircraft fired missile. Killed were Manal and five of her children:

• Manal, age 32
• Islam, age 15
• Eman, age 9
• twin sister Ehsan, age 9
• Bilal, age 6 and
• Izziddin, age 3

One year old son Abdul Hadi and Amal’s husband Issa survived. On February 25, PCHR interviewed Issa’s brother, Diaa’ who was in the house next door at the time of the attack. When he heard the explosion, he ran over and discovered the bodies, burnt and shorn of some body parts.

According to al-Battran family members, Issa hadn’t seen his wife and children since Operation Cast Lead began for fear of being assassinated. The day of the attack was the first time in January he was with them, only to pack clothing before heading to a safer location. He survived three earlier attempts to kill him because of his position in the Izz ad-Din Al Qassam Brigades.

Shrapnel at the scene identified a US-made Hellfire missile providing clear evidence of US involvement. Killing noncombatants is a war crime as defined in Article 8(2)(b)(iv) of the International Criminal Court Statute.

Other Case Studies: Further Examples of War Crime Attacks on Noncombatants, Including Children

(1) On January 16, two projectiles killed four Abu Eita family members outside their home, the youngest 2.5 year old Malak Abu.

(2) On January 9, two projectiles destroyed their house and killed six Salha family members, the youngest Bahaa, age 5

(3) On January 5, a projectile killed Mohammed Hijji. Earlier their home was commandeered by Israeli forces. Family members were held prisoners inside, then forced to be human shields so they could occupy a nearby house. Afterwards the family was ordered to evacuate Zaytoun where they lived, then shot at while leaving, killing their 2.5 year old daughter Shahd. Relatives and Arafat family members told to leave were also fleeing. In progress, one woman was shot and killed. Nine others were wounded. All are civilians, including children.

(4) on January 14, a projectile killed 14 year old Izziddin al-Farra in Qarara village in eastern Gaza while he and his friend Abdul Ghani were bicycling on a rural road. Abdul sustained a serious head injury.

(5) On January 4, Israeli forces shot and killed 1.5 year old Farah al-Helu. Family members were in their home. Soldiers entered, shot and killed 62 year old Fouad, then ordered the family to evacuate. Outside they were shot at, injuring three family members and killing Farah who bled to death. One family member described their ordeal. They tried crawling to safety. Most did but three others were struck and lay in the street. Farah bled to death because emergency care was denied — further evidence of a war crime atrocity.

(6) On December 29, a bombing of an adjacent mosque destroyed the Balousha family Jabaliya refugee camp home. Five of eight daughters were killed, the youngest Jawaher age four. Five others were injured and another five homes were seriously damaged.

(7) On January 6, two projectiles struck the yard of Mo’in Deeb’s Jabaliya refugee camp home when 10 family members were there. Ten were killed instantly, the youngest Nour Mo’in age 3. Others were injured, four critically. One subsequently died. Another had both legs amputated.

(8) On December 29, a bomb struck the al-’Absi family Yibna refugee camp home in Rafah while those in it were sleeping. Three children died instantly, the youngest Sidqi age 4. Their mother sustained critical injuries. Four other children were also injured.

(9) On January 17, a white phosphorous artillery shell struck the area around a Beit Lahiya school killing Bilal al-Ashqar (age 6) and Mohammed al-Ashqar (age 4). Two other family members were seriously injured. Their mother sustained critical head injuries and loss of her right hand. Her 19 year old daughter had her leg blown off. All were sheltering there at the time.

(10) On January 5, a projectile struck a house where the Abdul-Dayem family was attending a condolence ceremony. Those inside fled across the street and were struck by two tank shells containing flechettes. Three family members, including one child, were killed instantly. Two others, including a child, subsequently died of their injuries.

PCHR summarized the 23-day toll as follows:

“Alongside the 313 children killed by Israeli forces during (Operation Cast Lead), 1606 children were injured, with some sustaining horrific disabilities, head and spinal injuries, facial disfiguration, burns and amputation.”

Most were in their homes at the time. Others in shelters for their safety. Some of the injured couldn’t access medical care resulting in their permanent disability, infection, and for some their death. Even at hospitals, doctors were overwhelmed, under-resourced, and forced to deliver care under battlefield conditions.

The toll on parents and children was horrific, and some surviving adults face a lifelong task of caring for their permanently disabled offspring. Those who lost parents require help from relatives. The stench of death, injury, vast destruction, displacement, and Gaza still under siege pervades the Territory. The conflict’s psychological impact inflicted collective trauma — unrelieved and hardly noticed by Israel, America, the West, and most Arab states.

Children more than others suffer most and now experience “anger, sleeping difficulties, nightmares, avoidance of situations that are reminders of the trauma, impairment of concentration, and guilt” because they survived while others didn’t. Post Traumatic Stress Disorders (PTSD) approach epidemic levels, but fortunately Gaza’s Community Mental Health Programme (GCMHP) provides some of the best care of its kind in the Middle East. Years of conflict honed their skills.

After hostilities ended, they assessed the psychological damage on children and learned that the overwhelming majority personally witnessed traumatic events that could seriously impair their mental health. For example:

• 98% of children said they didn’t feel safe;
• 96% didn’t think they could protect themselves;
• 97% thought their families couldn’t protect them;
• 90% heard bombing;
• 89% saw homes destroyed from it;
• 65% were forced to evacuate their homes;
• 61% saw their neighbors’ homes bombed;
• 54% were either physically detained in their homes by soldiers or were trapped inside them during bombings and/or shellings; and
• 55% said they were told that one or more of their family members or relatives were killed.

Psychologist Hassan Ziyada said: “These children reported high levels of trauma and insecurity that will impact on the psychological and intellectual development….(They’re) suffering continual long-term trauma due to the psychological, social and economic effects of the recent offensive, the siege and closure of Gaza, and the internal political situation. This (attack) came at a very difficult time for all the people of Gaza, especially children, who were already suffering acute feelings of anxiety and powerlessness….Children in Gaza are continuing to exhibit long-term symptoms of hyperactivity, deterioration of their cognitive abilities, instrusive memories and hyper arousal and anxiety.”

Ziyada believes many children will develop long-term depression from the loss of loved ones and friends that contribute to a feeling of abandonment. He also said they’re experiencing physical body pain, headaches, stomach aches, insomnia and aggressive behavior.

In an appendix, PCHR listed all 313 children killed by name, gender, age, location, date of attack, and date of death. The youngest was one month old Al-Mu’tasim Bellah Mohammed Ibrahim al-Samouni. Also one month old Hala ‘Isam Ahmed al-Mnei’i. Israel expressed no regrets, neither did America.

While it cites patent expirations of blockbusters like Lipitor, Effexor and Plavix for falling earnings — “patient” expirations from Vioxx, Bextra, Premarin/Prempro, Vytorin, Avandia, Chantix, Ketek, Baycol and fen phen have helped.

Forty years of marketing the “diseases” of menopause and aging — Over 35? You Might Be At Risk for Menopause! — ended when hormone replacement therapy was found to cause not prevent the symptoms women feared.

A decade and a half of osteoporosis profits collapsed when bone drugs Fosamax, Boniva and Actonel were found to cause not prevent fractures and jaw bone death in some cases. Nor did it help that Boniva czar Sally Field allegedly broke a bone. Oops.

And speaking of causing not preventing, SSRI/SSNI antidepressants are linked to so many suicides — 660 in newspaper reports alone — the pharma founded and operated American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) is staging massive anti-suicide walks in June against an epidemic it largely created.

Even asthma inhalers are causing deaths they were supposed to prevent — nor are people rushing to inoculate their 11-year-old daughters with Gardisil. And let’s face it: the depression-with-pain and pain-with-depression fibromyaglia financial eddy can only last so long.

What’s a pharmaceutical industry in the middle of a recession with nothing in the pipeline but me-too drugs to do?

Say hello to monotherapy and treatment resistant conditions!

Expensive and dangerous drugs that don’t work are now said to not work as monotherapy. You need to add a second or third drug. Conditions that don’t respond to expensive and dangerous drugs (that don’t work) are now said to be treatment resistant — not conditions treated with the wrong drugs or assigned the wrong diagnoses.

“Monotherapy” and “treatment resistance” keep patients on their meds — including ones that fail as “monotherapy”–and insurers paying for them in the absence of any evidence they are working! (see: little light going out in the refrigerator.) They upsell patients who were on one med into increasingly common and perverse drug cocktails with several meds that require more drugs to treat the side effects. Best of all, they shift the emphasis from pharma’s failures to a patient’s “failures”: It’s not our drug that’s not working, it’s your treatment resistant condition! In other words, they’re a stimulus plan.

Of course even before the recession, pharma’s favorite payup was pediatric conditions covered by state disability tax dollars — also known as Claim Approved. No wonder pharma’s got new drug applications before the FDA for pediatric use of antipsychotics Seroquel, Geodon and Zyprexa this June. (Though judging from childhood diabetes cases in the US, the drugs are already in wide, off label use.)

But thanks to the recession, the pediatric diseases that surfaced when pharma debuted pills for them like social anxiety, passive-aggressive, oppositional-defiance and personality disorders now have “treatment resistant” varieties. Think children can’t have “treatment resistant” depression, ADHD, aggression, mania, anxiety and bipolar, obsessive compulsive and mood disorders because they’re too young? You haven’t been to clinicaltrials.gov lately.

And speaking of clinical trials, drugs are also being tested on children with schizophrenia — a condition that was rare in childhood until recently and the recession.

“Awareness of childhood-onset schizophrenia is rapidly increasing, with a more precise definition now available of the clinical picture and early signs, the outcome and the treatment strategies,” writes Gabriele Masi, MD, a Lilly funded doctor, in the journal CNS Drugs, lamenting the “hesitancy on the part of clinicians to make a diagnosis,” of schizophrenia.

Symptoms of childhood schizophrenia — “social deficits” and “delusions . . . related to childhood themes” — might look like symptoms of childhood itself (hello) but Zyprexa in conjunction with “social, scholastic, and familial interventions,” writes Masi — once called “bringing a kid up” — can turn the child around.

Of course Zyprexa has had a checkered past–at least as “monotherapy” — with manufacturer Lilly agreeing in April to pay the state of Georgia $6 million for hiding its diabetes, high blood sugar and excessive weight gain side effects in the latest in a string of damaging settlements. But in March it was granted a new lease on life when the FDA approved it in Lilly’s Zyprexa/Prozac combination drug, Symbyax, as the first treatment for adults with treatment resistant depression.

The April suicide of 7-year-old Gabriel Myers of Margate, FL who the Florida Department of Children & Families says was also prescribed Symbyax drew less attention.

Women fought for years to gain acceptance of the fact that many female health problems were real and not symptoms of hypochondria. The psycho-pharmaceutical cartel’s profit-driven invention of an epidemic of pregnancy-related mental disorders will wipe out a century of work toward that acceptance.

Sadly, the end result of this latest marketing scheme will be that the relatively few women who truly do suffer from postpartum depression will not be taken seriously.

The Mother’s Act legislation has already passed in the US House of Representatives. A majority vote in the Senate would represent a major coup for a multi-billion dollar industry.

“Like many of the acts of Congress, the real beneficiary will not be the mothers and their children but the “mental health” workers who will be handsomely paid and the drug companies that are behind this legislation,” says Steve Hayes, the director of he Novus Medical Detox Center, in the center’s July 31, 2008 newsletter.

“The drug store chains will expand more because more people will be hooked on these dangerous drugs,” he points out.

“Doctor’s offices will be more crowded because we know that these dangerous drugs often lead to serious health side effects that will require medical treatment,” he writes.

The advocacy groups battling against passage of the Mother’s Act are nearly equal in number to the Act’s supporters, and include Unite for Life, AbleChild, the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology; Alliance for Human Research Protection; International Coalition For Drug Awareness; Law Project for Psychiatric Rights, Mindfreedom International, and the Citizens Commission on Human Rights.

Same Old Song and Dance

The Mother’s Act technique has been used again and again in this country. A new sub-group of people is identified as not receiving enough treatment for mental disorders and the drug makers funnel money to front groups to fund the disease marketing campaign and set up screening programs.

The internet is now flooded with reports about the rise in pregnancy related disorders and the places to find treatment. Websites with names like “Postpartum Progress” and “PerinatalPro,” provide links to programs that claim women need screening for postpartum depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, anxiety disorder, panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post traumatic stress disorder, and eating disorders.

However, nowhere to be found, are reports about the sub-groups targeted in the past and all the depressed and anxious patients who became mentally healthy as a result of being screened and treated.

Dr David Cohen, a professor of Social Work at Florida International University and co-author with Dr Peter Breggin of the book, Your Drug May Be Your Problem, gave a keynote address titled, “Needed: Critical Thinking About Psychiatric Medications,” at the International Conference on Social Work in Health and Mental Health, in Quebec City, Canada in May 2004, and noted the following:

For the past 50 years, physicians in the West have been prescribing psychotropic drugs systematically to hundreds of millions of people to alter undesirable and disruptive emotions and behavior.”

“For the treatment of every single psychological affliction in men and women, in all ethnic groups, from the toddler to the aged, taking psychotropic drugs is now the cornerstone remedy, all other efforts secondary.”

“Despite the reliance on psychopharmaceuticals, however, not even modest improvements in the incidence, prevalence, relapse rate, duration, or long-term outcome of any condition routinely treated today with psychotropics, such as depression and schizophrenia, can be discerned.

Childbearing Years Represent Huge Market

Childbearing years cover women from roughly sixteen to fifty and the Mother’s Act proves the drug makers will go to any lengths to hold onto this market.

“The labels for antidepressants warn of the increased risk of SSRI-induced suicidality in youth and young adults, the women most likely to become pregnant,” Dr Breggin, author of the new book, Medication Madness, points out. “So the drugs not only threaten to cause the death of the mother through suicide but the death of the child through lethal birth defects as well,” he advises.

“The exposed fetus is at risk for a variety of potentially serious disorders, from cardiovascular anomalies to withdrawal symptoms at birth,” Dr Breggin warns.

“If pregnant women feel anxious or sad,” he says, “they should seek counseling or family therapy with the child’s father involved, along with other sources of emotional support.”

In February, with little to no fanfare, the FDA said it was once again evaluating the risk of birth defects of SSRI and SNRI antidepressants due to the number of adverse event reports.

Pregnant women and nursing mothers are rarely told that antidepressants take anywhere from three to six weeks to work, if they work at all. “We know that the natural history of depression means that many patients will improve within weeks whether treated or not,” says Dr David Healy, author of Let Them Eat Prozac.

“The overwhelming majority of women who are prescribed antidepressants are at little or no risk for suicide or other adverse outcomes from their nervous state,” he points out

“Treatment runs the risk of stigmatizing the person,” he says, “as well as giving them problems that they didn’t have to being with.”

“Only one in ten women will likely have a true response to an antidepressant even if they are depressed, so nine women will be subject to the risks for the one who might benefit,” he states.

According to Jonathan Leo, an Associate Professor at Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee, whose website, Chemical Imbalance is focused on debunking the “chemical imbalance” in the brain myth, the public health argument goes something like this:

“Helping one out of every ten does not sound very good but if you give the medications to 10 million people then you are helping one million.”

“This may be of little consolation to the nine million people exposed to potential side-effects,” he points out.

In December 2008, the FDA announced that anticonvulsants, widely prescribed as “mood” stabilizers, would now carry a warning about an increased risk of suicidality. They are also known to cause serious birth defects.

New Best Sellers — Atypical Antipsychotics

For a decade and a half, the new antidepressants were not only the best selling psychiatric drugs in the US, they became the top selling class of medications.

However, in 2008, antipsychotic revenues, at more than $14 billion, topped all other classes of drugs in the US, surpassing even cholesterol medications. The rest of the world apparently has not gone mad because the US accounted for over $3 billion of the close to $4.5 billion of worldwide sales of Seroquel, the fifth top selling drug in the US last year.

Anticonvulsants were the fourth class of drugs in terms of revenue, with over $11 billion in sales. Antidepressants held the fifth position, earning their makers more than $9.5 billion in 2008.

Like the SSRIs before them, the atypical antipsychotics are now prescribed off-label for everything from mild depression to anxiety to sleep problems to PTSD and ADHD, and for one reason. They are the biggest money-makers. The prices at a middle dose as of April 2009 on DrugStore.com were: Abilify 90 tablets $1230, Geodon 100 capsules $787, Invega 100 tablets $1168, Risperdal 90 tablets $716, Seroquel 100 tablets $839, and Zyprexa 90 tablets $1195.

The drugs were originally approved only to treat schizophrenia and later the manic episodes in patients with bipolar disorder. The National Institute of Health estimates that schizophrenia effects 2.4 million adults in any given year and 5.6 million adults have bipolar disorder.

“The story’s pretty clear, and pretty embarrassing for the profession of psychiatry, which has allowed itself to be led by marketing,” Dr Robert Rosenheck, a psychiatrist at Yale who has studied the expanded use and effectiveness of the atypical antipsychotics, told the LA Times on April 13, 2009.

“We know now what these companies’ strategies are: The number of people with schizophrenia is limited, so the road to profitability goes through soccer moms. They need to market these drugs to ordinary people who have dissatisfactions in life,” he said.

Antipsychotics come with serious side effects, some of them lethal. “The atypicals can cause a severe metabolic syndrome consisting of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular problems,” according to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania psychiatrist, Dr Stefan Kruszewski.

Diabetes is a major cause of vascular disease and the number one cause of adult blindness, end-stage kidney disease and non-traumatic amputations, according to a 2006 report by the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors.

“The atypicals have some of the same neurological side effects as SSRIs,” Dr Kruszewski says. “They also cause tardive dyskinesia, an often irreversible movement disorder.”

“Tardive dyskinesia looks so “strange” or “bizarre,” that it is often mistaken for a mental illness rather than a neurological disorder,” Dr Breggin reports.

“One variety,” he explains, “involves painful spasms of muscles that can literally torture the victim, and another involves an agonizing inner agitation that drives people to move their arms or legs, or to pace.”

“In some cases, the severe pain of tardive dyskinesia causes patients to become exhausted and ultimately disabled,” he reports.

“Tardive dyskinesia occurs at a cumulative rate of 4-7% per year in otherwise healthy patients treated with antipsychotics,” Dr Breggin says. “After taking the drugs for only a few years, 20% or more will be afflicted and older patient have an even higher risk.”

Helpless Children Harmed

There is no way to predict the adverse effects on the organs and bodies of children who receive psychiatric drugs filtered through pregnant and nursing mothers.

A study in the February 2004 journal Pediatrics reported abnormal sleep patterns, heart rhythms, and levels of alertness in babies exposed to SSRIs in the womb. The lead author, Dr. Philip Zeskind, told the Sunday Telegraph: “What we’ve found is that SSRIs disrupt the neurological systems of children, and that this is more than just a possibility, and we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of babies being exposed to these drugs during pregnancy.”

“These babies are bathed in serotonin during a key period of their development and we really don’t know what it’s doing to them or what the long-term effects might be,” he warned.

A year and a half later, Christine K sat in a neonatal intensive care unit and watched and waited as her baby lie in an incubator with tubes and needles stuck all over his body for four days.

After a single bout of psychosis following a traumatic event in her life, a psychiatrist labeled Christine schizophrenic and kept her on Paxil, Risperdal and Depakote for five years. When she became pregnant, the shrink told her the drugs were safe for the fetus. In fact, she insisted that Christine keep taking them even when she asked to go off the concoction six months into her pregnancy after reading that Paxil could harm her baby.

After looking up more information on the internet, Christine decided to wean herself off the drugs in her seventh month against doctors’ advice. However, when she tried to explain that she quit taking the medications long before the infant was born, Christine was informed that he would still have to remain in intensive care due to the fact that he had been exposed to the drugs in the womb early on.

For the first two years of life, the baby would not sleep for any length of time — waking up every two or three hours. For the first three months, his whole body would jump at the least little sound even when he was asleep. He could not suck hard enough to nurse and resisted bottles. For the first year, he required hours of feeding attempts each day to make sure he received enough formula.

He was three last October and still has a strong aversion to eating — “including cake, cookies and all the things kids will normally eat even if nothing else,” his mother says.

“He was well over 2-years-old before he started sleeping through the night,” she reports.

In addition to the extra hospital costs for intensive care, “in the first three years of his life, this child has needed more medical care and doctor’s appointments than my other three children combined,” Christine reports.

In this case, the problems were nondescript. Doctors do not know enough about the effects of psychiatric drugs on the developing fetus to know if or how to treat them. “All I can do is watch and wait and hope they resolve on their own,” she says.

Christine is by no means a supporter of the Mother’s Act. She was scared and worried for a year after her son came home from the hospital but not from postpartum depression, she says. “It was mostly guilt and fear over what the drugs may have done to my baby.”

Drugged into Madness

The drugging cycle with women often starts with a loose diagnosis of postpartum depression. “My daughter was one of those poor souls prescribed an antidepressant for a “possible” case of mild postpartum depression with no warning about the adverse effects of the drug,” says Marcia Christensen of Australia.

“This caused a devastating cascade of events with further prescribing of multiple classes of antidepressants, atypical antipsychotics, Lithium and electro-convulsive therapy,” Marcia recalls.

“She made several attempts on her own life, developed type I diabetes and had her liberty denied over a 3 year period,” Marcia recounts.

Her daughter, Rebekah Beddoe, has documented the family’s ordeal in the book Dying for a Cure, in which she describes her decline from an ambitious, successful career women to a chronic mental patient as a result of being diagnosed with postpartum depression.

After a kick-off with Zoloft, Rebekah was on six different drugs within two years, diagnosed with a myriad of different disorders and feeling like a psychiatric hospital might be her permanent home. Electric shock treatment came in the midst of numerous suicide attempts.

She credits a BBC documentary on SSRIs with saving her life because she immediately recognized that the bizarre behaviors began shortly after she took the first drug. Rebecca decided they had to go and gradually weaned off each medication one by one. It took her 9 months to get off the antidepressant because the withdrawal problems were so severe.

Rebecca and Christine are not rare cases. Mixtures of antipsychotics, antidepressants and anticonvulsants, now used as “mood” stabilizers, are regularly prescribed for the all “anxiety” and “mood” disorders sought to be marketed via the Mother’s Act. Drug cocktails represent dollar signs. A woman like Christine, taking Depakote, Paxil and Risperdal, can easily ring up over $15,000 a year for the drug makers alone in the US.

The doctors make out like bandits as well. “Psychiatry has increasingly replaced psychotherapy with something called “medication management,” which largely consists of symptom assessment and prescription updates,” Dr. Bruce Levine, author of, “Surviving American’s Depression Epidemic,” reports in the August 13, 2008 Huffington Post.

“Medication management typically takes ten or fifteen minutes and is scheduled every two to three months,” he explains.

While psychiatrists bill about half as much as they do for a psychotherapy hour, they can conduct a minimum of four sessions for every one psychotherapy session, he says.

Many psychiatrists do five- or ten-minute sessions, so they can complete five or six in the same hour that it would take to do a psychotherapy therapy session, including preparation and note writing, Dr Levine reports.

“The bottom line,” he says, “is that psychiatrists who offer only medication management routinely make nearly triple the income as do psychiatrists who provide mostly psychotherapy.”

* Article sponsored by the Houston law firm of Vickery, Waldner & Mallia

Meeting the students is a continual source of inspiration, as so many apply themselves to their studies with cheerful determination in spite of difficult family circumstances and almost insurmountable obstacles put in their way by the Occupation. So I enjoy the newsletters the Brothers regularly send me.

Their latest includes the heart-rending story of a young girl, Merna, an honors student in her final year majoring in English. For most people studying for a degree is tough enough, but this youngster also has to battle against armed intruders who invade her home and have systematically destroyed her family life.

Merna is described by the Brothers as “a joyful and engaging person, full of life and love”. The tragedy is that Israeli soldiers frequently rampage through her refugee camp in the middle of the night and have taken away her loved ones, one by one. From childhood Merna remembers the constant night raids and soldiers randomly searching Palestinian homes, ransacking their contents and arbitrarily arresting residents. She remembers, too, her home being bombarded with missiles fired from Gilo, an illegal Israeli settlement outside Bethlehem.

Merna in Azzeh Camp where she lives. The bright smile hides a steely determination.

Merna’s family, like thousands of others, became refugees when their village was attacked by Jewish terrorist forces in 1948. The villagers were forced to flee to a camp in Bethlehem where they remain to this day, unable to return to their old homes.

In 2003 her 14-year-old cousin and best friend was shot dead by an Israeli sniper while sitting outside her family home during a curfew.

In 2004, the Israelis arrested her eldest brother, a 22 year-old artist who designed posters and banners for university student groups. They accused him of taking part in student political activities, which can mean anything from running for student council to organizing speaking events, and for this he spent 4 years in prison.

In 2007, they came back for Merna’s 18-year-old brother. He is still incarcerated under ‘administrative detention’, which means he hasn’t been charged or sentenced for any crime because the Israeli military claims to have secret evidence, which only a military judge can see. The Israelis use this device to lock up Palestinians — mostly students — for up to 6 months, to be renewed if the mood takes them. Merna’s 19 year-old cousin is also in prison waiting to be charged with a ‘crime’.

Then a few months ago the military came again, this time to take her youngest brother. Merna was in despair. He had only just turned 16. “As he was being taken away, he told us to take care of ourselves,” said Merna, her eyes brimming with tears. “He’s my little brother! He is the one who needs taking care of. What is he doing in an awful prison cell and how are his spirits?”

Israeli military law treats Palestinians as adults as soon as they reach 16 — a flagrant violation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Israeli youngsters of course are regarded as children until 18.

Sleepless and tearful, Merna nevertheless went to university next day as usual, determined not to let this latest blow upset her future plans. Even if her brothers had been robbed of an education, Merna would still fight for hers.

A fellow student recalls than when chatting to Merna online in the evenings, she often had to leave the computer because the military had barged into her home. But she always came to school the next day, even if she’d been up all night while Israeli soldiers trashed her house and questioned her family.

“Coming to school is a way of getting away from what is happening in the refugee camp,” says Merna. “It’s like an oasis here for me.” But her thoughts are never far from her cousin and brothers. “I only wish they were allowed this opportunity.”

She is now a senior member of the Bethlehem University Student Ambassadors Programme and an example to fellow classmates, say the Brothers. She hopes to pursue post-graduate studies abroad and return to the University to give back to the community some of the support it has offered her.

To get to Bethlehem University many students have to cross two or more checkpoints, “Sometimes they take our ID cards and they spend ages writing down all the details, just to make us late,” said one. Students are often made to remove shoes, belt and bags. “It’s like an airport. Many times we are kept waiting outside for up to an hour, rain or shine, they don’t care.” But the worst thing is the humiliation. The soldiers attempt to forcibly remove students’ clothes or they swear and shout sexual slurs at female students.

One of the girls, who has attended university for four years, tells how she’s been sexually harassed on the journey, had tear gas thrown at her near checkpoints and been refused crossing. “Sometimes I can’t concentrate in class because I am worried what the Israelis will do on my way home.” According to one of the professors these are the more insidious consequence of the checkpoints. Over the years they have noticed a dramatic decline in student motivation and concentration. “When you are constantly facing this sort of humiliation, your feelings toward yourself change and you feel worthless.”

Israel brags about its “independent” justice system. Here we see it at work. ‘Administrative detention’ is a particularly vile and unjust practice. In any respectable country detainees are charged with a recognizable offence and tried in a suitable court of law in accordance with internationally accepted standards for fair trial. If there’s insufficient evidence they are immediately released.

But Palestinians are dealt with by Israeli military courts, even when it’s a civil matter. These courts ignore international laws and conventions, so there’s no legal protection for individuals under Israeli military occupation. And as detention is based on secret information, which neither the detainee nor his lawyer is allowed to see, it is impossible to mount a proper defence. Besides, the Security Service always finds a bogus excuse to keep detainees locked up “in the greater interest of the security of Israel”.

They are not informed of the reasons for their arrest, even after release. The detention period of 6 months is renewable indefinitely by a military judge. Although detainees have the right to review and appeal, they are unable to challenge the evidence and check facts as all information presented to the Court is classified. The justice process is therefore a mockery.

Now, I hear, the Israeli cabinet has voted to clamp down on ‘political’ prisoner rights and make life even more miserable, even to the extent of denying them the chance to take high school exams or university correspondence courses. This is to put pressure on Hamas to release their captive, the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, a trained killer belonging to the tank corps. In the meantime Israel holds some 11,000 Palestinians captive, including a number of women and children, but there is no orchestrated international chorus of voices pleading for their release.

Israel disregards Geneva Conventions with impunity and violates international law and its agreements with the EU, but is never held to account. The regime even resorts to placing legitimately elected members of the Palestinian Legislative Council under administrative detention. One can only conclude that world leaders are not committed to defending human rights and the endless words on the subject are no more than hot air.

So young minds like Merna’s must continue to persevere against the odds. Though greatly distracted by the cruel fate of her close family, the ordeal has forged a steely resolve, and the purposeful way she lives her university life, say the Brothers, has given her added strength and confidence. Merna has managed to turn the tables on adversity. Her loss is actually her gain.

What a remarkable young lady.

Diana Block’s recently published book Arm the Spirit: A Woman’s Journey Underground and Back is the personal tale of one such supporter. A white North American women involved in the feminist, lesbian and gay rights and new left movements in the United States of the 1970s primarily as a member of the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee (PFOC), Ms. Block joined forces with other white North Americans to support the endeavors of the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN ) in its endeavor to free Puerto Rico. Her support resulted in several years underground as the result of her partner’s entrapment in an FBI sting operation. The tale she tells in these pages is the story of those years and the decisions and circumstances that brought her to them. It is also the story of her family’s lives underground. For those who were involved in or at least paid attention to the left in the 1970s and 1980s there will be descriptions of moments that jog the memory. For those that didn’t, this will open their eyes to the reality that existed within Ronald Reagan’s morning in America.

This is a very political book. It is also a very personal book. It is about lives determined as much by one’s political beliefs as they are by personal emotions and about the juncture between the two. It is about very political people in an apolitical time. Many of those who had been involved in the antiwar and antiracist moments of the 1960s and 1970s were moving their lives into more conventional arenas that involved making money and buying things. Others, meanwhile, had drifted deeper into the life of the street and poverty, leaving their political personas behind in the daily struggle to survive. Meanwhile, the men and women involved in leftist groups like Prairie Fire Organizing Committee were existing on the fringes of US society trying to figure out how to maintain a political relevance. It may have been that existence on the outside that colored the decisions they made: going underground when they maybe should have involved themselves in a more public type of organizing; adopting immovable positions that alienated them from other groups with similar agendas, to name a couple such decisions.

Block’s memories of that period are consistently evocative and occasionally emotionally wrenching, compelling the reader to stay glued to the text. Her reflections on the thoughts about how the decisions made by her and her partner Claude Marks affected the lives of their children and families reveal caring and thoughtful parents whose politics are motivated by a love as deep as the love they have for those closest to them. They also provide an insight into the difficulties involved in living a life of resistance inside the belly of the imperial beast that is the United States. To put it succinctly, it is safe to say that Arm the Spirit is about the multitude of forms love takes: familial, romantic, comradely and revolutionary. It is also about the difficulties we face trying to meet the ideals these loves represent, especially when they come into conflict with one another.

Besides the aforementioned political and emotional realities revealed in this book, there are the descriptions of daily life on the run. Periods of normalcy when you and your family are as normal as the neighbors next door interrupted by days and weeks of uncertainty tinged with fear after your picture makes the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted. Joy and tears as you wrestle with how much information you should share with your maturing child.

Genuine friendships made under assumed names that must be broken when the presence of the law gets too near. The frustrations felt because your political self can not speak out when the Empire attacks for fear you will be recognized and taken away in chains. The decision to finally give up your underground status and face the courts. The period of adjustment to once again using your family name and living as the person you couldn’t be while underground.

Politically, Block’s experiences as a revolutionary and a woman lead her to a conclusion perhaps best expressed by the writer and revolutionary Margaret Randall: that the inability of almost all twentieth-century revolutionary movements to develop a feminist agenda contributed to their failure to evolve new and equitable forms of power sharing that might have helped keep them alive. The period of adjustment mentioned in the previous paragraph provokes some other interesting observations by Block. Foremost among them are her observations regarding the changes in the progressive movement in the 1970s and the movement today, especially her remarks that much of the work formerly done by organizations with no financial portfolio now being done by what she calls the nonprofit industrial complex.

The shortcomings of this movement are even more apparent today as funding for these nonprofits dries up in the wake of the economic shocks throughout the capitalist world. This factor doesn’t even touch the political timidity of many of today’s organizations–a timidity certainly influenced by their need to gather money from beneficiaries of the very system whose excesses and wrongs they hope to remedy.

One other insightful observation is that, despite the multitude of single issue movements and organizations, many of the groups and individuals involved have no underlying philosophy to bind these issues together and present a systemic analysis that would propel the struggle for economic and social justice forward. Although Block does not examine this much further, it is clear that she sees the need to develop and provide that analysis as part of the role of her and others involved in the struggles of the latter half of the twentieth century. After all, the fundamentals of that analysis are the same as those the left has always referred to. The economic crisis of capitalism and the wars of Washington make that clear.

Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan sent children to jail for offenses so trivial that some of them weren’t even crimes. A 15-year-old called Hillary Transue got three months for creating a spoof web page ridiculing her school’s assistant principal. Mr. Ciavarella sent Shane Bly, then 13, to boot camp for trespassing in a vacant building. He gave 14- year-old, Jamie Quinn, 11 months in prison for slapping a friend during an argument, after the friend slapped her. The judges were paid $2.6 million by companies belonging to the Mid Atlantic Youth Services Corp for helping to fill its jails.¹ This is what happens when public services are run for profit.

It’s an extreme example, but it hints at the wider consequences of the trade in human lives created by private prisons. In the US and the UK they have a powerful incentive to ensure that the number of prisoners keeps rising.

The United States is more corrupt than the UK, but it is also more transparent. There the lobbyists demanding and receiving changes to judicial policy might be exposed, and corrupt officials identified and prosecuted. The UK, with a strong tradition of official secrecy and a weak tradition of scrutiny and investigative journalism, has no such safeguards.

The corrupt judges were paid by the private prisons not only to increase the number of child convicts but also to shut down a competing prison run by the public sector. Taking bribes to bang up kids might be novel; shutting public facilities to help private companies happens — on both sides of the water — all the time.

The Wall Street Journal has shown how, as a result of lobbying by the operators, private jails in Mississippi and California are being paid for non-existent prisoners.² The prison corporations have been guaranteed a certain number of inmates. If the courts fail to produce enough convicts, they get their money anyway. This outrages taxpayers in both states, which have cut essential public services to raise these funds. But there is a simple means of resolving this problem: you replace ghost inmates with real ones. As the Journal, seldom associated with raging anti-capitalism, observes, “prison expansion [has] spawned a new set of vested interests with stakes in keeping prisons full and in building more. . . . The result has been a financial and political bazaar, with convicts in stripes as the prize.”³

Even as crime declines, lawmakers are pressed by their sponsors to increase the rate of imprisonment. The US has, by a very long way, the world’s highest proportion of people behind bars: 756 prisoners per 100,000 people, or just over 1% of the adult population.⁴ Similarly wealthy countries have around one-tenth of this rate of imprisonment.

Like most of its really bad ideas, the last Conservative government imported private jails from the US. As Stephen Nathan, author of a forthcoming book about prison privatization in the UK, has shown, the notion was promoted by the Select Committee on Home Affairs, which in 1986 visited prisons run by the Corrections Corporation of America. When the corporation told them that private provision in the US improved prison standards and delivered good value for money, the committee members failed to check its claims. They recommended that the government should put the construction and management of prisons out to tender “as an experiment.”⁵

Encouraged by the committee’s report, the Corrections Corporation of America set up a consortium in Britain with two Conservative party donors, Sir Robert McAlpine Ltd and John Mowlem & Co, to promote privately financed prisons over here. The first privately-run prison in the UK, Wolds, was opened by the Danish security company Group 4 in 1992. In 1993, before it had had a chance to evaluate this experiment, the government announced that all new prisons would be built and run by private companies.

The Labour party, then in opposition, was outraged. John Prescott promised that, “Labour will take back private prisons into public ownership — it is the only safe way forward.”⁶ Jack Straw stated that, “it is not appropriate for people to profit out of incarceration. This is surely one area where a free market certainly does not exist.” He too promised to “bring these prisons into proper public control and run them directly as public services.”⁷

But during his first seven weeks in office, Jack Straw renewed one private prison contract and launched two new ones. A year later he announced that all new prisons in England and Wales would be built and run by private companies, under the private finance initiative (PFI). Today the UK has a higher proportion of prisoners in private institutions than the US.⁸ This is the only country in Europe whose jails are run on this model.

So has prison privatization here influenced judicial policy? As we discovered during the recent lobbying scandal in the House of Lords, there’s no way of knowing. Unlike civilized nations, the UK has no register of lobbyists; we are not even entitled to know which lobbyists ministers have met.⁹ But there are some clues. The former home secretary, John Reid, previously in charge of prison provision, has become a consultant to the private prison operator G4S.¹⁰ The government is intending to commission a series of massive Titan jails under PFI. Most experts on prisons expect them to be disastrous, taking inmates further away from their families (which reduces the chances of rehabilitation) and creating vast warrens in which all the social diseases of imprisonment will fester. Only two groups want them built: ministers and the prison companies: they offer excellent opportunities to rack up profits. And the very nature of PFI, which commits the government to paying for services for 25 or 30 years whether or not they are still required creates a major incentive to ensure that prison numbers don’t fall. The beast must be fed.

And there’s another line of possible evidence. In the two countries whose economies most resemble the UK’s — Germany and France — the prison population has risen quite slowly. France has 96 inmates per 100,000 people, an increase of 14% since 1992. Germany has 89 prisoners per 100,000: 25% more than in 1992 but 9% less than in 2001. But the UK now locks up 151 out of every 100,000 inhabitants: 73% more than in 1992 and 20% more than in 2001. Yes our politicians have barely come down from the trees, yes we are still governed out of the offices of the Daily Mail, but it would be foolish to dismiss the likely influence of the private prison industry.

This revolting trade in human lives creates a permanent incentive to lock people up; not because prison works; not because it makes us safer, but because it makes money. Privatization appears to have locked this country into mass imprisonment.

1. Amy Goodman, “How Two Former PA Judges Got Millions in Kickbacks to Send Juveniles to Private Prisons,” Democracy Now!, 17th February 2009; “Bad judges: the lowest of the low,” The Economist, 26th February 2009; Stephanie Chen, “Pennsylvania rocked by ‘jailing kids for cash’ scandal,” CNN, February 24, 2009.
2. Bryan Gruley, “Prison Building Spree Creates Glut of Lockups,” Wall Street Journal, September 6, 2001; Joseph T. Hallinan, “Going Backwards,” Wall Street Journal, November 6, 2001.
3. Bryan Gruley, ibid.
4. The total prison population at the end of 2007 (see above) was 2,293,157. The most recent figure for the adult population I can find — 217.8 million — was produced by the US Census Bureau in 2004.
5. Stephen Nathan, 2003. Prison Privatization in the United Kingdom. Published in Capitalist Punishment: Prison Privatization & Human Rights. Clarity Press, Inc., Atlanta.
6. John Prescott, 1994, quoted by Stephen Nathan, ibid.
7. Jack Straw, 8th March 1995, quoted by Stephen Nathan, ibid.
8. 7.2% in the US, 11% in the UK.
9. The Committee on Standards in Public Life, cited by the House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee, 5th January 2009. Lobbying: Access and influence in Whitehall. Volume I, para 187.
10. ”G4S Appoints John Reid As Group Consultant,” Security Oracle, 18th December 2008.

I was looking for a specific image, one that would humanize Palestinians as living, breathing human beings, neither masked nor mutilated. But to no avail.

All the photos I received spoke of the reality that is Gaza today – homes, schools and civilian infrastructure bombed beyond description. All the faces were either of dead or dying people.

I paused as I reached a horrifying photo in the slideshow of a young boy and his sister huddled on a single hospital trolley waiting to be identified and buried. Their faces were darkened as if they were charcoal and their lifeless eyes were still widened with the horror that they experienced as they were burned slowly by a white phosphorus shell.

It was just then that Sammy walked into my room snooping around for a missing toy. “What is this, daddy?” he inquired.

I rushed to click past the horrific image, only to find myself introducing a no less shocking one. Fretfully, I turned the monitor off, then turned to my son as he stood puzzled. His eyes sparkled inquisitively as he tried to make sense of what he had just seen.

He needed to know about these kids whose little bodies had been burned beyond recognition.

“Where are their mummies and daddies? Why are they all so smoky all the time?”

I explained to him that they are Palestinians, that they were hurting “just a little” and that their “mummies and daddies will be right back.”

The reality is that these children and thousands like them in Gaza have experienced the most profound pain, a pain that we may never in our lives comprehend.

“I think that Gaza is now being used as a test laboratory for new weapons,” Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian doctor who had recently returned from Gaza told reporters in Oslo.

“This is a new generation of very powerful small explosives that detonates with extreme power and dissipates its power within a range of five to 10 meters

“We have not seen the casualties affected directly by the bomb, because they are normally torn to pieces and do not survive, but we have seen a number of very brutal amputations.”

The dreadful weapons are known as dense inert metal explosives (DIME), “an experimental kind of explosive” but only one of several new weapons that Israel has been using in Gaza, the world’s most densely populated regions.

Israel could not possibly have found a better place to experiment with DIME or the use of white phosphorus in civilian areas than Gaza.

The hapless inhabitants of the Strip have been disowned. The power of the media, political coercion, intimidation and manipulation have demonized this imprisoned nation fighting for its life in the tiny spaces left of its land.

No wonder Israel refused to allow foreign journalists into the tiny enclave and brazenly bombed the remaining international presence in Gaza.

As long as there are no witnesses to the war crimes committed in Gaza, Israel is confident that it can sell a fabricated story to the world that it is, as always, the victim, one that has been terrorized and, strangely enough, demonized as well.

The Jerusalem Post quoted Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni on January 15.

“Livni said that these were hard times for Israel, but that the government was forced to act in Gaza in order to protect Israeli citizens.

“She stated that Gaza was ruled by a terrorist regime and that Israel must carry on a dialogue with moderate sources while simultaneously fighting terror.”

The same peculiar message was conveyed by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as he declared his one-sided ceasefire on January 17.

Never mind that the “terrorist regime” was democratically elected and had honored a ceasefire agreement with Israel for six months, receiving nothing in return but a lethal siege interrupted by an occasional round of death and destruction.

Livni is not as perceptive and shrewd as the US media fantasizes. Blunt-speaking Ehud Barak and stiff-faced Mark Regev are not convincing men of wisdom. Their logic is bizarre and wouldn’t stand the test of reason.

But they have unfettered access to the media, where they are hardly challenged by journalists who know well that protecting one’s citizens doesn’t require the violation of international and humanitarian laws, targeting medical workers, sniper fire at children and demolishing homes with entire families holed up inside. Securing your borders doesn’t require imprisoning and starving your neighbors and turning their homes to smoking heaps of rubble.

Olmert wants to “break the will” of Hamas, i.e. the Palestinians, since the Hamas government was elected and backed by the majority of the Palestinian people

Isn’t 60 years of suffering and survival enough to convince Olmert that the will of the Palestinians cannot be broken? How many heaps of wreckage and mutilated bodies will be enough to convince the prime minister that those who fight for their freedom will either be free or will die trying?

Far-right politician Avigdor Lieberman, a rising star in Israel, is not yet convinced. He thinks that more can be done to “secure” his country, which was established in 1948 on the ruins of destroyed Palestinian towns and villages. He has a plan.

“We must continue to fight Hamas just like the United States did with the Japanese in World War II,” said the head of ultra-nationalist opposition party Yisrael Beitenu.

A selective reader of history, Lieberman could only think of the 1945 atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. But something else happened during those years that Lieberman carefully omitted. It’s called the Holocaust, a term that many are increasingly using to describe the Israeli massacres in the Gaza Strip.

It is strange that conventional Israeli wisdom still dictates that “the Arabs understand only the language of force.” If that were true, then they would have conceded their rights after the first massacre in 1948. But, following more than 60 years filled with massacres new and old, they continue to resist.

“Freedom or death,” is the popular Palestinian mantra. These are not simply words, but a rule by which Palestinians live and die. Gaza is the proof and Israeli leaders are yet to understand.

My son persisted. “Why are Palestinians so smoky all the time, Daddy?”

“When you grow up, you’ll understand.”

Aside from its sheer barbarism, this chant reflects the widespread belief among Israeli Jews that Israel scored an impressive victory in Gaza — a victory measured, not least, by the death toll.

Israeli pilots and tank commanders could not really discriminate between the adults and the children who hid in their homes or huddled in the UNRWA shelters, and yet they chose to press the trigger. Therefore, it is not at all surprising that the lethal onslaught left 1,314 Palestinians dead, of which 412 — or nearly one third of all of the casualties — were children.

This latest assault underscores that Israel, not unlike Hamas, readily resorts to violence and does not distinguish between civilians and combatants (only the weapons at Israel’s disposal are much more lethal). No matter how many times the Israeli government tries to blame Hamas for the latest Palestinian civilian deaths it simply cannot explain away the body count, especially that of the children. In addition to the dead, 1,855 Palestinian children were wounded, and tens of thousands of others have likely been traumatized, many of them for life.

Every child has a story. A Bedouin friend recently called to tell us about his relatives in Gaza. One cousin allowed her five-year-old daughter to walk to the adjacent house to see whether the neighbors had something left to eat. The girl had been crying from hunger. The moment she began crossing the street a missile exploded nearby and the flying shrapnel killed her. The mother has since been bedridden, weeping and screaming, “I have let my girl die hungry.”

As if the bloody incursion was not enough, the Israeli security forces seem to be keen on spreading the flames of hatred among the Arab population within Israel. Hundreds of Palestinian citizens of Israel have been arrested for protesting at the Israeli assault and more than 200 of them are still in custody. One incident is enough to illustrate the psychological effect these arrests will likely have on hundreds more children.

A few days after the ceasefire, several men wearing black ski masks stormed the home of Muhammad Abu Humus. They came to arrest him for protesting against the killings in Gaza. It was four in the morning and the whole family was asleep when the men banged on the door. After entering the house, they made Abu Humus’s wife Wafa and their four children Erfat (12), Shahd (9), Anas (6) and Majd (3) stand in a corner as they searched the house, throwing all the clothes, sheets, toys, and kitchenware on the floor. With tears in their eyes, the children watched as the armed men then took their father away and left.

Chance would have it that Abu Humus, a long-time peace activist and member of the Fatah party, is a personal friend of ours. In 2001, he joined Ta’ayush Arab-Jewish Partnership, and since then has selflessly organized countless peace rallies and other joint activities. During the past eight years, we have spent many hours at each other’s homes and our children have grown up respecting and liking one other. It is hard to believe that just one month ago he attended the Bar Mitzvah of Yigal’s son in a Jerusalem synagogue.

Muhammad and Wafa Abu Humus have tried over the years to instill in their children a love and desire for peace, and while the security forces may not have destroyed this, the hatred they have generated in one night cannot be underestimated. Indeed, what, one might ask, will his children think of their Jewish neighbors? What feelings will they harbor? And what can we expect from those children in Gaza who have witnessed the killing of their parents, siblings, friends and neighbors?

We emphasize the Palestinian children because so many of them have been killed and terrorized in the past month. Yet it is clear that Israeli children are suffering as well, particularly those who have spent long periods in shelters for fear of being hit by rockets.

The one message that is being conveyed to children on both sides of this fray is that the other side is a bloodthirsty monster. In Israel, this was instantly translated into gains for the hate-mongering Yisrael Beytenu party headed by the xenophobic Avigdor Lieberman, who is now the front-runner in mock polls being held in many Jewish high schools, with the hawkish Binyamin Netanyahu coming in second.

Hatred, in other words, is the great winner of this war. It has helped mobilize racist mobs, and as the soccer chant indicates it has left absolutely no place for the other, undermining even basic empathy for innocent children. Israel’s masters of war must be happy: the seeds of the next wars have certainly been sown.

This is a transcript of a December 22, 2008 Bruce Dixon interview with longtime Chicago educator and activist George Schmidt broadcast on WRFG 89.3 FM Atlanta.

Bruce Dixon: Our next guest George Schmidt was a Chicago Public School teacher for 28 years. A longtime union activist, he was once a candidate for presidency of the 28,000 member Chicago Teachers Union, one of the largest union locals of any kind in the nation. He is a founding member of Substance and Substance News, an organization and a newspaper originally founded to represent the views of Chicago’s substitute teachers. Substance News, which you can find online at substancenews.net is still required reading for anybody who wants an unfiltered view of the road public education has taken in Chicago and nationwide over the last two decades. How you doing Mr. Schmidt?

George Schmidt: It’s been a fun week, to be sure.

BD: We’ve got a lot to cover. Can you tell us about your own background for the first minute or so of this?

GS: Well, I spent almost all my public school teaching career in the inner city high schools of Chicago, starting at Dusable in the upper grade center, and teaching at schools like Manley, Marshall, Collins and Tilden. My last years of teaching were at Bowen High School on the city’s far south side near the Indiana border where I taught English and where I also served as union delegate and what we called the school security coordinator. During those years I was also very active in the union, as you pointed out. At one point I got over 40% of the vote in a race for president of the Chicago Teachers Union, but I didn’t win.

BD: Yeah, it takes a little more than 40%. Well, we’re talking to Mr. Schmidt because last week president-elect Barack Obama tapped Arne Duncan, who heads the Chicago Public Schools to be his Secretary of Education. Now Chicago has the third largest school system in the nation, so if you can make it work for the citizens of Chicago maybe you ought to get a chance to do it nationwide. So how’s it working in Chicago, man?

GS: Basically, it’s not. It’s not working for the majority of children in the city and it’s certainly not working for the majority of teachers. In order to understand how that particular sentence can be nuanced, you have to understand two things. The first is the dominance of the corporate narrative of “school reform”. In 1995 democratic control of the Chicago Public Schools was taken out of the hands of parents, teachers and citizens and put into the hands of Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley. A new law which was passed by the all-Republican state government at the time gave Mayor Daley the power to appoint a seven member school board eventually — at first he appointed a five member thing that was called the School Reform Board of Trustees — and the power to appoint a newly created chief executive officer based on the corporate model to run the Chicago Public Schools. Daley was also given power over the entire school system’s budget, and for the first time in 17 years, the school system was freed from the oversight of an outside entity called the School Finance Authority.

What Daley did since then was basically massively increase the public relations spin that was put on every activity performed in Chicago, to the point where the gap between the reality of the public schools we have in our city and the claims that have been made about them is as great as any between fact and fiction anywhere on the planet.

BD: We hear a lot about “reforming education.” I’m from Chicago, and back in the 80s when I was involved in school reform, school reform meant giving more power to parents and to rank and file teachers, power to determine curriculum, even to let parents evaluate the performance of teachers and programs and principals. You talked about the corporate narrative of school reform. Just what is that?

GS: The corporate narrative is the dictatorial model that you get in any corporation under a chief executive officer or CEO. And just as it’s failed now miserably in corporate America, with the collapse of Wall Street and the finance industry, it’s failed in the public schools as well. But just as a year ago you would find very few dissenters on the private sector analogy so today we still find not a loud enough voice for those who dissent against the claims that the corporate model (of education reform) has succeeded. Basically what you’re talking about by the late 1980s we had one of the most democratic models – with a small d – of school improvement anywhere in the United States. In 1988 Illinois passed a law which gave an elected Local School council of ten or eleven members the power at every school to hire and fire the principal to set curriculum and to have an enormous say over the budget. The majority of those Local School Council members were parents. Those of us who were active at the time participated in those elections and those processes.

BD: So that was school reform in the eighties.

GS: That was school reform in the eighties, and that grew primarily out of the work of Harold Washington who we elected mayor of the city of Chicago in 1983 in a mass movement that locally rivaled the mass movement which just elected Barack Obama president of the United States.

BD: So now we’ve replaced democratic school reform that gave parents the power with what exactly? I understand one of Arne’s pet things is giving public high schools over to the US military.

GS: Yeah, that’s one example of several and it’s a very good one. Beginning in the first days of the 21st century, literally Chicago instituted military high schools. And we’re not talking about high schools that have ROTC programs, we’re talking about high schools that are run by and for the military. The first of those was established in the heart of Bronzeville, the south side community at 35th and Giles, in the old armory there. It’s now the Chicago Military Academy. Since then they’ve set up two more army high schools. Carver and Phoenix, a Marine high school and a naval academy which is named the Hyman Rickover Naval Academy inside Senn High School.

BD: Except for the naval academy operation inside Senn High School all of these are in African American communities, are they not?

GS: Yes they are.

HG: George this is Heather Gray. Is this a model that’s in other parts of the country as well? Are other cities doing this?

GS: No.

HG: So this is unique to Chicago.

GS: This is unique to Chicago. Most places where you have more democracy, even where you have this CEO type dictatorship now, the citizens are better positioned to resist it than we are here in Chicago.

BD: In Chicago, for the benefit of our audience, we’re in Atlanta, GA now, the mayor is Richard Daley. 2009 marks his 20th year in office. His father was the mayor too for almost as long, from about 1956 if I remember right to 1975, I think, eighteen or nineteen years. So out of the last fifty or so years, for forty of them the city of Chicago has been run by the Daley clique, the Daley Regime, or as we call it in Chicago, the Machine. Arne Duncan, is he a product of the Machine.

GS: Exactly, Daley as I pointed out, in 1995 was given dictatorial power over the Chicago Public School system. It was based upon the lie that the system as a whole had failed, and the repetition of that lie from the eighties on. Daley has appointed two CEOs and roughly two school boards since then. Both of the CEOs have been white non-educators who replaced African American educators. Both of the CEOs had no experience in education or in corporate America. This is an important point since it’s supposedly a corporate model. They were fundamentally political puppets who would do his bidding.

BD: The predecessor to Mr. Duncan (in Chicago) he’s a guy named Paul Vallas, isn’t he?

GS: That’s true. Mr. Vallas came to the chief education job in Chicago through his position as budget director at City Hall under Mayor Daley.

HG: George, just going back to the military model (of education) again. What have been Barack Obama’s comments about this, if any at all.

“The gap between the reality of the public schools we have in our city and the claims that have been made about them is as great as any between fact and fiction anywhere on the planet.”

GS: I haven’t heard comment from Barack Obama himself, and I’ve known him since he was in the Illinois State Senate, and I was working for the Chicago Teachers Union. Never to my knowledge, and that may be contradicted by something on the record did he comment on this assault on the openness of Chicago high schools. But his newly incoming chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel has been a proud proponent of the military academies and even bragged on one occasion I was covering a press conference and he was with Mayor Daley that he got a million dollar earmark specifically for the military academies while he was in the US House of Representatives as my congressman.

BD: So it does say something that out of all the superintendents of school systems, CEOs or whatever nationwide, Barack Obama reached around and found one that not only liked the corporate model but liked the military model too. Since we’re talking about Chicago’s unique contribution to education on the national stage, let’s stick with Paul Vallas. You said Paul Vallas got his start just an average guy on the budget team on the City Hall budget team, where did Mr. Vallas go after leaving the Chicago Public Schools”

GS: After Daley dumped Vallas in 2001, he was picked up by Tom Ridge, the governor of Pennsylvania who was trying to privatize the Philadelphia school system. Vallas was made head of the Philadelphia school system in mid 2002 after a failed attempt to get himself elected governor of Illinois. He ran Philadelphia for four years I believe, the chronology may be a little off. Presently he’s been sent to New Orleans where the public school system has been obliterated after Hurricane Katrina and replaced by a system of primarily charter schools, many of which have been modeled on the charter school privatization plans originally hatched here in Chicago.

BD: Arne Duncan is going to be the nation’s number one guy on education. Surely this guy must have years and years of classroom and administrative experience,

GS: Wrong. He has none.

BD: So he’s never been in a classroom?

GS: No.

BD: Except as a student, perhaps.

GS: He talks now, as he tries to brush over his resume, about how when he was a student at the privileged University of Chicago Lab School where his father was a professor at the University of Chicago, that after school he would go to a tutoring program his mother ran in that area north of the University of Chicago called Kenwood, where he apparently, according to Arne’s narrative helped poor black children with their homework. That’s the extent of Arne Duncan’s actual educational experience or praxis. His career after Harvard, where he supposedly got a BA in Sociology, I’ve never got to see a resume, was in professional basketball…

HG: What do you mean you haven’t been allowed to see a resume? Why do you say that? You’ve asked for a resume and you’ve never seen one?

GS: For the past 14 years we’ve asked for the curriculum vitaes and resumes of top officials of the Chicago Public Schools under the Freedom of Information Act. And the answer we get every time we repeat this request is that this is classified privileged personnel information.

BD: Of course the new Obama administration is pledged to openness and transparency everywhere, so I’m sure that Arne’s resumes and cv’s and all that will surface really soon.

GS: If that’s the case, people are going to find out that he spent most of his adult life either playing basketball or working with some very wealthy financiers from his old neighborhood of Hyde Park in Chicago.

BD: Since we are talking about applying this Chicago model of public education nationwide, what has the regime of high stakes testing and closing schools that don’t meet testing goals which is now national policy thanks to No Child Left Behind meant to Chicago — oh, and one other thing I’d like to see if I can get your comment on is that Hillary Clinton at one point said let’s repeal No Child Left Behind while Barack was saying, well, he didn’t quite say mend it but don’t end it, but something like that. So what has the regime of high stakes testing done for African Americans in Chicago and public education in Chicago?

GS: Basically the vast majority of the schools that have been closed for supposed academic failure, which means low test scores, have been those schools which served a population of 100% poor black children via a staff that was almost always majority black teachers and usually a black principal. Since Arne Duncan took over in 2001, he has closed over 20 elementary schools. Most of them have been privatized into charter schools, and he’s closed six high schools. In all the cases I know of, the majority of the staffs of those schools who were then kicked out of union jobs and forced on the road to try to get new jobs, were majority black teachers and principals, many of which I knew personally. The six high schools he closed, Austin HS, Calumet HS, Collins HS, Englewood HS, Orr HS, and Harper HS, were either all black, in the case of five of them, or majority black and Latino in the case of Orr. That’s the active record of what Arne Duncan has done in his school closings for which Barack Obama has praised him. .

BD: We’re not seeing much of any criticism of Barack Obama’s nominations, especially not this nomination…I understand there was a meeting of the Chicago Board of Education soon after the nomination was announced, and some people who were at that meeting took issue with the nomination. Can you tell us about that?

GS: If you don’t mind I’ll give you a six day backup of that. The teaser stories began on December 11. On that day, Margaret Spelling, who’s George Bush’s Secretary of Education came to Chicago to stand on stage with Arne Duncan and Mayor Daley and praise the (teacher) merit pay plan that they’d introduced jointly, and to say that Arne Duncan was the same type of educational leader that she and George Bush favored. By Monday the 15th, word was out around Chicago that Duncan was probably the front runner for the Secretary of Education…

BD: He plays ball with the president-elect

GS: Exactly. On the night of the 15th it was made official. Barack Obama held a press conference with Joe Biden at Dodge School on the 16th. On the 17th, the Board of Education had its regular monthly meeting scheduled for downtown Chicago. Even though they apparently, expected it to be a love fest for Arne Duncan, what happened was that more than a dozen teachers and community activists from seven schools got up and exposed Duncan’s public record of sabotaging public education, of privatizing schools, of union busting, and of fraudulently cooking the educational statistics books. By the middle of the meeting Duncan had walked out for an hour and these testimonies continued to go on. By the end of the meeting members of the board were heatedly arguing with the teachers, and after the meeting two of the teachers were threatened. Members of Duncan’s staff called their principals demanding to know why they had been allowed to take the day off work to talk about Arne Duncan’s crimes (against public education) before a school board meeting.

BD: Now I haven’t been to a meeting of the Chicago Board of Education in a long time, but it’s hard to believe that the day after Duncan had been tapped to be Secretary of Education, it’s hard to believe that room wasn’t full of corporate media. We haven’t seen or heard anything about this. Have we? Or did I miss it?

GS: No, the dog and pony shows were on the 16th, at Dodge School where Barack Obama made the announcement with Duncan sitting there. At the Board of Education (meeting), one of the most interesting things that happened… was that not one of the TV stations was there to film or video any of this activity during the board meeting. The only photographer there besides me, because I cover every board meeting for Substance, was a woman from the Chicago Tribune and the only photograph the Tribune did was of Barbara Easton Watkins, who according to speculation here is in line to succeed Duncan here in Chicago. The TV stations boycotted the meeting completely, the story in the Tribune was a wacky one that ignored most of what happened in the meeting. The Sun-Times which is our other major daily newspaper covered the meeting slightly accurately, and NPR had a reporter there who missed 98% of what was actually going on, typical for the way Chicago Public Radio has been covering this type of story.

BD: The regime of high stakes testing and closing schools that came into national prominence which became national policy with No Child Left Behind, then is going to be with us for a while. What does that do to public education? Does it work?

GS: First of all, it has gradients. As soon as I say this you’ll know what I am talking about. Public education in the United States is not a unified system of equal access for all children. It’s a highly stratified system of at least four or five components. In the wealthy suburbs of any major city you’ll find some of the best public schools anywhere on the planet. In Chicago we’re talking about Wilmette, Winetka, the north shore, Glen Ellyn in the western suburbs, where the high schools are just everything you could want for your children if you could only afford a home in those areas.

BD: OK.

GS: You move from there and you have rural schools in some of the most challenging schools in some of the most desolate parts of rural North Dakota or Montana. When you get to our cities and the immediate suburbs which have declined industrially too, right now what we have is a three part system, Chicago is the exemplar of that. We have a magnet school system which selects kids on the basis of IQ scores and test scores in kindergarten or the first grade, and keeps them in that magnet school system for twelve years, and that’s one of the best school systems you’ll find anywhere. Michelle Obama is a graduate of Whitney Young High School, which is a part of that system, the magnet and elite schools in Chicago…

BD: We’re down to our last minute and a half…

GS: Well then, basically… the place where the impact of high stakes testing has been most devastating has been in those schools which serve the poorest children with the fewest resources and in the most challenging environments. In that area, the schools have not been improved, but instead the teachers and schools have been under attack for failing at things the society has never taken responsibility for.

BD: Last question, if you can do this in ten or twenty seconds or so, people in their millions or tens of millions voted for change. Insofar as education goes, are we gonna get it?

GS: If this the kind of change we needed, then I am still glad I voted for Barack Obama. I’m proud I was able to publish pictures of him and our colleagues. But this is not the kind of change we needed or we hoped for here in Chicago, we the people who supported that man, and who’ve known him and his wife for years and years.

Insect Dreams by Marc Estrin — A clever and funny tale about Kafka’s beetle Gregor Samsa and the world of the 20th century. This latter subject ultimately turns the humor in this story into tragedy, which transforms it from just a good work of fiction into a classic one.

Subterranean Fire by Sharon Smith — This history of labor’s struggle for economic justice in the United States is a necessary and hopeful read for those who earn a wage in these times of economic uncertainty.

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak — Nominally a work written for the young adult market, this work unveils the emotional horrors of war and oppression while simultaneously celebrating the everyday beauty found in human existence. It is about the casualties that the masters of war ignore.

The Scar of David by Susan Abulhawa — The beauty in this story is not in its few moments of joy and happiness or its even rarer moments of hope. No, the beauty lies in the stories of a people determined not to die. In a young girl’s belief in family and friends. This story is a story of Palestine. The writing here echoes the finest couplets of Gibran and Rumi.

People’s History of Sports in the United States — Dave Zirin has composed a wonderfully written, well-researched, and very readable story of US sport and its meaning to the oppressed and those who fight with them against the rulers. Like any sports book, there are stories of glory and prowess. This book is about the playing field and its role in the struggle for freedom and equal rights. It is about the rulers attempts to keep sport safely in the realm of nationalism and the status quo and the struggle of some athletes to make their efforts much more than that. Zirin makes it clear that it is a also a history that continues to be written.

Where the Wind Blew by Bob Sommer — Sommers’ novel is an emotionally taut tale. Like the strings on his old girlfriend’s cello, the story is tuned perfectly. One twist of the pegs to the left or right would make the story less than what it is–either too flat or mere melodrama. Where the Wind Blew is an intelligent and sensitive treatment of a time when the apocalypse was always just around the corner.

Born Under a Bad Sky by Jeffrey St. Clair — Most of the book is made up of hard-hitting articles regrading the destruction of the environment and exposes of those determined to continue that destruction. The jewel of the book lies in the last 116 pages of narrative. Titled “The Beautiful and the Damned,” this section is St. Clair’s beautifully rendered tale of a trip down some of the US West’s best known rivers. Seemingly inspired by Hunter S. Thompson, Aldo Leopold and the sheer beauty of the natural surroundings it describes, “The Beautiful and the Damned” does more than end Born Under a Bad Sky with a flourish, it conveys it into the genuinely sublime.

War Without End by Michael Schwartz — This is the best book on the US war in Iraq published in English to this date. It is comprehensive in its breath, revealing in its detail, and relentlessly radical in its critique. Michael Schwartz explains not only what the US has done to that country and its people, but why it is still there. Furthermore, it explains why there is a good chance that US troops will be there forever unless massive public protests are mounted against that presence.

The Duel — by Tariq Ali This is an important book. There has been very little published in English about Pakistan that doesn’t merely parrot the positions of the Pakistan government, the US desires for that government, or some combination of the two. It is written in an engaging and accessible style. As the US widens its war against those who would defy its designs into Pakistan, it becomes essential reading for anyone who refuses to accept the Orientalist narrative spewed by the policy makers in Washington, DC. Ali has written a history that explains and interprets the reality of Pakistan that is free of western prejudices and self-serving assumptions conceived in the foreign policy bureaucracies of DC and London.

The Trip Into Milky Way by Gary Corcoran — Trip Into the Milky Way (Coldtree Press 2007) is a novel of flight and it’s a story of love. A beautifully told tale of one man’s journey from the military draft and toward himself during the US war on Vietnam, this occasionally humorous, often heart-wrenching novel is a tale of a generation that serves as a metaphor for a nation that lost its way. The story is a story of wandering. Sometimes the wanderer is lost and sometimes he is just wandering.

GB84 by David Peace — GB84 is nothing short of stunning. It is a novel about the savagery of capitalism. Jackboots and legalized police beatings of unarmed strikers. Secret hit squads and government/corporate-sponsored organizations of police pretending to be miners whose job is to convince the strikers to scab. Democratic forms and fascist realities. The war of the super rich against the workers. This is David Peace at his best

The Lightning Thief Series by Rick Riordan — This is a delightful series set in modern times that features modern children of the gods and humans battling it out for the future of the Earth. It is also published for the youth market, but its appeal transcend the industry’s intentions. An introduction to Greek mythology that makes it all seem very alive.

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing by MT Anderson — One more set of books supposedly for the Young Adult market that transcends its intended market. The story of an American slave sold into a house of Enlightenment scientists in Boston who are attempting to discern the differences between Europeans and Africans, this two-volume set is a look at the role the slavers played in the American colonists’ war for independence and how the aspirations of the African-Americans of their times were manipulated by both sides in the conflict. It is also a unique telling of a young man’s intellectual and emotional growth into adulthood and a paean to the joys of classicism — musical and literary.

I also believe a mention of my 2007 novel Short Order Frame Up should appear here. Here are some comments from readers and reviewers regarding that novel.

“Ron Jacobs has created a working-class brew of language and music, a quasi-bitter, semi-sweet world of weed and sport, of love and violence, of not-so-innocent innocence up against the walls of racism and power. A compelling story, alas, and an underlying reality of life in America.” -Marc Estrin, author of Insect Dreams

“With Short Order, Ron Jacobs delivers something I haven’t come across since the works of James Baldwin: a great anti-racist novel. Powerful and political without being preachy. Poignant without being treacly. It’s stunning.” – Dave Zirin

and one more…..

Finally a novel about social and racial justice wrapped in the digestible genre of a murder mystery and set in Baltimore, a town that divides the north from the south and embodies the hopes and prejudices of post-60s America. Short-Order Frame Up is charged by its keen eye for historical detail and social conscience. But the devotion to context never interferes with the relentless pull of the story. A finely written but disturbing novel that probes the lingering bruises on the American psyche. –Jeffrey St. Clair

I called out to our youngest daughter, Gillian, as she set off down the road to meet the bus that she should be gracious. Don’t gloat I said. She said yeah right, after what they’ve put me through at school, this is going to be fun.

She was second in her class, academically, throughout seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth grades; her grades made her automatically eligible to apply for admission to the National Junior Honor Society.

However, she is not a member, and has never been; the handful of teachers sitting on the NJHS selections committee at Elk Lake School District in Dimock, PA voted down her application, twice, after which she never applied again.

The reason her membership was disallowed was this: after the U.S. invasion of Iraq she and her sisters decided, in protest, not to stand for the pledge to the flag.

Hilary was in eighth grade and Heather in tenth at the time, and both had been named members of the NJHS, in their turn, before the issue of the Iraq war and their protest to it came up.

To not stand for the pledge was a dramatic, traumatic decision which affected all of them significantly. Many teachers were outraged. Fellow students were often abusive.

Hilary and Heather were already up in the high school at the time, so there were two of them to face the music together. And, for a while, two or three of their classmates sat too, in solidarity, but one by one, under pressure from the faculty, the administration, their peers, and their parents, all but Hilary and Heather were forced back to their feet.

Gillian was twelve and in the sixth grade. She waged her protest all alone in the elementary school. She was sent to the hall. She was sent to the office. She was browbeaten and bullied, and still she stood (or sat) her ground.

It was in the fall of 2004, when she was in eighth grade, that Gillian received the letter stating that she was eligible for membership in the National Junior Honor Society. She completed the paperwork, obtained the necessary references, and submitted her application. In due course she learned that Elk Lake’s board of selections had voted to deny her application for membership.

Being of a curious nature, I spoke with a few of her teachers, most of whom did not sit on the board of selections. According to her French teacher, Kathleen Host, Gillian was “…an excellent student, helpful, with a good attitude”; her earth science teacher, James Eastman, said that she was “…among the best students in the school, period”; and Timothy Woolcock, her ecology teacher, said that she “…does well (and her) academics speak for themselves.” Even the school superintendent, Dr. William Bush, said, “She is an exemplary student. She works very hard.”

Her geometry teacher, George Delano, said that he knew it was because she wouldn’t stand for the pledge that she had not been admitted to the NJHS; her civics teacher, Fred Hein, said that although Gillian was exercising her constitutional rights by refusing to stand, that was the reason she was rejected; Mr. Eastman said that he did not approve of the NJHS, that “It has turned into a popularity contest for students among teachers.”

I also spoke with her geography teacher, Michael Cutri, who headed the selections board. From him I learned that Gillian had met all of the membership criteria–based on scholarship, leadership, service, character and citizenship–except citizenship. “Gillian is a superb student,” he said. “She fell short only in the area of citizenship. She doesn’t stand for the pledge of allegiance.”

“So Gillian was denied because she is a bad citizen,” I said. He replied, “Yes.” So much for sarcasm.

Now she is a senior. The 2008 election is over, Barack Obama has won, and I can’t blame the child for wanting to enjoy the moment.

I watched her reach the end of the dirt road, turn the corner, and start up the hill to Brooks Road. I looked down the valley at the scattered houses of my nearest neighbors. I heard the school bus reach the top of the hill and begin its descent.

I pondered the concept of good grace in victory, briefly. I let out an experimental yell. It felt really good. I yelled again; I think I whooped. With great difficulty I managed to lift my great-great-grandmother’s dinner bell high enough off the porch to set it ringing: that bell hasn’t been rung in over forty years; there must be some significance in that.

The noise woke Heather, who has volunteered tirelessly for many weeks for the Obama campaign, while simultaneously attending college classes and working almost full time. She yelled out her window for me to be quiet, so of course I rang the bell again. By then the bus had collected Gillian and was on its way across the flat.

Hilary emailed from her dorm at Mansfield University, “Even before Obama won but it was obvious that he was going to, people were outside my window screaming ‘Obama!! Go Obama!!’ I think pretty much the majority of the students wanted him to win. :) It is really exciting!! Yay!”

Why Pittman snapped is anyone’s guess. Maybe it was the frequent whippings he got from his father, or his mother’s tendency to disappear for years at a time. When he was 12, he had a nervous breakdown, which is when he started taking Paxil. That is also when he moved from the family home in Oxford, Florida to live with his grandparents in Chester, South Carolina.

Joe and Joy Pittman had always been a source of warmth and stability in his life. So it isn’t clear why he walked into their bedroom a few weeks later, flipped on the lights and shot his grandfather — whom he grew up calling “Pop-pop” — through the mouth and his grandmother (”Nanna”) through the back of the head.

But no one was interested in why Pittman did what he did. More than three years passed before he went to trial. By then, in 2005, jurors saw not a child but a six-foot-tall young man, going on 16. And they saw little else. Justice may be blind but for Pittman it was blinder than a deaf bat.

The jury didn’t care that in South Carolina, a doctor had abruptly changed his Paxil prescription to Zoloft, a drug not even approved for children. But suddenly having his depression medication switched may have been the least of Pittman’s problems. Even when properly dispensed some antidepressants can cause suicide and violence.

“Zoloft triggers violence,” attorney Andy Vickery said during opening statements. “The doctor gave a mind-altering drug to a 90-pound 12-year-old. He did not have an evil mind. He had a mind that had been tampered with chemically.”

Perhaps so, but whatever made Pittman go insane, what really matters is that imprisoning a child is inhumane.

“It was difficult, simply because he was 12 years old when he did this,” Steven Platt, one of the jurors, said after the trial. “That was the big factor in the deliberations we did. That played a major role in the difficulty.”

Unlike the jury, the judge was prevented by law from taking Pittman’s age into account.

“This is a very tragic case, tragic to the victim and tragic to the entire family,” Judge Daniel Pieper said. “This case has called attention to the very core values of this society about the treatment of juveniles and punishment.”

His final words to the defendant before sentencing him to South Carolina’s 30-year minimum for murder: “Good luck to you.”

As luck would have it, the South Carolina Supreme Court took a look at his case last year, saying it involved “an issue of significant public interest.” But the state argued that when it came to murder, there was “simply no identifiable national consensus” against locking up 12-year-olds and throwing away the key. The court agreed, and upheld the sentence.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court refused even to hear Pittman’s appeal. This despite his lawyers’ pleas that ignoring his age had violated the U.S. Constitution’s clause against cruel and unusual punishment; that Pittman, now 19, was serving the longest sentence anywhere for a crime committed so young; and that the whole thing just made America look bad.

“Punishing young children with excessive sentences violates international norms of human rights and juvenile justice law,” they said. “Virtually no other nation in the world subjects young children to such long sentences.”

The High Court replied by subjecting the lawyers to a decidedly short sentence: “No comment.”

Pittman’s one hope of emerging from prison anytime before 2031 now rests with South Carolina’s governor. And there would be no greater child advocate than Gov. Mark Sanford were he to issue a pardon. The case is emblematic, a glaring reminder that while there are laws to protect children from predators, there is nothing to protect them from the law itself.

Pittman has been in prison for seven years — or about one year for every hour the jury deliberated before putting him away for decades. Absent a pardon, he will be in his mid-forties when he leaves Broad River Correctional Institution, in Columbia. Freeing him might not seem as important as bailing out Wall Street. But it is.

Pardoning Pittman, after all, isn’t just about pardoning Pittman. It is about chipping away at an unpardonable belief that some children are disposable. By issuing a pardon, Sanford, who has four sons of his own, would send a clear message that children are not simply pint-sized adults. And that imprisoning instead of rehabilitating them isn’t justice.

It is barbarity.

Fortunately for Republicans, the timidity and “good manners” that served Democrats so well in 2004 are still on full display. The Obama camp appeared paralyzed before the senator himself curtly cut short further talk about the biggest Palin pop-up: the pregnancy of her unwed 17-year-old daughter.

But do these attempts to preserve the moral aura of Sarah Palin serve America’s interests?

Consider Palin’s stance on abortion. In her view, rape and incest are insufficient reasons for granting a woman the right to choose — even, as she has said, if that woman was her own daughter.

From a safe remove, some may admire Palin’s apparently uncompromising stance on the sanctity of life: here is a woman who sticks to her principles.

But is this an honest assessment? While Americans and others around in the world heatedly debate whether life begins at conception, delivery, or somewhere in between, everyone can agree that children and adults are living beings.

Therefore, it is prudent to ask a crucial question: why is Palin so fond of unborn life but so contemptuous of those who have exited the womb?

Palin’s loyalties lie with a party that stands against health care for poorer Americans, against relief for indebted homeowners, and against tax breaks for the working and middle-classes. Why do these lives not matter?

Also standing in striking contrast to the GOP’s professed respect for unborn life is its open contempt for dark-skinned life in various corners and crevices of the globe. In Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Palestine, Palin’s party has cheerfully dropped or supplied bombs that have erased thousands of children from the montage of mankind.

So while Democratic centrists stay silent, they pass up a peerless opportunity to ask why the “culture of life” honors those who aren’t yet alive while making sure those who are alive don’t stay alive.

It’s also useful to compare Palin’s position on abortion with that of the next slated target in the Republican war plan: Iran. In 2005, the Iranian parliament passed a law to allow abortion of fetuses up to four months old if they exhibited signs of physical or mental handicap. But the unelected mullahs of The Iranian Guardians Council took the same view as Palin and rejected the move.

In early 2008, Iranian Grand Ayatollah Mazaheri issued a decree allowing unwed mothers the right to choose — a right Palin seeks to abolish for everyone here in America.

On the question of sexual education and resources, the Islamic Republic appears enlightened compared to the GOP’s new darling. In Tehran, Iranian citizens can find vending machines with cheap condoms and needles (AIDS is a big concern). Meanwhile, Palin is on the record as saying she would fund abstinence-only propaganda. The mullahs promote sex education in schools and for soon-to-be-brides, and state programs offer sex advice to women that would make Palin and her Christian fundamentalist admirers squeamish.

Despite Palin’s backward positions, some people are overawed by the pull of her personal dramas. Palin, they say, should be applauded for going through with a pregnancy despite a Down Syndrome diagnosis, and should be afforded privacy for her daughter’s personal affairs.

Which is all well and good — except that Palin is running on a platform of subjecting everyone else’s personal affairs to her own judgment, which she seeks to codify into federal law.

Palin’s pregnancy decision may be noble, but her attempt to deny other women the right to make their own decisions is not. Her daughter’s pregnancy may be a private matter, but her plan to deny other children real sex education would leave them and their parents facing the same “private” problem.

The reluctance of Democratic gatekeepers to pounce on Palin’s fundamentalism reflects a level of foolishness that makes John Kerry’s windsurfing adventures appear wise by comparison.

It is not necessary to trash Palin’s private life to point out the perniciousness of her politics. It is only necessary to observe that a morally “perfect” American who works to the public’s detriment is far worse than a flawed American who promotes the general good.