Of all the statistics that describe the devastation wreaked upon Iraq by the illegal war, I find the figures describing the plight of Iraqi children the most troubling and heart-wrenching.   These children are the ones who will determine what sort of future Iraq will have.  Their well-being, or lack of it, will impact on the lives of all Iraqis regardless of sect, religion, or ethnicity.

A study by the Iraqi Society of Psychiatrists in collaboration with the World Health Organization found that 70% of children (sample 10,000) in the Sha’ab section of North Baghdad are suffering from trauma-related symptoms.

Even if this study is not completely replicated in the whole of Iraq, it clearly shows that huge numbers of children are growing up with mental problems. Many of these childrenhave seen close family members killed; they have walked in streets where they have seen dead and mutilated bodies just lying around. If left untreated, what impact will these mental problems have on the future of Iraq?

First, of course, the suffering, the stress, and the depression that afflicts these children must be alleviated.  All of Iraqi society must see that providing expert medical intervention to help these children cope is a moral imperative.

The effect of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is bad enough for professional soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.  It is hard to imagine the effects on a child growing up amongst such carnage.  In macho Iraqi society, such children, particularly the boys, tend to suffer in silence for fear of being labelled wimps. In any case, expertise to treat such cases is woefully inadequate in Iraq,

It is unfortunate that Iraqi society and possibly the entire Arab world is pervaded by a macho culture that sees people who express fear, anxiety and emotional distress as weak, particularly boys and men.  Education is essential to puncture this erroneous and destructive trait.   People need to be able to express these emotions, and be taught that these are expected reactions to the trauma they have experienced.

The Iraqi government must provide the necessary funds to train professionals to treat these children to relieve their stress and misery, of whom 4.6 million have lost one or both parents. Over half a million children live on the streets prey to physical and emotional abuse.

Surely politicians from whatever sect, supported by the intelligentsia and opinion-formers, could work together to make the goal of helping the children of Iraq a priority. Working collaboratively on such a project would, one hopes, generate trust across the ethnic and sectarian fault lines and may lead to further cooperation.

The West can help by providing scholarships to Iraqis to gain the expertise necessary to save Iraq from the consequences of mental impairments that could condemn Iraqi society to a bleak future, with its ripples fanning out well beyond its borders.

Iraqis need to start somewhere to work together, and what better goal to aim for than the future of Iraq’s children. All Iraqis, instead of continuously engaged in blaming each other, could focus on such a worthy, humane, and moral project, and with its success improve the chances of a peaceful, prosperous future to the benefit of all.

They will kill me but they will not kill my voice,
because it will be the voice of all Afghan women.
You can cut the flower but  you cannot stop the coming of spring.
— Malalai Joya

Within weeks of my leaving Kabul in mid-August 2011, the US Embassy there was shelled by rocket-propelled grenades. The Embassy then “canceled all trips in and out of Afghanistan for its diplomats, and suspended all travel within Afghanistan.”¹

In my 30 days in Kabul I never saw another westerner outside guarded compounds – except in military convoys. Such fear reveals how illusory any US claims of “progress” have been over these past ten years – despite the hundreds of billions of dollars squandered. Not to mention all the orphans and the numerous number of limbs and lives lost.

In the States, only now do we seem to be waking up to the absolute failure of this war – by any standard except that of generating mega-profits for certain “defense” corporations. Few, including our leaders, have firsthand knowledge of Afghanistan. Few can conceive of the tenacity of the armed  resistance, its willingness to risk, its willingness to sacrifice.

Few of us have any idea how the Afghan people suffer from our ten-year invasion and from our hamstrung occupation. Those of us opposing war need to better understand war and its toll on human beings.

Haunted by this gap in my own education, I went to Afghanistan  with a small Voices for Creative Nonviolence delegation. Among us were two vets – one, Jacob, a paratrooper and explosives specialist, had done three tours of duty in Afghanistan.

Nervous Armed Men

Early on we learn that, according to the Red Cross, security is worse here than it’s been in the last 30 years of war. In Kabul life is lived opaquely — except for the internal refugees’ mud huts, homes huddle in compounds behind thick metal doors and high walls topped with barbed wire.

Kabul is a city of sandbags and nervous, armed men, both on foot and in big, shiny, urgently honking vehicles. Approach the international airport and Afghan soldiers will have you out of your vehicle three times, patting you down before you even reach the parking lot.

Our delegation is restricted in our movements. Do we avoid venturing forth from the clipped lawns and rose gardens of our guest house compound? Hardly. But every morning until our driver arrives, we stay inside those high walls, never lingering together outside on the street. Then we scoot into his van. With preternatural reflexes, Imam plunges us into what must be some of the densest, scariest, least-regulated (no traffic lights) traffic on the planet.

We’re off to visit a primary school, a women’s co-op, a photo gallery, a de-mining museum, a refugee camp. Or we tour the Kabul zoo – with its pack of scrawny wolves and its flock of vultures. On one of the few occasions we stay out after dark, we attend a US Embassy-sponsored film festival showcasing young Afghan filmmakers.

We have 40 or so meetings with teachers, journalists, editors, social entrepreneurs, and with the staff of various NGOs — internationals, Afghan-Americans, and Afghans. Whether guarded or candid, perplexing or illuminating, each encounter provides a piece (a figment?) of the puzzle. We glimpse complexities and contradictions — and tragedies — some beyond our sheltered imaginations.

I journeyed to Afghanistan expecting to hear what Afghans think about Reaper drones. I think the Reaper is cowardly. Here in Central New York at Hancock air base, young technicians  pilot these robot planes – equipped with Hellfire missiles and 500-pound bombs – over Afghanistan, frequently killing civilians.

I expected to meet with drone survivors. But staff at Kabul’s no-questions-asked Emergency Hospital (Italian-run, specializing in war wounds) tell us that drone victims would be treated elsewhere – if at all – closer to where drones prey. And where we westerners dare not go.

One human rights NGO staffer allows that, yes, drones kill civilians, but—ta da! — they also destroy madrassas (Islamic schools). I wince at this functionary’s equanimity: rural Afghans may be rather less cavalier about such aerial terrorism.  But few of our contacts seem  interested  in drones. Instead they’re angered by the US military’s night raids on homes – terrorism stalking Kabul itself.

Malalai & Ian

Several of  those we meet with are inspiring. Malalai Joya (a pseudonym) is a young woman barely five feet tall. She was elected to Parliament from a remote region, but was drummed out of that august body for publicizing the war crimes of her parliamentary colleagues. While this notoriety led to international speaking tours, it also led to assassination attempts. Malalai only survives by moving with her guards from safe house to safe house.

To find her, we get our directions via several cell phone calls en route; we don’t know our exact destination until moments before we arrive. Through heavy metal doors, we enter one of those unmarked compounds on a nameless unpaved street (typical of Kabul) and are met by two armed men. One stands a few feet off, gun poised, while the other frisks us — and has us snap photos with our cameras and write with our pens to confirm that these aren’t disguised weapons.

Malalai comes out to greet us and invite us inside. Immediately I’m captivated by the care and courage she radiates.  Malalai’s remarks to us suggest why she is a marked woman:

~ If more US troops leave, one more enemy will be gone – no more bombing, no more white phosphorus….

~ The US military are expanding military bases here. They won’t leave us. They work for Balkanization….It’s a big lie that the U.S. will leave by 2014. [In fact, the US is quietly lobbying the Karzai government to agree to permanent US bases.]

~ When you are in the heart of Asia, you’re surrounded by other countries with oil and gas. From here these can be controlled.

~ Under the UN the Taliban have been replaced by the war lords.

~ Afghan and foreign NGOs are corrupt. [She refers to  them as “NGO lords.”]

~ Afghanistan has the second biggest copper mine in the world.

~ Under the Taliban 185 tons of poppy were exported; now over 4000 tons are exported. [Hmmm. Who gets the lion’s share of  drug traffic profit – Afghans or Americans?]

In her “Message on the Tenth Anniversary of NATO’s War and the Occupation  of Afghanistan,” Joya declares:

Ten years ago the US and NATO invaded my country under the fake banners of women’s rights, human rights, and democracy. But after a decade, Afghanistan still remains the most uncivil, most corrupt, and most war torn country in the world. The consequences of the so-called war on terror have only been more bloodshed, crimes, barbarism, human rights and women’s rights violation, which has doubled the miseries and sorrows of our people.²

Malalai, it’s clear, is not one of those who entwine their interests with those occupying her country. Check out her memoir,A Woman Among Warlords [Scribner, 2009].

*****

Ian Pounds is a long-term volunteer at one of the several orphanages we visit. Ian tells us that Afghanistan has over a million orphans. He notes that “the US is part and parcel of the drug trade.” He goes on, “The US has no intention of leaving Afghanistan. The US is here to pressure Iran….The US was ready to go into Afghanistan before 9/11; it’s not here to save the women.”

Now “80% of the girls don’t go to school and many end  up in forced marriages.” The women’s prisons here “are full of women who have been raped and therefore accused of having sex out of marriage.” (For an extended  report on Afghan women, especially those in prison, see Ann Jones’ grimly eloquent 2006 book, Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan.

Shortly after our visit Ian emails us some stats drawn from the Afghanistan section of Save the Children’s July 2011 report on the “State of the World’s Mothers.” Among them:

~ Fifty women die in childbirth each day.

~ One in five children die before age five.

~ One in three women are physically or sexually abused.

~ Women’s life expectancy: 44 years.

The report declares Afghanistan the worst country in the world to be a mother.

Staring Through the Keyhole

To begin understanding this harrowed land you must see its teeming capital. Yet Kabul provides only an incomplete and, indeed, distorted picture of the country as a whole.

From our too few day-trips outside the capital, it’s clear that Kabul bears little resemblance to the hinterland. One might as well try to imagine an elephant having only seen its trunk. Or one might seek to understand the US by visiting only Washington or New York…or Syracuse.

Swollen with internal refugees, Kabul is said to now have about a fifth of Afghanistan’s population. Kabul’s social structures are not those of the countryside. Nor do urban agendas and interests—or security issues—reflect those of the rural areas where most Afghans live.

I belabor this point because I’m taken aback by how many of those we meet in the capital seem to favor an ongoing US military presence (or do some – not knowing us – say what they think visiting US Americans must want to hear?) Perhaps some prefer the devil they’ve come to depend on to other, less well-heeled, devils? Many surely fear chaos if the US leaves and its corrupt puppet government dissolves – “within three days,” an academic and former US Embassy contractor tells us.

They fear the ensuing civil war — as if for years the invader hadn’t been making night raids, humiliating women, detaining and  torturing their male relatives, arming fundamentalist warlords, fostering corruption, promoting ethnic hatred, paying off the Taliban, displacing hundreds of thousands, waging air war…and  testing its high-tech weapons systems on the Afghan people.

Some, especially among the NGO strata, have a stake in the status quo. Why not? In a region where many earn less than $2 a day, the status quo seems to work well enough for those Kabulis with internationally-derived incomes. Without the invader such emoluments would vanish. But I keep wondering how rural Afghans — already savaged by the occupation and by those resisting the occupation — would see things. Mostly confined  to Kabul, how are we to know?

Reparation

My few weeks in Afghanistan reinforce what I already do know: US taxpayers must face our complicity in the terror of US militarism. As the war on Afghanistan is now into its eleventh year, we must overcome our chauvinism and uncritical thinking. We must get beyond our bubble.

This past century teaches that no war truly ends. Its consequences endure and ramify. As with the people of Viet Nam and Iraq,  the Afghan people – the orphaned, the widowed, the amputated, the displaced, the heartsick, the driven mad – will continue to suffer long after the last US soldier leaves, the last base is closed, the last drone is grounded.

Even then our responsibility to the people of Afghanistan will remain. We must provide reparation for the wounds we have inflicted. Dollars cannot compensate for the lives lost or the infrastructure devastated. Nonetheless, we must give our utmost. We must get out of the way of Afghans and (judiciously) provide the economic support they need to rebuild their country and their lives.

We must also begin the overdue reparation of ourselves. We must end our worship of violence. We must mend our hearts that have tolerated so long what we’ve been doing to the Afghan people. We must fully support the healing of our returned soldiers who, maimed in body and soul, are doomed to live out their days having experienced what we have done. And we must hold accountable those who conned us into invading Afghanistan and those who keep us there.

We must convert our war-besotted economy to one that profits from life, not death. We must dismantle our bloated military. To stop subverting and invading the Islamic oil lands, we must own up to  our Islamophobia and  break our addiction to oil. We must struggle to free not only Afghan children, but our own, from the destitution and killing that threatens to engulf us.

We must no longer avert our eyes.

1. 14 Sept. 11 Associated Press.
2. 7 Oct. 11, CommonDreams.org.

At a very young age, Lindsay Lohan was thrown by her parents into the Hollywood meat grinder that chews up and spits out many thousands of desperate young hopefuls every year. Author Jake Halpern described in his excellent book, Fame Junkies, how so many American children are completely deprived of a normal childhood in the quest to become the next Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga. Their families drag them out to California, often taking on huge debts to enroll them in academies that are supposed to prepare them to be the next big superstar in movies, television or music. These kids spend their whole waking lives taking singing, dancing and acting lessons in between being dragged around from audition to audition where the competition is absolutely cutthroat. A lucky few get their big break and achieve what they are seeking. Most, however, are broken by the system and return back to where they came from having had their youth squandered by their stage parents.

Initially, Lindsay Lohan appeared to have won the fame lottery. She was already modeling at the age of three, and by age 11 was cast to star in her first featured film, the 1998 remake of The Parent Trap. By all accounts, despite appearing in Disney-produced, teen-oriented fluff, young Lindsay actually did have some natural ability as an actress and a singer. This could explain why her career soared to such meteoric heights during her adolescent years.

Unfortunately, instead of nurturing her burgeoning talent, our celebrity-obsessed culture placed her on a pedestal—throwing countless millions of dollars her way while the media stalked her incessantly, all at an age when the biggest worry for most girls is whether anyone will ask them to the prom. Lindsay could scarcely step out in public without her every move becoming a major headline. Seriously, how many of us could ever hope to stand up to that kind of scrutiny, especially at that age?

Sure enough, as the bright lights of fame turned into a white-hot, unending glare, Lindsay’s life began to spiral out of control. She became a habitual user of narcotics, which was bad enough, but then began to commit a series of petty criminal acts for which she’s been repeatedly arrested. And it is here where all of the hypocrisy and class-based injustice of the American legal system has been put on full display.

Because she is a famous Hollywood actress and not a single welfare mother living in a public housing complex, Lindsay’s drug busts have always resulted in her being allowed to go to cushy rehab centers rather than being sent to prison. I would argue that non-violent drug offenders SHOULD be given treatment rather than punishment, but they only are if they have the money to hire top notch defense attorneys. Even more telling is how the actress has so far avoided serious jail time for her other infractions, including twice Driving Under the Influence, driving with a suspended license, misdemeanor theft and repeated probation violations. In one notorious instance, she spent exactly 84 minutes in jail to fulfill her sentence on one of her DUI arrests.

Throughout it all, the paparazzi have continued to stalk her, gleefully documenting her many court dates and her rapid physical decline, which has become red meat for hungry tabloid readers desperately seeking an escape to feel better about their own crappy lives. If there is anything idiot Americans love more than breathlessly following the lives of celebrities, it’s heaping scorn and derision upon them should they prove to be frail and all-too-human. It’s even better when the celebrity is a young woman whose sexual exploits, both real and imagined, are the grist for endless speculation and gossip and she can then be condemned as a slut and a whore.

All of this stuff —celebrity worship, media irresponsibility, a broken criminal justice system and insane drug laws–is bad enough, but to top it off like a cherry on a shit sundae comes the unfortunate Lindsay’s parents to display another quintessentially modern American trait: an utter lack of responsibility for one’s own actions. Here’s a quote from a recent interview with her father about her most recent arrest:

I hate seeing my daughter in cuffs. She belongs in rehab! Why don’t they institute drug testing? Get drug testing involved! Keep her straight! Make sure she’s in an outpatient program. They need to put a sober coach with her! A no nonsense sober coach! I’m sick of this, when she wants to be honest with herself and live up to her responsibility she’ll turn her life around. But she has learned too much of the opposite from her mother,” says Michael.

Even though Michael is known about town as being low-key crazy and has willingly appeared on Celebrity Rehab, for some reason he seems to think he’s knows what’s best for Lindsay.

My mission is to get rid of all the people in her life that are kicking her down. I’m going to eliminate them from her life. I’m going to do all I can…not physically but I’m going to put them in a position where they can’t be around her.

Not to be outdone, here is her mother in a separate interview:

I blamed her friends, her career and her handlers for an (sic) newfound lifestyle of partying excessively. Drinking, drugging and behaving irresponsibly became Lindsay’s way of daily living–and it tore me up inside.

How could I deny my daughter the chance of a lifetime? How could I hold Lindsay back from her dream of becoming an actress? So, I listened to others and sent my daughter to Hollywood with a few pieces of luggage and a chaperone.

Do those quotes not make you want to grab these two clueless morons and slam their heads together? Really, it was Lindsay’s conscious choice to become a model when she was only three years old? For much of her professional career, Lindsay Lohan was a minor, and therefore raising her was their responsibility. They were perfectly happy to cash the big fat checks and bask in the reflected glory of their young movie star daughter. But actually being parents to her? Why, that’s way too HARD, don’t you know.

Despite having international fame and more money than most of us will ever earn in our lifetimes before she was even old enough to vote, Lindsay Lohan’s life is a complete wreck at the tender young age of 25. It will be a shock if she actually lives to see 30. When she does inevitably succumb to that final fatal overdose, you can bet moralists everywhere will be wagging their fingers while National Enquirer readers gleefully soak up every sordid detail of her death. The cable news shows will feature extended career retrospectives and her record label will no doubt release a posthumous album in order to cash in on the publicity. The funeral will be widely televised, and plenty of teary-eyed mourners who never even met her will say how sad her passing is, even if not one of them would have ever deigned to lift a finger to help her while she was still alive.

So there you have it, America. Lindsay Lohan: the perfect poster girl for the type of deranged society we’ve become. She is literally giving her life to keep you entertained and distracted so you won’t have to open your eyes and see how completely screwed you really are. Appreciate her now—revel in her transgressions, laugh at her misfortunes, speculate about who she’s sleeping with, embrace the feelings of moral superiority that come over you when you look at her mug shots—but be sure to do so soon before it’s too late.

Now try to visualize, if you can, many such children–their curious, hopeful world crushed and trampled in an instant when U. S. soldiers and bomber pilots “just following orders” willingly imposed the tortures of hell upon them.  Can you picture in your mind, say, ten or 20 or 200 or 2000 or 20,000 or 100,000 Iraqi children—killed or burned or dismembered?

Now look at Google Images: under, say,  “cluster bombs,” examine the photos of children, children lying on the ground in shock, children whose arms are now bandaged stumps, children who stare unbelievingly into the void.  Scrutinize their faces: zoom in as close as you can and try to feel-into their hearts.  Single out one of these children, a boy or girl, perhaps a child who reminds you of your own child or your own childhood.  Try to feel-into this child’s emotions: terrified bewilderment, a shocked sense of betrayal, a deep sadness and despair.

Little children, like all little children — their idle play and gentle imaginings suddenly pulverized by weapons of senseless malevolence and fiendish cruelty.  Little children, busy gathering wood on a remote hillside, as a U. S. Army helicopter pilot methodically takes aim and executes them.  Little children, awakened into a world they could never have imagined, a world in which bad people suddenly appear, bad people who hurt them, burn them, kill them.  I am asking you to call forth (or re-awaken) the wellsprings of empathy, our deeply human capacity for “sympathetic identification”—the MORAL FORCE of which can be likened to Gandhi’s ahimsa and satyagraha.

Indeed, the pernicious amorality of such perpetrators is sometimes revealed by their own disclaimers.  For instance, Gen. David Petraeus claimed last February that Afghan parents might be deliberating burning their own children in order to bring discredit to the U.S. military.  At that time, after NATO attacks had killed 64 Afghan civilians in one week, “one Afghan official said, ‘Killing 60 people, and then blaming the killing on the same people… This is inhuman.” ¹ In short: first carelessly include innocent little children within the broad parameter of your designated “enemy,” then torture them unceasingly with weapons devised by scientific sadists, then claim that those you so horribly tortured really did it to themselves.

In his 2009 essay “Why I Threw the Shoe,” journalist Muntazer al-Zaidi noted that “Iraq is now filled with more than five million orphans, a million widows and hundreds of thousands of maimed.  Many millions are homeless inside and outside the country.” ²  I would suggest that U.S. citizens, arguably complicit through their largely passive compliance (and their taxes which helped pay for the war), have yet to throw the other shoe (figuratively speaking).  Since U.S. citizens, in their vaunted but loathsome faux-democracy, were unable or unwilling to prevent the Bush administration from initiating wholesale war under false pretenses, they are now morally obligated to seek redress on behalf of the millions of people condemned to death, dismemberment, displacement, grief and despair.

If the U.S. Anti-War Movement was ultimately unable to stop the Bush Administration from proceeding as planned, we must now reframe and broaden its vision, as part of the new and growing global movement for HUMAN (classless) SOLIDARITY (goodbye 1%). This inspiring movement, still in its embryonic stages, might ultimately be called:    WE ARE HUMANITY (99%)!

Had such a non-violent uprising of a million people –with a message of universal human rights and solidarity (with the people of Iraq) — OCCUPIED the environs of the White House and/or the Pentagon in February 2003, it might have caused Bush to suspend his invasion plans rather than risk the paralyzing effects of widespread civil non-compliance and general strikes.  Lest we forget the tens of thousands of graves of those children I have described, we must, even at this late stage, actively seek some measure of justice.  Under both international and domestic laws (the UN Charter, Geneva Conventions, U.S. War Crimes Act, etc.), Bush and his associates committed mass murder and other atrocities which may conceivably be successfully prosecuted.³

In the humanistic spirit of this growing global movement to eradicate the global class war (and its concomitant imperialism), protesters may proclaim total solidarity and identification with the victims of these wars—and resolve to dismantle the U.S. War Machine:

“We ARE Iraqis.  We ARE Afghans. We ARE Palestinians.  Going to Kill THEM?  Then you’re going to have to KILL US—AND THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING.”

1. Washington Post, February 22, 2011
2. The Guardian (UK), September 18, 2009
3. The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, by former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, focuses on the violation of domestic laws (2008).  In George W. Bush: War Criminal?, political scientist Michael Haas painstakingly enumerates the specific violations of both domestic and international laws and treaties (Praeger 2009).

I had read the stories from Gaza after Israel’s so called “operation cast lead”. I had read the reports. I thought I had cried enough then not to cry again. But this film went to my heart, stirred everything up, made the tears fall and fall and here I am now, with a hollow, spooned out hole in my gut because bombs were dropped on sleeping children, helicopters rained the death and disfigurement of white phosphorous on terrified civilians huddling at a UN school for shelter… and no one is doing anything about it.Tears of Gaza lays bare the lies, the cover ups and Richard Goldstone’s moral flip flopping. It takes you into the heart of Gaza’s tormented landscape to show the truth behind craven and mendacious headlines with words that describe Israel’s slaughter as an “incursion” or “self defense”. This film shows us these truths through the luminous spirits of children. It is not to be missed!

I first heard of Tears of Gaza when Bernard Henri-Levi launched an attack against Lokkeberg and me in major newspapers throughout Europe. She and I were in touch after that and I was finally just able to get hold of the film to watch it. It is a monumentally important work. It is beautiful and painful and honest and devastating.

Vibeke Lokkeberg gives us the names, faces, and stories of three ordinary Gaza children with extraordinary spirits. We first fall in love with Yehya, a 12-year-old boy who wants to become a doctor so he can heal people who are shot by Israelis. We see him on a small motorboat, lost in the magic of childhood as he is taught to steer the boat. His beautiful eyes and brilliant smile during these moments make his tears all the harder to bear when he talks about his beloved father. The losses that follow in his life are incomprehensible and overwhelming merely to hear about.

Until you meet Amira, 14 years old, and walk through her world.

Amira is beautiful. It’s the kind of beauty that holds an ineffable pain not often seen in the young. Her life, too, is marred by death and destruction and disfigurement of her body by ammunition. She tells us that she wants to become a lawyer so she can take the Israelis to court for the crimes they’ve committed. Then, recalling her father and brothers, she admits wishing she had just “gone with them”.

Like Amira, Rasmia is far beyond her 11 years. Arabic speakers might detect things about her that non-Arabic speakers will not. This is largely because of the translation; and this is my only criticism of the film. When Rasmia goes into what seems like a waking trance, her mother tells us in Arabic that she is “imagining”. The translation says “memorizing”, which doesn’t make sense and it distracts from an important subtlety. Her mother explains that she sometimes just “imagines” things from the attacks. I suspect that most psychologists witnessing those scenes and hearing her mother’s explanation would agree that she was experiencing flashbacks and exhibiting clear signs of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Another example where the wrong translation obscures important nuances is when Yehya is telling us about losing his father. He is, in fact, speaking in the third person: “when someone loses their father, it’s like they’ve lost the whole world” etc. But his words are translated as if in the first person: “when my father died, it’s like I lost the whole world.” The distinction might not seem important, until you realize that he cannot get the words out without breaking down when he speaks in the first person. It’s a faint distinction, but one that makes your heart break even more.

And we should all allow our hearts be broken over Gaza. It’s the least we can do. To hear these three children and ask others to hear them is the very least we can do. Vibeke Lokkeberg has given us a monumentally important record of what happened in December 2009 to January 2010; so no one can ever say “I didn’t know.”

Lest we forget, lest our tears dry or outrage subside, and lest our hearts heal before Palestine is free, I hope this film will be shown throughout the world, across university campuses, communities, organizations and living rooms. Take this not just as a review, but a call to action.

In the first paragraph of an article published this week in the academic journal Pediatrics, Angeline S. Lilliard and Jennifer Peterson set up their study with a pick-and-choose somewhat slanted view of television. According to these psychologists, “correlational studies link early television viewing with deficits in executive function . . . a collection of prefrontal skills underlying goal-directed behavior, including attention, working memory, inhibitory control, problem solving, self-regulation, and delay of gratification.” Translated into English, we conclude that psychologists don’t speak English.

To make sure no one misreads the study as anything but pure empirical science, they toss in “covariant assessment,” “covariate,” “posthoc analyses,” “backward digit span,” “encoding,” “cognitive depletion,” and something known as the “Tower of Hanoi,” not to be mistaken, apparently, for the Hanoi Hilton, or the Tower of Babel, which this study seems most likely to emulate.

For their subject group, they rounded up four-year-olds from “a database of families willing to participate.” Three groups of children were given the same four separate tasks. Those who watched a truncated version of a “SpongeBob” cartoon, which has scene changes an average of every 11 seconds, fared worse in the measurements than did the groups that watched a more “realistic” and “educational” PBS cartoon (“Caillou”) that had an average scene change of 34 seconds. The third group (known as a “control” group) drew things and participated in all the tasks. On all four tests, “SpongeBob” lost. The fact the researchers labeled “Caillou” as educational could reveal pre-conceived bias; even a cursory look at “SpongeBob,” although primarily entertainment, reveals numerous social and educational issues that could lead to further discussion.

The pre-schoolers were mostly White, from middle-class and upper-class families. Thus, there was no randomly-selected group, something critical in most such studies. The researchers do acknowledge this, as well as a few defects in the study itself. Possibly salivating over future grants, they tell us that “further research . . . is needed.”
The reality may not be that four-year-olds who watch “SpongeBob” and similar cartoons had developmental defects but that they are far more interested in the cartoon than in other activities and temporarily suspend those “good quality” activities while they remember the cartoon and think of other events or issues that SpongeBob and the cast got into. The researchers measured the students’ responses shortly after watching the cartoons; perhaps measurements a few hours or a week later might have given different results.

Nevertheless, the researchers—hung up on standard deviations, regression analysis, and Cronbach’s Alpha, among other empirical tests—didn’t do the most basic of all research. They didn’t ask the children what they thought about the cartoons, nor any questions leading to why the children who viewed “SpongeBob” may not have performed as well the other two groups on tests that may or may not be of value. It’s entirely possible that watching fast-paced well-written tightly-directed animated cartoons may be more fun—and more productive—than watching slower-paced educational cartoons. But we don’t know because the research was quantified.

The wounded response by Nickelodeon, which airs “SpongeBob Squarepants,” isn’t much better than the academic study. Squeezed into a sentence, the comment is that the cartoon is for 6–11 year olds, not the four-year-olds who were tested. The Nick PR machine wants us to believe that even if everything the researchers said was true, it doesn’t matter because the cartoon isn’t aimed at four-year-olds. Apparently, even if older siblings are watching “SpongeBob” or their parents are watching horror, adventure, or war movies it doesn’t matter because those forms of entertainment aren’t for four-year-olds.

For more than eight decades, animated cartoons have come under fire by all kinds of academic researchers and certain “we-do-good” public groups. From 1930 to 1968, the Hays office, ensconced in Puritan ideals of morality, censored films and cartoons for all kinds of reasons. By the 1960s, academic researchers began questioning the violence in cartoons, focusing primarily upon the Warner Brothers characters. For a few years, television programmers, either believing themselves to be great pillars of morality or afraid of losing sponsors, forcibly retired many of the most popular cartoons from the screen.

At least half of the studies concluded that watching violence could be one of the factors that lead to violent acts. Another group of studies showed little correlation. But, stripping away the academic verbiage, the most logical conclusion of all the studies that denuded a small forest was that persons pre-disposed to violence may become violent if exposed to violence in cartoons. Certainly, watching Roadrunner/Wile E. Coyote cartoons won’t cause a Quaker to go out and mug Baptists.

The mugging that SpongeBob (and other characters in quick-sequencing action) got is another attempt to quantify life by exorcizing a small part of life, running tests, and trying to explain human cognition and development without understanding humans.

But then you notice that what looks like a child in pink is really a child drenched in her own blood. Her shirt is washed with faded crimson. The little girl in the back of the truck, she’s placed on a blanket amongst others who are not sleeping either.  She should be five years older now, but that moment caught by a cell phone camera in 2006 is the last of her. She lays there on blankets with 5 other dead children, reportedly killed execution style, during a US raid.

The details are only seeping out now due to a recent Wikileaks report.  And the particulars are the stuff of nightmares. The report indicates that what transpired that day in Iraq was what is called an “extrajudicial killing”. It’s an amazing word that tamps down the reality of the situation, that of cold blooded murder.

It is said that the family was bound with handcuffs and shot in the back of the head. If you look closely at the image of the child you can see exactly where that band was on her tiny wrists.

We used to be shocked by child murder. Truman Capote looked into the devil’s eyes as he tried to make sense of the murder of the Clutter family in 1959 Kansas with his masterpiece “In Cold Blood”.  In trying to understand what must have gone through the minds of these men, I’m brought back to that tale which digs into the psyche of the two killers who committed a similar crime, but against older children and their family members. Strange allegiance to each other and the notion that if one didn’t kill, the other would, contributed to that long ago crime. What dynamics could make these recent men kill such innocence in such a methodical manner?

You wonder if the men thought that in this world of retribution, these children would just grow up to kill them anyway.  Is that how one rationalizes this sort of thing? Once a mind has made a snap like that I doubt that it bodes well for anyone who challenges them when they get back to the states. It’s unlikely that they will become lucid, model citizens, but as far as I know, not one person is in trouble for this.  Were there weak men in there who didn’t speak up, but went along with the horror, thinking surely this can’t be happening? Did they stand by as evil had its giddy way in that mud brick home?

This is precisely what Madeleine Albright should have considered when asked “Has the price been worth it?” She, of course, answered in the affirmative. She didn’t know these kids and I’m sure she won’t ever live next to the perpetrators. It’s a huge price, I would say – not just the loss of these beautiful children, but the loss of a nation’s soul. Perhaps it was a soul that never held kindness; we were just taught that as a fairy tale. Now the pretense is gone.

For those who wouldn’t have the hot blooded evil to perform these deeds themselves, but full well know on a dark night when they look up at the sky that they enabled all of this, do they feel sorrow or vast nothingness? Perhaps those men who actually performed these acts were never souls that could be salvaged. I don’t know, but they were provided means and excuse to carry this out by individuals like Albright.

At first it was indicated that no wrong had transpired during these events, and the sad tale would have probably died if diplomatic cables unearthed hadn’t indicated a different story. The discredited townspeople had been saying all along that a dark murder of children had occurred. They said a firefight had preceded the crime, and after that was over, the house was entered and everyone inside was handcuffed. The inhabitants were then shot in the back of the head — babies, children…..everyone. And after this happened an air strike helped fog what had transpired.

Humans now walk amongst us who have done unthinkable acts – perhaps they have an allegiance to each other as did the murderers in Holcomb, Kansas. It is hard to fathom. The reasoning and interrelationships that had to contribute to this atrocity can surely be hashed out and explained as was done in that book, but it’s as if a foreign nation sponsored the murderers of the Clutter family and obligingly bombed the evidence afterward. And we certainly don’t seem to have a national will to scream out about it. History will not consider us to be a decent people.

Madeleine Albright and others, present Commander in Chief included….. you may not have had to wash the blood, hair and brains off your body in a physical sense, but you provided the pantheon of evil for these men, and you made it happen. You will never be able to wash that off.

I was sitting with my young daughter as she watched a program on television the other day. No, I’m not perfect — I haven’t slung the TV out the window like a person probably should. And, yes, I allow her to watch a show now and then. This particular one is called “Rescue Heroes” and they pretty much just go around rescuing people whether they like it or not. And they tell kids not to start fires. That seems reasonable. So, yeah, I let her watch it.

As I sat with her, a commercial came on for something called K12. The advertisement seemed just too bouncy and giddy to be legitimate. Children were raving about their magnificent experiences being schooled at home through their computers. And as if to reassure the parents, it was highlighted that all of that glorious learning came through public school lesson plans. I mean, these kids were absolutely beaming, as joyous as if Rocky Canyon had just rescued them from a wolverine’s jaws!

After I finished watching the amazing rescues, I decided to look into this K12 thing. I’ve realized that the stench of privatization is quite noticeable if you are paying attention, and it pops up in the most unlikely places. I had a hunch this was to be one of those times.

I found out that this K12 enterprise now has over 80,000 students pounding away on laptops, making it one of the largest “districts” in the nation. The thing is, it’s not a school district. It’s a publicly traded entity that actually makes profits off of the students. It’s traded under ticker symbol LRN. No, they aren’t cashing in on kiddie carpal tunnel surgery — they get public funding as if the kids were sitting in traditional classrooms. Surprisingly, providing online content and no gym locker equals big profits for the “educators” who have waded into the pixilated education of our youth.

This is the world of Charter Schools — under state laws these schools generally can’t make a profit, but there’s a catch, always a catch…. The school boards can select for-profit management companies, like K12, to oversee the burgeoning one-screen schoolhouses that are popping up around the nation. They get almost as much per child as traditional schools (with generally just enough cost savings to brag about). It’s a very inexpensive manner to deliver “education”. There exists home after home of children leashed to their computers –that is, if they actually even bother doing the online studies. Shockingly, truancy is quite common with the process.

Just who are these groundbreaking individuals who have found this sweet spot of public fund availability?

No other than Michael Milken (yeah, that Junk Bond guy, James’ crappy brother), and former Goldman Sachs banker, Ron Packard. These two were there at the beginning of K12. When teachers are asked why they went into that profession, they generally comment that they felt driven to teach. Packard makes it clear what their intentions were in the article, “Education According to Mike Milken” by John Hechinger. Packard said: “Mike believes that education is a phenomenal investment opportunity.” He optimistically predicts: “There’s no reason why eventually you can’t be educating a billion kids online.”

If you don’t recall, Milken gained notoriety during the heady bond trading days of the 1980s. It was the beginning of the Greed is Good crowd. Milken was indicted on 98 counts of racketeering and fraud during this time and he ended up pleading guilty to six counts of securities and tax violations. He went to jail for almost two years, but it really didn’t seem to hurt his bottom line too much. He has a comfortable perch as #488 in the Forbes list of Billionaires.

It’s really getting pretty difficult to startle me. I’ve become fairly numb by the constant loot grabs in the name of the “free” market. But mining our kids for coins, especially ones who are vulnerable for this reason or that — I’m afraid that’s when a society becomes fully driven by parasites ready to explode from their feasting. It’s simply too much.

This exploits a common trend. Parents look for solutions to school problems such as overcrowding and bullying. The worse conditions are, the more students will flow into these extremely cheap to manage, online schools. It’s another one of those instances where the dismantling of traditional social structures reaps large rewards on the very detractors helping to create the problem. It’s a time honored tradition in the war against collective well-being.

I’ve read that these groups often become aligned with poor school districts, forming an alliance of benefit to all but the kids. Do we really need to pretend that something of this nature is legitimate? Is that the hope we have for our children — to be placed in front of a computer at the earliest of ages, bathed in a creepy laptop light for the greater part of the day? It’s a conditioning method that will, no doubt, breed an even more docile worker in the future. A world without recess as the CEOs of companies like K12 frolic in the sun?

One can draw their own conclusions about the intentions of the myriad of think-tanks that come up with their own profitable solutions to our school problems. They serve up the rationales for this unraveling process. The arguments inevitably encourage the Charter School path. Don’t forget that nice loophole when you hear about these solutions — the ones that allow for private management of those Charter schools.

If only Rocky Canyon could swoop down and save the kids from the lurking Privateers.

According to the National Education Association (NEA), a charter school is “a primary or secondary school that receives public money but is not subject to some of the rules, regulations and statutes that apply to public schools, in exchange for some type of accountability for producing certain results, which are set forth in each school’s charter.”

Parents of color are encouraged to believe that charter schools are the panacea to the obstacles their children face due to institutional racism and underfunding in the public schools. But are charter schools truly the answer to inequality in schools? No! The truth must be exposed to stop these for-profit organizations.

Two-tier Education, Union-busting, Lower Living Standards

Charter schools actually hinder the development of students of color in several ways, while at the same time eroding the quality of public education.

First, they increase classroom segregation by race. In 2010, the UCLA Civil Rights Project released a study showing that 7 of ten Black charter school students attend schools with extremely low numbers of white students. It also found that 32 percent of charter school students are Black — twice the percentage as in public schools.

These schools aggravate other kinds of segregation as well. They gain access to lists of high-achieving students and poach them from public schools. They cherry-pick their students with a restrictive enrollment application and are legally allowed to reject students with special needs: those with physical or cognitive disabilities, for example, or English language learners. What’s even more appalling is that this exclusion is done with taxpayers’ money! Publicly funded schools should be required to serve the needs of all children — not just the ones with the best chance of success.

Charters are also the trigger for union-busting. Teachers’ unions, longtime defenders of quality schools, have to be silenced in order for public schools to be closed and replaced with charters. Most charter school teachers have no union representation and can be terminated for any reason as long as the decision is not based illegally on a characteristic like age, race or sex.

Imagine working under that kind of pressure with 40 students or more in a classroom! This helps to explain why the average teacher in a charter school works there for less than five years.

Public school teachers are required to have earned a bachelor’s degree and gone through a student teaching program. Charter school teachers are not. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the NEA are two unions that were created to ensure that educators would have rights as professionals, health benefits, and wages above the minimum.

Children will suffer and the living standards of U.S. workers will drop if the teachers’ unions are broken and a two-tier educational system takes hold.

Education for the masses!

Originally, freed slaves — defying threats to their lives — established the public education system in the South as a tool to empower disenfranchised African Americans and to create equal educational opportunities for all people. I vehemently defend public education because I, myself, am a successful product of the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest public school system in the nation!

With encouragement from my family and some very hard-working, dedicated teachers, I beat the odds in spite of my humble beginnings.

Had charter schools been around when I was growing up, I would not have been able to attend due to their selective rules. Many require a minimum of two hours per week of on-site parent volunteer service. That would have eliminated me because my dad worked two jobs to support the family. Charters also often require that parents provide lunch daily for their children. Once again I would have been excluded. And the uniform requirement?! I again would have been left out; my mom sewed my clothes because there was no money to buy them.

Would I have been missing out on a stellar education? Probably not.

In 2009, the Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (Stanford University) presented a study comparing charter schools and public schools. Charter schools outperformed public schools only about 17 percent of the time. Nearly 46 percent of charter schools are on par with public schools. However, about 37 percent of charters are rated academically lower. Other factors being fairly equal, how is it possible to start with the “cream of the crop” and yet produce sour milk more than a third of the time?!

Charter schools have sprung up rapidly in New Orleans, New York, Georgia, California, and elsewhere. We need to fight against this destructive wave of ineptitude that charter schools have initiated.

Antidote: United Defense of Public Education

Quality public schools can be an effective road out of a cycle of poverty. They can reduce social inequality, help youngsters achieve their potential, and provide good union jobs for people who care about children. So, how do we fight for them?

Our unions must once again strive to build solidarity with the community — where parents of color are often in the lead. We can also take a giant step in fighting back by participating in ongoing campaigns.

As I write, one immediately upcoming opportunity will present itself July 28-31 in Washington, D.C., where Save Our Schools (SOS) is holding a several-day conference and organizing a march. SOS demands include equitable funding for all public school communities; an end to high stakes testing used for the purpose of student, teacher, and school evaluation; teacher, family, and community leadership in forming public education policies; and curriculum developed for, and by, local school communities.

As the famous and deservedly popular anti-war slogan has it, “It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need, and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber!”

•  This article first appeared at Freedom Socialist newspaper, Vol. 32, No. 4, August-September, 2011

We, on the other hand, are full of “life!”
We eat pizza and watch television.
Water magically appears at our fingers.
Our skin is bathed in emollients.
Our babies are full-throated and fat.
Our bodies are soft, and shaped like gourds.
We drive everywhere in S.U.V.’s.
We vote for politicians who despise us.
We are proud of our democracy.

The people of Somalia vote with their feet.
They trudge the hot sands, looking for water.
The soles of their feet are hard as tires.
They know nothing of Global Warming,
Population over-shoot, Earth’s carrying capacity.
Their carrying capacity
Is a baby on each raw hip.

The poor among us are deliberately poor.
Anyone with gumption can make a million.
Our hard times will pass and we’ll get back to normal:
Proms and Christmases, first kisses,
Change we can believe in, reality TV.
We’ll die and we’ll kill for inalienable rights:
Happy Meals, water at our fingers;
Our right to be oblivious; our right to
Life, liberty and a perennial mirage.

Speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival, they explained how Stand for Children, a nonprofit ostensibly dedicated to helping “all children get the excellent public education…they need to thrive,” helped push through legislation in Illinois aimed at severely restricting teacher union rights.

Their panel discussion, titled “If It Can Happen There, It Can Happen Anywhere: Transformational Education Legislation in Illinois,” began with Crown painting a picture of an all-powerful teachers union that consistently blocks education reform and has a stranglehold on Illinois politics:

[W]e had a mayor who talked importantly about reforming the schools, Mayor Daley, and we had a CEO of public schools, Arne Duncan, who did everything he could in that environment. But this was not a fair fight. Because of the political strength and the organized strength of the unions, who, each time they came up to a contract session, would not concede on length of day, would not concede on teacher metrics and would insist on additional compensation. And that’s the way things have gone for an entire generation in terms of negotiated outcome.

Crown was particularly angry that teachers in Illinois had maintained their right to strike. “In forty-five of the fifty states there is no right to strike by teachers,” he protested. “So this was an incredibly strike permissive environment with these other efforts by the unions, and so forth, that created an unsustainable structure in our school system.”

But for Crown, whose family has long been a pillar of the Chicago financial elite, this environment changed when Jonah Edelman and Stand for Children got involved.

Stand for Children (SFC) is a Portland, Ore.-based non-profit that emerged out of a 1996 march of over a quarter-million people in Washington, D.C. The aim of the march was to highlight child poverty at a time when Congress and the Clinton administration were preparing to “end welfare as we know it.” According to Susan Barrett, a parent volunteer who recently stepped down from her position in Portland’s SFC chapter, Jonah Edelman:

and a co-founder set up a home base in Oregon, and worked on smaller issues with positive impact, such as after-school program funding and emergency dental care for uninsured kids. Many parents like me who joined SFC a while back still remember how it was an organization fighting for the Portland Children’s Levy, which provided funds for early childhood education, foster care, child abuse prevention programs and a variety of other programs centered on children.

But in the last couple years, Stand for Children has seen an influx of corporate cash that drastically changed the organization’s priorities.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of SFC’s earlier big donors, began by offering a two-year grant of $80,000 in 2005. In the last few years, however, possibly because it realized that SFC could be an effective ally in pushing the corporate model for education reform, the Gates Foundation drastically enlarged its contributions. In 2007, Stand for Children received a $682,565 grant. In 2009, it got a $971,280 grant, and in 2010, it received a $3,476,300 grant—all from the Gates Foundation.

Though the Gates Foundation remains the biggest donor to Stand for Children, other players in the world of corporate education reform have also begun to see SFC as an effective vehicle to push their agenda.

New Profit Inc. is the other major player that has funded SFC since 2008—to the tune of $1,458,500. According to its website, New Profit is a “national venture philanthropy fund that seeks to harness America’s spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship to help solve the country’s biggest social problems.” New Profit’s “strategic partner” is Monitor Group, a consulting firm that was recently criticized for signing a $3 million contract with Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi for a PR campaign aimed at rehabilitating the regime’s image.

The Walton Family Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the extremely wealthy owners of Wal-Mart, made a 2010 grant of $1,378,527. Several other major funders are tied to Bain Capital, a private equity and venture capital firm founded by Mitt Romney—currently the frontrunner for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

To think that bedfellows like these are just handing over millions in cash and expecting nothing in return would be naïve. As Susan Barrett wrote in an eye-opening article about the changing atmosphere inside Stand for Children:

Parents and community members most likely do not know that SFC now has private equity investors and venture philanthropists on the board, making decisions for the organization as it grows new chapters…

My fear is that unwitting parents and community members will join SFC because they want to rectify the problems they see every day in their children’s public schools, such as underfunding, lack of arts programs, large class sizes and cuts to the school year, only to find that they get roped into very different goals. With SFC inspiring many of its members to run for school board seats, and the funding it gives through its PAC, I worry we will lose a truly democratic discussion and action on education weighted in favor of corporate reforms.

Barrett goes on to explain how the priorities of the Portland chapter have changed:

About three years ago, some team leaders at my school became uncomfortable when they were asked to engage in what they considered to be tacky conversations with teachers around hiring practices. When a fellow parent and I were asked to take over as the new team leaders for this school year, we were cautioned about this, but otherwise, we all assumed SFC was working to enhance public education, and this was just a minor mistake along the way…That was a red flag, but now, as I look back and connect the dots, I see so many more.

I think about the visits from the Policy Director of the New Teacher Project, and the former aide to New York City charter operator Eva Moskowitz, who said she was moving to Portland and trying to set up a chapter of Democrats for Education Reform, the pro-charter, hedge-fund driven organization. I think about their push for Oregon to submit a Race to the Top application, (which the state did initially, but it failed); and how the organization acted as the “social justice partner “of Waiting for “Superman” and urged parents to attend the film. Only recently did I come to realize that the SFC Portland director, Tyler Whitmire, is the daughter of Richard Whitmire, author of The Bee Eater, a book lavishing praise on Michelle Rhee.

This past year, Oregon SFC staff wanted us to press our legislators to pass a “bipartisan education package,” which basically tied the release of much-needed school funding to the expansion of charter schools, online learning, and other so-called “reforms.” SFC also pushed to lower the capital gains tax….

This stance is a great departure from what people would normally expect of SFC, and only makes sense when you see the wealthy investors on SFC’s National Board of Directors, and how billionaire philanthropists like Bill Gates and the Walton Family Foundation are now funding and driving the organization’s agenda.

As SFC begins to expand across the country, new chapters will likely be controlled from the top with the corporate-driven agenda as their first priority.

This was certainly the case in Illinois, where Stand for Children played a part in crafting what they are touting as their biggest victory yet: Senate Bill 7.

SB 7, which passed the Illinois Senate in a unanimous vote and the General Assembly with a single dissenter, undermines seniority as the basis of teacher job security and specifically singles out the Chicago Teachers Union by severely restricting its right to strike.

Which brings us back to Jonah Edelman and his unrestrained arrogance. At the Aspen Ideas Festival—sponsored by the Aspen Institute, another Gates Foundation recipient that works on corporate education schemes such as the Teachers as Human Capital Project—Edelman caused an uproar for his comments about SB 7.

In a speech caught on video, Edelman gives a step-by-step account of how Stand For Children worked to undermine teacher union rights in Illinois. After explaining how SFC essentially bought a handful of Illinois legislators with campaign contributions—most crucially, Assembly Speaker Michael Madigan, a Democrat who had been shunned by the unions after pushing to cut teachers’ pensions a year earlier—Edelman explains SFCs strategy:

After the election, Advance Illinois and Stand had drafted a very bold proposal we called Performance Counts. It tied tenure and layoffs to performance. It let principals hire who they choose. It streamlined dismissal of ineffective tenured teachers substantially—from two-plus years and $200,000 in legal fees, on average, to three to four months, with very little likelihood of legal recourse.

And most importantly, we called for the reform of collective bargaining throughout the state—essentially, proposing that school boards would be able to decide any disputed issue at impasse. So a very, very bold proposal for Illinois, and one that six months earlier would have been unthinkable, undiscussable.

And after the election, I went back to Madigan…I reviewed the proposal, and I confirmed his support…The next day he created an education reform committee, and his political director called to ask for our suggestions for who should be on it. And so in Aurora, Ill., in December, out of nowhere, there were hearings on our proposal…

In addition we hired 11 lobbyists, including the four best insiders and seven of the best minority lobbyists, preventing the unions from hiring them. We enlisted a statewide public affairs firm…We raised $3 million for our political action committee between the election and the end of the year. That’s more money than either of the unions have in their political action committees.

And so essentially, what we did in a very short period of time was shift the balance of power. I can tell you there was a palpable sense of concern, if not shock, on the part of the teachers unions in Illinois that Speaker Madigan had changed allegiance, and that we had clear political capability to potentially jam this proposal down their throats, the same way the pension reform had been jammed down their throats six months earlier.

Stand’s “Performance Counts” was used as a battering ram to get the less harsh Senate Bill 7. As Edelman explained, “[B]ecause we started extreme, we gave ourselves room to come back….And so, in the course of three months…[the unions] essentially gave away every single provision related to teacher effectiveness that we had proposed…Not irrationally, not idealistically. It wasn’t a change of heart. It’s because they feared that we were able to potentially execute our collective bargaining proposal.”

Edelman’s anti-union comments rightly produced outrage among union and education activists and Edelman, realizing he had blown Stand for Children’s progressive cover, issued an extended apology. Edelman said he regretted that he “left children mostly out of the equation,” and that the speech “could cause viewers to wrongly conclude that I’m against unions.” The lengthy apology was obviously nothing more than an attempt to rehabilitate the image of SFC and Edelman.

For their part, the leaders of Illinois’ three main education unions blasted Edelman in a joint statement:

We heard a lot from Jonah Edelman about power in politics, power over unions and management power over teachers. Sadly, we didn’t hear anything in that hour-long session about improving education…What’s worse is that these false claims clearly show an organizational agenda that has nothing to do with helping kids learn.

What should be clear after reading Edelman’s remarks is that Stand for Children, rather than standing for the rights of poor children, has become an organization that stands for Corporate America. In order to push its agenda, groups like SFC try to get parents and other community members who care about education to buy into the myth that teachers have bloated pensions and are impossible to fire.

But any real account of the current atmosphere for teachers flies in the face of this fairy tale.

Chicago, in particular, has seen its school system devastated by a slew of corporate reformers: Paul Vallas (1995-2001), who later became the architect behind the union-busting and charterization plan in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina; Arne Duncan (2001-2008), who privatized Chicago public schools at a rate of about 10 per year before becoming Barack Obama’s Education Secretary; Ron Huberman (2009-2010), who weakened protections for probationary teachers and cut sports programs, while paying exorbitant salaries to central office officials; and now Jean-Claude Brizard (2010-present), the former superintendent of Rochester, N.Y., where 95 percent of teachers voted “no confidence” in his administration.

Chicago has become a testing ground for corporate education policy, which has created a terrible atmosphere for teachers.

For example, a week before the Edelman scandal broke, the Chicago Reader printed an insightful story by Ben Joravsky about a Chicago Public Schools teacher that debunks the teachers-are-impossible-to-fire myth. According to Joravsky, Allison Bates, a third-year science teacher at a high school called Austin Polytechnical Academy, “was fired and banned from working anywhere in CPS for the unforgivable sin of—hold on to your hats, folks—not putting her lesson plans in the red folder, as her principal told her.”

Bates’ first principal had given her an “excellent” rating, but within a year, he was promoted to the central office and replaced by a new principal from North Carolina, and Bates was given an “unsatisfactory” rating. This rating had nothing to do with her ability to manage a classroom or teach science to her students, but was due to her forgetting to follow the principal’s instructions to put printed-out copies of her lesson plans in a red folder.

As Joravsky points out:

[P]robationary teachers—that is, those with less than four years in the classroom—have no tenure rights. They have their jobs on a year-to-year basis and can be fired without much of an explanation. Moreover, probationary teachers who are given unsatisfactory evaluations and who are not rehired at their schools are slapped with a do-not-hire designation. Principals can hire back teachers evaluated as unsatisfactory, but if they don’t, the teachers are essentially banned from ever teaching anywhere in the CPS system.

This story reveals that the complaints of Edelman and James Crown about the difficulties in firing teachers are nothing more than a pretext for attacking what few rights teachers have left.

For the first several years, when teachers are in their probationary period, they can be fired for almost any reason. When teachers receive “tenure,” they can still be fired—the difference is that now they have access to due process, a basic right written into most union contracts, and they can file a grievance if they feel they were unjustly terminated.

Though cloaked in language about helping children, the purpose of further restricting teachers’ rights to due process and to strike is to take control of the classroom out of the hands of teachers and the communities they serve—and putting it under the authority of corporate boardrooms.

Breaking the teachers’ unions—now the largest sector of organized labor in the U.S.—is about smashing any organized resistance to the bipartisan drive for austerity. Edelman’s comments may be unique in their candor, but the ideas he espouses are commonplace among corporate education reformers—whether they come in Republican or Democratic clothing.

As the Edelman scandal makes clear, the ruling class is preparing to export the strategy it adopted in Illinois to the rest of the country. It will be up to teachers, parents and students to expose organizations like Stand for Children—and organize the fight to defend public education.

I know, I know. Never heard of it, right? Yeah, I wish too. It was being discussed in many of the places we happened through. Vicksburg, Pensacola, Tallulah — it was as if this child was a relative to all. Wisps of conversations floating about.

I spotted a waitress in Jonesboro, Arkansas showing her phone to a coworker. At first I thought, well, that’s sweet; she’s showing a photo of her child she’s proud of. But then I saw the screen of her phone (she was near me and I’m quite nosy). It was a photo of the Anthony girl. The waitress was visibly shaken; she was telling someone about that trial and her displeasure with the jury results. Frantic nods were exchanged as the women looked with wet eyes at the digital image of a toddler.

This got me to thinking about the effects of immediacy and empathy. This child of the South was being mourned with obvious zeal, but grief for the countless children who are currently dying from things like drone attacks isn’t something being experienced in these venues. That’s just nonsense to ponder, really. The media has focused on this one child almost as an exhaust valve for well meaning individuals who just absorb the news they are fed; people who still evidently have the capacity to grieve for someone they don’t even know. And it certainly keeps discussion away from the more concrete and systemic ailments facing this nation.

One wonders if the mainstream media picked one single child from Afghanistan, a child killed in a drone attack. Could they foster the same empathy if countless photos of an adorable, large eyed child were available (of course, they wouldn’t be, but for comparison sake….)? If the child’s milestones were described, if crying relatives were placed on the news with continued stories each night, maybe some of her friends could describe how much they miss her. Could the same level of loss be arrived at by these women in the far flung regions of the South? I really don’t know the answer to that question, but it’s not like this will be tested out. Americans aren’t supposed to grieve for those others, and their news will not avail the opportunity.

Those kids are statistics but ours are precious.

I know that the salacious aspects of this case probably piqued the interest of those who normally don’t follow news of any kind, but it is undeniable that this is what is served to these individuals. It’s not like they have easily accessible information on anything other than the three or four stories that have been agreed upon as the news to be chewed up, regurgitated and stuffed into their baby bird mouths.

I’ve learned from coworkers who refused to allow me that precious ignorance I had in regard to this case that the mom was involved in “Hot Body” contests after her child was dead. I’m sure you have similar helpful people in your lives. The ones who make sure you know about the things that you don’t want to know about. It’s all very generous of them. But it did spark a thought:

Maybe the child deaths in Iraq weren’t so newsworthy in the previous years because of a lack of a Hot Body angle. If only Rummy had competed in Hot Body contests. He might have received some sympathy votes for his old saggy ass, and maybe the depleted uranium babies could have merited an expert or two on Headline News.

Obama pretty much just does his own personal “Hot Body” contests; they aren’t done on the road or in public, so probably no follow up on the Afghanistan drone attacks. He oils up in front of the mirror in the Lincoln bedroom in his underpants, cigarette dangling from his lips. “Who’s a hot body? You’re a hot body.” (he talks about himself in the third person). As he starts to pull his underpants down for part two of his performance his handler comes in. “Yes, yes, I’m working on the speech“ (he clears his throat and adjusts the underpants) “Two words for you: predator drones. You will never see it coming.”

“That’s perfect, Mr. Bateman, I mean, President Obama. Everyone will think it’s funny to mention the Jonas Brothers in coordination with predator drones. That’s comedy gold.”

I know it’s a difficult job for Fox, CNN, and MSNBC. You can’t know if the child deaths will have any Hot Body connection so you really don’t know whether to employ the experts or not. Like everything in the journalistic world these days, it’s all so “unexpected”.

I’m probably being a bit aggressive in not mentioning that, of course, any child death is a tragedy beyond scope; it’s just another sad example of American Narcissism (yes, I capitalized that; it seems necessary). So many brutal and tragic demises are just cast upon the carnage heap that is Empire Gone Wild. The mainstream media decides who and what deserves compassion, and it isn’t anyone hapless enough to be born in a nation needin’ bombing.

I’m not sure what the next diversion of the week will be, but I do know one thing:

“Two words for you: Conscientious Reporting. You definitely will not see it.”

Glenn Taylor is a much younger man. His life had not even begun when the black liberation struggle in the United States of the 1950s and 1960s was at its height. As he freely admits in his novel’s afterword, he has only read and heard about it. Yet, he has created a scenario in his novel, The Marrowbone Marble Company that challenges today’s reader to consider not only the United States’ racial and economic past, but its current situation. His text equals Baldwin’s fiction in capturing the raw emotional tension of the period, while describing a social wound that has yet to heal. As these works make clear, it is a wound that may never heal as long as there are men and women in power who insist on picking at that wound’s scabs, thereby reinfecting it with the pus of hatred and ignorance.

The geographical locales of these two novels could not be more different. Just Above My Head takes place in the streets of 1950s Harlem, the cities and theatres of Europe and for a brief and dangerous spell, the churches and country roads of the US South. Taylor’s characters populate a mountainside cut in the backwoods of West Virginia. The time period shares that of Baldwin’s work: the 1950s through the late 1960s; and each locale’s torment is uncomfortably and ashamedly similar. I say ashamedly because it is the psychological locale defined by a race hatred that is aggravated by economics and police. Uncomfortably because it is a place all too many of us have experienced.

Glenn Taylor’s primary protagonist is a man whose parents died violently when he was young. This man, named Loyal Ledford, began working at a local glass factory when he was thirteen. Like most every other man at the time, he went into the military to fight in World War Two. Also, like most other men in that war, what he saw in that war forever changed him. He realized violence inside him that he never had acknowledged before. He also decided that there were certain injustices he could not abide. It is the latter reality that insures his future. After the war, he meets a man in college whose life has brought him to the conclusion that he must do something to end the US South’s racial apartheid. In Ledford, this man, Reverend Don Staples, finds a willing ally with resources. After a series of incidents at the glass factory that Ledford has returned to work as an executive, Ledford and his family, Staples and a few others set up an interracial community in a locale known as the Marrowbone Cut. Their experiment in antiracist living does not go unnoticed. Racist police officials and greedy businessmen cooperate with amoral politicians in an ongoing effort to subvert a future that history tells us was not up to them.

It is this same future that James Baldwin spent his lifetime exploring. Likewise, it is the same history that he wrote about. That history is perhaps best summed up in one line from a letter Baldwin’s publisher included in the brief yet powerful 1962 testament titled The Fire Next Time. “I know,” wrote Baldwin to his nephew. “What the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it.” Like the Freedom Riders beaten to within an inch of death, Baldwin’s brother suffered the beatings upon his body and soul that can only come with the angry and irrational barbarism of racism. For James Baldwin, that brother was not only the one with whom he shared the bonds of blood, but also all of those with whom he shared the bonds of race.

The Freedom Riders were committed to a strategy of nonviolence. Even while fists and feet rained bloody blows upon their bodies, they adhered to this strategy. This commitment was founded in expectations of justice that the powerful few dismissed as mere fancy. In Baldwin’s novels and in Taylor’s The Marrowbone Marble Company many of the characters also attempt to replicate this philosophy. However, the relentless presence of violence in their lives occasionally proved too much.

Sometimes it is the case that the wrath of a terrible swift sword is the only justice that can be served. This fact does not diminish the heroism of those that utilize the sword. It does, however, hint to their humanity. For, while one’s inspiration can be the gospel of nonviolence, the reality of the narratives discussed here is the presence of violence in every man’s soul. Like the movement for liberation that provides the setting for these stories, the struggle between that inspiration and reality also defines the struggle itself.

Human Resources begins with the psychological research on animal behavior, how rat, dog, pigeon behavior might be shaped. Behaviorist scientists John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner applied the behavior-shaping experiments to humans.

The human experiments turned even more sinister with an emphasis on eugenics, which is based in the notion that there are superior and inferior humans, superior and inferior races. Academia was very much involved in this movement, and as the documentary points out, it went to the highest levels of government, as president Calvin Coolidge supported eugenicist notions. Corporations funded the research, with the Rockefellers playing “a particularly devious role,” said historian Sharon Smith.

Rebecca Lemov, author of World as Laboratory, said the Rockefeller largesse made for the most funded social science project in history.

Taylorism and the Disempowerment of Workers

Even though moral philosopher Adam Smith had warned against the division of labor, another man, Frederick Taylor, disagreed. He atomized the workplace and work tasks. He set target times for worker tasks. This increased efficiency but at a cost of de-skilling workers and disempowering them.

Skilled labor was undermined by the atomization of tasks, the result being a loss of power and control by skilled workers. The exemplar is the assembly line instituted by anti-worker Henry Ford, which consolidated hierarchical control.

Human Resources calls it dehumanizing.

Labor does not need to be dehumanizing though. Human Resources interviews Michael Albert who, with Robin Hahnel, espouses an economy called participatory economics – or parecon. Albert says the corporation is pathological.¹ The pathology is the drive for profit without concern for people or the environment. The parecon workplace is egalitarian.

Paradoxically, Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin supported Taylorism’s scientific management although it was disliked by workers. Human Resources quotes Lenin: “Socialism is merely state-capitalist monopoly.” If this is the case, then the state has merely replaced the corporations in the economic system, and the Marxist refrain of a dictatorship of the proletariat becomes a meaningless slogan.

Human Resources argues that Lenin and Trotsky destroyed socialist institutions and waged a war against anarchists. They forced industrialization, leading to totalitarianism.

Thus, argues anarchist professor, Noam Chomsky, the term “socialism” became degraded.

Mikhail Bakunin, an anarchist opponent of authoritarian Communism, had foreseen the dangers of the state. Consequently, hierarchical political systems became entrenched worldwide.

Political scientist Stephen M. Sacks discusses the Hawthorne experiments, which looked at the quantity of work and worker satisfaction. It found that having discussions with workers, regardless of whether or not workers concerns were taken into consideration, increased productivity. Sachs says it doesn’t have to be that way. The workplace can be democratized.

Why should the economic system not be rational, for example, like a parecon?

Educating Workers

Educator John Taylor Gatto, author of Dumbing Us Down, illustrated how the education system makes people unable to think in context. Initially, he says, compulsory schooling was resisted by parents (who battled for control) and enforced by state militia.

Corporations, however, feared educated workers, and students were converted into “obedient tools.”

Educational theorist Alfie Kohn extolled on the paucity of critical thinking and debilitation of forced competition. He argues against grading because grades 1) cause a loss of interest in learning; i.e., it is no longer learning for the sake of knowledge, 2) lead to shallower thinking, and 3) lead students to choose easier tasks (the logical choice).

Competition, says Kohn, undermines character and destroys relations. He points to research which shows that competition isn’t necessary for excellence and tends to impede excellence at most tasks. Competition disrupts more difficult tasks and problem solving.

“Excellence,” he says “pulls in one direction and competition in another.”

If the system is one of competition, then that system must have winners and losers of competition. What does that mean for a society?

The Origins of Violence

Noble segues into causes of violence. He turns again to behaviorist psychology (which really does not have that much sway in contemporary psychology) and the frustration-aggression hypothesis which states that thwarting people from achieving their just rewards frustrates them and leads to aggression.

Human Resources portrays rampant hatred of the other in American society that is promulgated by the media. Historian Howard Zinn, in one of his last interviews, saw an intentionality in design; the hatred of others is scapegoating — deflecting the anger onto to others so the system can perpetuate itself.

Anthropologist Elliot Leyton even implied the system as being partially responsible for mass murders. He saw multiple murderers as “alienated individuals … that represent central cultural themes” that “are relatively ignored by government institutions…”

Governments, said Leyton, focus much more on control of public than serial and mass killers. “Governments and politicians are the main killers.” The state is a mass murderer.

Human Resources holds that modern military training best encapsulates the frustration-aggression hypothesis. The military funnels frustration into hatred and fear of a group.

Fear was used to manipulate human behavior.

Mind-control Experimentation

The CIA’s mind-control project MKULTRA “abandon[ed] any pretense to morality, leading to a nightmarish search for the holy grail of social engineering: a fully controlled, fully obedient human being.”

Projects included Artichoke, Bluebird, MKULTRA (truth serum, mind wipes) etc. Since 1973 these projects remain classified.

Under the auspices of the government, military, CIA, academia (universities and “leading professors”) drug, electroshock, brain surgery, noise manipulation, and other experiments were carried out on animals, patients, soldiers, citizens, and even children as “unwitting guinea pigs” for various drugs. Among the outcomes were psychosis and death. Compensation is denied for many cases.

Psychiatrist Colin Ross says authorities typically deny human experimentation, or when undeniable blame the laxer restraints of the time period. In the case of children used in mind-control experiments, national security was proffered as a justification.

MKULTRA was deemed a failure except that it produced Kubark, in essence a “torture manual.” It detailed deprivation experiments, stress positions, and electric shock – all used by US personnel on humans at Abu Ghraib, as horrific video shows.

How is that humans can live in a system that subjects them unwittingly to dangerous experimentation? How is it they can allow their country to terrorize people in other countries in a “war on terror”?

Human Resources points to TV and its fear-based programming which becomes reality. TV entertains but it also induces passivity and suggestibility in people.

Eugenics underlies Human Resources. Yet, a capacity for cruelty has been demonstrated in supposedly learned people, even by those who might consider themselves superior: management, politicians, commanders, and doctors.

Human Resources is another excellent documentary by Noble – a documentary that should cause all people to question the nature of the society they live in, who the authorities serve — and even more — should society have authorities, should it exist as a hierarchy? The film causes us to ask who we should fear – the authorities who pursue the development of weapons of mass destruction, who develop and implement the practice of torture, who use their own citizenry as unwitting guinea pigs? Who is the genuine terrorizer? Who is the genuine enemy?

1. The thesis of another excellent documentary, The Corporation.

Was the Tucson massacre a form of political violence? Some have argued that it was, by virtue of the fact that the principal target was an elected official. Many on the right, including Palin, have objected to this characterization, arguing that “blaming the right” or any one else is intrinsically unfair and that the mindless crime occurred simply because the perpetrator was mentally ill and unhinged. Since the assassin was ‘sick,’ this cannot be seen as a ‘political act.’ The allegedly deranged mental state of the perpetrator becomes an opening to ‘de-politicize’ the crime. This is, simply put, a ruse.

I have for some time been analyzing the “ecology of fear” and the climate of hatred it generates to feed the growing menace of presumably random acts of violence in Arizona and other parts of the country, especially those that have a strong presence of right-wing partisan groups like elements of the Tea Party, Minutemen, and others. At the outset, we need to recognize and include other victims within the same realm of recent killings that were caused or promoted by right-wing partisan hatred and direct calls made by right-wing extremists for acts of political violence, oftentimes attached to a sense of entitlement that right-wing extremists express through an emotional appeal to the right to defend their land, families, and territory.

Under these circumstances, we have to include the murder of ten year-old Brisenia Flores and her father during a home invasion in a Phoenix suburb on May 10, 2009 by members of a ring-wing militia group. In this case, the motivating political objective was ridding the state of Arizona of ‘illegal aliens.’ Indeed, the U.S. has a long history of such violence and correspondingly incoherent but hate-filled vitriol, dating to the earliest days of the enterprise.

We must therefore be receptive to the idea that the ideologically-hostile climate produced by exaggerated ring-wing grievances about ethnic, racial, class, and other sources of resentment is a serious problem in our public culture, and thus limits democracy. Despite the underlying validity of this argument, I do not agree that this is the most positive and productive approach to take in seeking to address the problem of a lack of a civil, equitable, and democratic political culture in this nation. What is needed instead is a movement toward a more transformative dialogue about peace and democracy, grounded in the lived experiences of our families and communities.

We are all partly made into the type of human we embody as a result of the child-rearing practices we experience. These practices are not epiphenomenal or coincidental. The way we raise children is as revealing about the biography of the becoming of a person as it is of the societal structure and general cultural values, mores, and norms that play a significant role in creating the ‘public persona’ (the person that interacts with others in the public sphere). In particular, we can look to exemplars like the “Zapoteca” of La Paz, Oaxaca, Mexico — a cultural inquiry that, incidentally, could be banned in Arizona as part of the now prohibited pursuit of “ethnic studies” — who are revered across the world for their practice of “socialization for peace.”

Research by anthropologists, including Douglas Fry (1993) among others, has long suggested that there are human communities where it is possible to raise children in a manner that reduces violence, aggression, and exuberant physicality or ‘toughness.’ For example, the Zapotec are known to rear their children to value “respect for elders” and “sharing as a virtue.” These norms are part of a complex set of practices that produce what scholars call “socialization for peace.” The Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace, and Conflict entry for “La Paz Zapotec” of Mexico illustrates this in ethnographic detail.

The idea that cultures exist that emphasize “socialization for peace” may be viable in Oaxaca, Mexico, but is it is also viable anywhere else we wish to become more mindful of the effects and consequences of our child-rearing practices? Could it be that socialization for peace will result in a culture that produces very few “sociopaths”? The Zapotec of La Paz (Spanish for “Peace”) have some of the lowest crime rates in the world including a near absence of murder. It can certainly be stated that the Zapotec have never produced a serial or mass murderer.

This seems quite unlike our dominant avarice-driven, self-centered, and neo-Darwinian approach to child-rearing that gets kids to compete ruthlessly for attention while encouraging them to engage in banal acquisitiveness as a route to self-realization. This suggests that, while our society is very complicated, it has not truly attained the level of norm-setting and values-defining sophistication evident in the child-rearing practices of the Zapotecs. This apparently pervasive deficit — and not some naturalized proclivity of the American character toward avarice, competition, and violence — likely makes more advanced forms of justice and juridical normative control difficult to attain broadly in our society.

Native Americans have long held that the roots of the American Republic are steeped in systemic and even gloriously and religiously-inscribed violence. We could argue the point endlessly but the fact remains that the Zapoteca have experienced some 400+ years of colonialism, racism, land theft, structural violence, and every other imaginable indignity and violent deprivation imposed by outsiders. Amazingly, they continue to socialize their children for peacefulness despite their experience of four centuries of inter-generational historical trauma and structural violence. Despite this inter-generational suffering, the Zapoteca have persisted because of their culture of resilience which empowers them to refuse being reduced to the detritus of neoliberal capitalism. They are not merely ghosts of ‘primitive accumulation.’

I know many Zapotecas and other Mesoamerican people who are part of a post-NAFTA Diaspora into the U.S. and Canada. From L.A. to Seattle, I have been privileged over the years to work with Mesoamerican Diaspora farmers as part of our collaborative engagement in the new urban agriculture movement and its basic struggle for food sovereignty. Along the way, I have heard stories of violence and peace and witnessed the parenting of youth. Mesoamerican members of the South Central Farmers Feeding Families have shared stories of great-grandmothers who were forcibly raped and kidnapped by criminal rurales, the armed forces of the dictator Porfirio Diaz. They have shared stories of abuelos captured, chained, and exported like cattle on railroad cars toward unknown destinies as slave labor for plantations and mining centers.

This was followed by new waves of violence in the form of state terrorism perpetrated by the landed gentry, the regional post-Revolutionary caciques and other overlords that included state Governors and other elected officials. This wave of violence forced numerous indigenous peasant farmers off their communal lands. Then came the most recent wave of violence that was perpetrated by neoliberal shock doctrines and more people have died, this time from hunger and malnutrition or from a spray of bullets by the new rurales, the minions and thugs of the Zetas and various drug cartels.

In this manner, one great-grandmother, a grandfather, and a father were all killed or died during three distinct waves of political violence in Oaxaca between 1887 and 1993 — all in same same Zapotec family and community. An important part of this family is here today, farming in southern California. They are peacefully participating in and creating an urban agriculture revolution. They are basing this on their ancient agroecological knowledge and the heirloom seeds of corn, bean, squash, and hundreds of other Native land race crops they have brought along inside suitcases full of mole and chapulines (dried crickets, a popular snack).

While peacefully creating a new place-based ecological democracy and contributing to local food sovereignty, they are also teaching their children how to be kind, gentle, and generous human beings. They do so by sharing the secrets of good farming, a sound community, healthy bodies, and the ethics of the solidarity economy — mutual aid and communal caring.

How do we transform our violent political culture toward one based on the alternative care ethics of mutual aid and conviviality? I turn again to the Zapotec farmers. The concept of “moral economy” has been used by social scientists to refer to the interplay between cultural mores and economic activity. It can be used to describe a situation in which custom and social pressure coerce members of a community, when acting in the economic sphere, to conform to traditional norms, even at the expense of personal profit.

This describes the moral economy of the South Central Farmers. It also describes Zapotec child-rearing practices. They raise their children by emphasizing the good of the whole. But they also celebrate the worth of the self connected to others as a contributing member of a community. We can learn from cultures such as the Zapotec how to build our own moral economy from the numerous acts of peace-loving practice of inclusive citizenship, mutual aid, and conviviality. The everyday act of raising peaceful children may become the most important overlooked resource we can mobilize to build a sustained and truly transformative social movement that can finally take us beyond the current political culture that produces (and is itself constantly poisoned by) the deep wells of structural and interpersonal violence.

Context

Most of the 1.5 million population of the Gaza strip is impoverished.  Half are refugees from Mandate Palestine or their children.  About 50% of the male population is without work.  It has been isolated and occupied for decades.  A commercial port was being built in 2000 but that was bombed by Israel.  The isolation and the hobbling of its commerce was increased by a siege which was started in March 2006 in response to the election of a majority of Hamas members to the legislature.  It was further tightened in June 2007 after the Hamas government pre-empted a coup by the Fatah faction that was led in Gaza by Mohammad Dahlan.

The misery was further deepened with Operation Cast Lead that was unleashed 27/12/08.  This was promised 29/02/08.  “The more Qassam fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, [the Palestinians] will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah (holocaust) because we will use all our might to defend ourselves,” said Matan Vilnai  Deputy Defence Minister to Israeli Army Radio.  There was a massive bombardment which killed 220 adults and children in the first 15 minutes.  This was followed by a full scale invasion.  1400 humans were killed and approximately 5000 injured physically.  The minds of very many more were injured too.  4000 homes were totally destroyed, almost all the factories and 40 mosques.  The two gleaming science blocks of the Islamic University  of Gaza were flattened by very powerful thermobaric bombs, the blasts being heard throughout the 360 square kilometres of the Gaza Strip.

The siege has been even more draconian since.  Cement, ballast and steel rods are only let in at about 5% of the rate needed for rebuilding, the pretext being that ‘bunkers’ could be constructed.  At the present rate it will take 78 years to rebuild Gaza.  Chocolate, writing paper and all manner of things have been blocked.  The 1000 tunnels at Rafah have provided a way in for goods but in the face of bombing and roof falls.

The lack of any work and the extreme poverty of the large extended families has drawn the boys and men to scavenge for broken concrete (‘gravel’) in the evacuated Eli Sinai ‘settlement’ and in the industrial zone by the Erez border control post at the northern limit of the Strip.  The factories of the industrial zone have been progressively demolished by Israeli shelling, etc.  They are seen to the west as one enters Gaza through Erez.  A donkey and cart, shovel, pick, sieve, muscles and courage are the tools.  The rubble is used to make cement blocks and poured concrete with the cement that is imported largely through the tunnels.  Many dozens of men and boys do this work for precious shekels in the shadow of manned watch towers and under ‘drones’ above.

The 23 boys who have been shot between 26/03/10 (Said H) and 23/12/10 (Hatem S) are listed in the table below with skeletal facts.  These points are made:-

• In 18 there were single shots and not automatic fire;
• The reported range in most cases confirms that the weapon was a sniper’s rifle in the hands of a sniper;
• Almost always there were many dozens of other men and boys at work; these victims were picked off;
• A leg was the target in most cases.  Where the leg was not the target it is likely the sniper was ‘aiming up’ so the flank, elbow etc was hit instead;
• No weapons were being borne by the gravel workers so they posed no threat to the Israeli Occupation Force personnel.  Instead they were bending their backs to their menial work within their internment camp;
• The histories refer often to the recovery of the injured boy by friends and relatives under fire. This was a feature during ‘Cast Lead’ or instead the paramedics were barred from getting to the victims so they died without care.

The history of the injury and sequel for each boy are linked to in (1).  It has been done meticulously and the translation into English is perfect.  The pain, and often the terror, felt by the boy as the bullet struck home are vividly recorded.  No bullets have been recovered yet so the calibre/type is unknown.

• How many boys will regain full, or nearly full function is difficult to judge without the radiographs being present.  Cases 3, 4, 5, 7, 13 and 15 are likely to have joint involvement and thus some lifelong disability.
• In cases 1 and 3 there is nerve injury.  If that proves to be an axonotmesis in either, it is possible that a first class repair will not be available in Gaza.
• The fractures are open by definition and no doubt comminuted.  Delayed or non-union is possible.  Deep infection is a real risk, antibiotic therapy not withstanding.  The risk of deep infection relates to (a)  the possible inclusion of fabric; (b) the high energy injury causing irregular and wide devitalisation of the tissues; (c) the probability that these difficult bullet wounds were not laid open and a complete wound toilet performed.  One or two of these boys might end with an amputation.
• Almost all the boys have been frightened off or forbidden from gravel work.  There are few, if any, other means of earning shekels.

The shooting to wound and kill Palestinians is relentless.  DCI-P notes that according to a UN study, between January 2009 and August 2010, at least 22 Palestinian civilians in Gaza have been killed and 146 injured in the arbitrary live fire zone adjacent to the border with Israel and imposed at sea. At least 27 of these civilians were children.  It also notes that the targeting of civilians is absolutely prohibited under international law, regardless of circumstances.

These quotations from the available stories convey a little of the poverty, the suffering and the courage:-

• ‘The three of us would wake up every day at around 5:30am and leave to collect gravel. We were not the only ones doing this type of work.  Hundreds of youngsters aged between 13 and 22 used to work with us, despite the danger we faced because we were close to the Israeli border.’ Awad W- 3
• The work was exhausting and dangerous. ‘Israeli soldiers would sometimes shoot at us, and sometimes shoot in the air to intimidate us,’ recalls Ibrahim .  ‘Sometimes they would       shoot at the carts, horses and donkeys we used to move the gravel. But we had to do the work despite the dangers, because we didn’t have any other job to do.’  Ibrahim K- 4
• Mohammad was taught by his neighbours to watch for birds flying away from the watch towers, as this was a sign to start running, as it meant soldiers were climbing into the towers and the shooting would soon begin.  Mohammad M – 6
• They killed our three horses and one donkey in four months, and we had to spend the money we earned on replacing them.’ ….. ‘They were down on their stomachs pointing their rifles towards us, but they didn’t shoot. We got used to such things.’  Mohammad S – 11

Silence is complicity.

• I thank Gerard Horton and DCI-P for the availability and excellence of this information, and for supporting publication in a medical forum. I also thank Dr Khamis Elessi in Gaza for information.

This paper was submitted to the Lancet and the British Medical Journal 4 January 2011 under the title ‘Ethical’. The refusal from the latter is here:

BMJ/2011/850099

The methodical shooting of boys at work in Gaza by snipers of the Israeli Occupation Force

by David Sydney Halpin

Dear Mr. Halpin

Thank you for sending us your paper. We read it with interest but I regret to say that we have decided not to publish it in the BMJ.

Clearly soldiers shooting at children is awful, but we didn’t think your article gave a clear reason why we should be publishing it now. The information comes from the Defence for Children International (palestine section) website, there isn’t much context, there’s no description of the Israeli soldiers’ explanation for these events, and the article just sort of ends.

We receive over 8000 submissions a year and accept less than 10%. We do therefore have to make hard decisions on just how interesting an article will be to our general clinical readers, how much it adds, and how much practical value it will be.

I am sorry to disappoint you on this occasion.

An editor at the British Medical Journal

*****

See Table: The methodical shooting of boys at work in Gaza by snipers of the Israeli Occupation Force

But it was also the year the Justice Department filed the first criminal, not civil, charges against a drug company executive, former GSK VP and assistant general counsel Lauren Stevens.

And the year prominent psychiatrists, Charles Nemeroff and Alan Schatzberg, were accused of writing an entire book to teach primary care physicians p$ychopharmacology.

Still most of the action was still the promotion of dangerous pills, many of which should never have been approved.

Here is 2010′s Hall of Shame.

Yaz and Yasmin

Soon after Bayer launched the pill Yaz in 2006, billing it as going “beyond birth control,” 18-year-olds were coming down with blood clots, gall bladder disease, heart attacks and even strokes. FDA ordered Bayer to run correction ads that detail the drugs’ risks though Yaz sales are still brisk. In fact, financial analysts attribute a third quarter slump to a Yaz generic coming online, not dangerous side effects.

Lyrica, Topamax and Lamictal

In August FDA ordered a warning on the seizure drug Lamictal for aseptic meningitis (brain inflammation) but it is still the darling of military and civilian doctors for unapproved pain and migraine uses. All three drugs increase the risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviors according to their mandated labels, in addition to the memory and hair loss patients report.

Humira, Prolia and TNF Blockers

The drug industry’s highly promoted biologic drugs are made from genetically engineered hamster cells and suppress the immune system, inviting tuberculosis and several cancers. Yet Humira is advertised to healthy people for “clearer skin” and Prolia is advertised to prevent osteoporosis in healthy women.

Chantix

After 397 FDA cases of possible psychosis, 227 domestic reports of suicidal behaviors and 28 actual suicides, the government banned pilots, air-traffic controllers and interstate truck and bus drivers from taking the antismoking drug Chantix in 2008. Its neuropsychiatric effects were immortalized when New Bohemians musician, Carter Albrecht, was shot to death in 2007 in Texas by a neighbor after acting aggressively on the Chantix.

Ambien

The sleeping pill Ambien was immortalized as the drug Tiger Woods reportedly cavorted with his consorts on and former US Rep. Patrick Kennedy crashed his Ford Mustang on, while driving to Capitol Hill in the middle of the night to “vote” in 2006. Law enforcement officials say it has increased traffic accidents from people who drive in a black out and don’t even recognize arresting officers.

Tamoxifen

Is it a coincidence that Tamoxifen maker AstraZeneca founded Breast Cancer Awareness Month and makes carcinogenic agrochemicals that cause breast cancer? As a breast cancer prevention drug, an American Journal of Medicine study found the average life expectancy increase from Tamoxifen was nine days. Public Citizen says for every case of breast cancer prevented on Tamoxifen there is a life-threatening case of blood clots, stroke or endometrial cancer.

Lipitor and Crestor

Why is Lipitor the best selling drug in the world? Because every adult with high LDL or fear of high LDL is on it. And also 2.8 million children, says Consumer Reports. All statins can cause muscle breakdown called rhabdomyolysis. And Crestor is so linked to the side effect, Public Citizen calls it a Do Not Use and the FDA’s David Graham named it one of the five most dangerous drugs before at a Congressional hearing.

Boniva

Boniva and other bisphosphonate bone drugs are a good example of FDA approving once unapprovable drugs by transferring risk onto the public’s shoulders. The list of dangers on the label includes waiting 60 minutes before eating or drinking anything except plain water, never taking the drug with mineral water, sparkling water, coffee, tea, milk, juice or other oral medicine, including calcium, antacids, or vitamins and not lying down after you take it.

Prempro

Pfizer’s hormone drug Prempro is linked to a 26 percent increase in breast cancer, 41 percent increase in strokes, 29 percent increase in heart attacks, 22 percent increase in cardiovascular disease and double the rate of blood clots. But its cognitive and cardiovascular “benefits” are being tested right now at major universities to debut an HT “Light,” hoping the public has a short memory.

Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, SSRIs

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRIs) antidepressants like Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft and Lexapro probably did more to inflate drug industry profits than Viagra. But many say the drugs have also inflated police blotters. In addition to 4,200 published reports of SSRI-related violence, including the Columbine, Red Lake and NIU shootings, SSRIs can cause serotonin syndrome and gastrointestinal bleeding when taken with certain drugs. Paxil is linked to birth defects.

Effexor, Cymbalta, Pristiq, SNRIs

Selective norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs) are like their SSRIs chemical cousins except their norepinephrine effects can modulate pain, which has ushered in your-depression-is-really-pain, your-pain-is-really-depression and other crossover marketing. SNRI’s are also harder to quit than SSRIs. 739,000 web sites address “Effexor” and “withdrawal.”

Seroquel, Zyprexa, Geodon, atypical antipsychotics

The antipsychotic Seroquel tops 71 drugs on the FDA’s January 2010 adverse event report and is linked to unexplained troop deaths and many research scandals. But it’s the fifth biggest-selling drug in the world. Atypical antipsychotics cause weight gain and diabetes, the tardive dyskinesia they are marketed to prevent and death in the demented elderly. Yet FDA approved Zyprexa and Seroquel for children last year and the new atypical antipsychotic, Latuda this year. Maybe the FDA is bipolar.

Ritalin, Concerta, Strattera, Adderall and ADHD drugs

ADHD drugs rob “kids of their right to be kids, their right to grow, their right to experience their full range of emotions, and their right to experience the world in its full hue of colors,” says Anatomy of an Epidemic author Robert Whitaker. But they are a gold mine for the drug industry. During an August conference call with financial analysts, Shire specialty pharmaceuticals president, Mike Cola, lauded the “very dynamic ADHD market,” and the “co-administration market” (in which kids don’t need one drug but several).

Gardasil and Cervarix Vaccines

A pharma-government plot to inoculate the public with dangerous vaccines? Maybe not but why are governors like Texas’ Rick Perry mandating vaccination of girls for HPV? And why was University of Queensland lecturer, Andrew Gunn, silenced when he questioned the Gardasil vaccine? The HPV vaccine doesn’t work for all viral strains, requires a boo$ter and is linked to 56 US girls’ deaths as of September, according to the CDC.

Foradil Aerolizer, Serevent Diskus, Advair and Symbicort

Unlike drugs that look safe in trials and develop “safety signals” postmarketing, the long-acting beta agonists (LABA), salmeterol and formoterol, found in many asthma drugs, never looked safe. Studies link them to an increase in asthma deaths, especially in African-Americans and children. They may have contributed to 5,000 deaths said Dr. David Graham at FDA hearings about the controversial asthma drugs.

Singulair and Accolate, Leukotriene Receptor Antagonists

Leukotriene receptor antagonists also never looked safe. Original FDA reviewers said asthma control “deteriorates” on Singulair and it may not be safe in children. Last month, Fox TV reported Singulair, Merck’s top selling drug, is suspected of producing aggression, hostility, irritability, anxiety, hallucinations and night-terrors in kids, symptoms that are being diagnosed as ADHD. It is huckstered to parents by the trusted educational service Scholastic, Inc. and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

There have always been enough incriminating evidences to fill several Pentagons and CIA headquarters. It takes no dick or hacker to know that the U.S. government is duplicitous and sadistic. It lies and kills compulsively. Though hardly alone, America’s unique in her reach and influence. As an empire, our sick tendencies become everybody else’s problems. Without our “leadership,” would Poles and Ukrainians kill and be killed in Iraq? Would Germans patrol Afghanistan? Would Georgia pick a fight with Russia, only to have its ass kicked? We don’t just commit evils, we train many others to do it. We graduated thousands of torturers from The School of the Americas. After some bad press, it was niftily re-christened as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. (Similarly, Blackwater is now Xe.) Our tactics haven’t changed, and waterboarding, openly admitted to by our cynically sinister capos, is the very least of it. No criminal confesses to everything. “Ah, I only do some shoplifting on the side, Your Honor. No beating or rape or nothing.”

Our elected leaders, our bald, shiny faces to the rest of the world, are shameless hypocrites. During the Georgia-Russia conflict, George Bush was indignant that Russia had “invaded a sovereign neighboring state,” while John McCain declared, “In the 21st century nations don’t invade other nations.”

Was March 20th, 2003 in the 21st century? I’m not talking about March Madness, of course, but the start of our invasion of Iraq. Sated with college hoops, Americans could switch channel for some cool, live snuff action. Soon after, George W. Bush announced at the Boeing F-18 Production Facility in St. Louis, “Two weeks ago, the Iraqi regime operated a gulag for dissidents, and incredibly enough, a prison for young children. Now the gates to that prison have been thrown wide open, and we are putting the dictators, political prisons, and torture chambers out of business.” (Applause.) A mere year later, the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, revealing America to be in charge of Saddam’s torture chambers.

Not so incredibly, we also imprisoned children in Abu Ghraib. Its commander, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, spoke of visiting the youngest inmates, including a boy who “looked like he was 8-years-old.” Maybe this kid was just undersized from all those years of economic sanctions? Maybe he was actually 11 or 12? By 2008, the Pentagon would admit to jailing 600 Iraqi juveniles. From a supposedly feel-good story in Stars and Stripes: “The U.S. military in Iraq is holding some 600 juvenile detainees—ranging in age from 11 to 17—and is building educational programs to address their special needs.”

In any case, no evidence could be more damning than what happened at Abu Ghraib, yet there were no consequences, really. We went on with our occupation, which has continued to this day, and only one officer was ever court-martialed. The conviction of Lieutenant Colonel Steven L. Jordan was even overturned, resulting in merely an “administrative reprimand” on his record. Torture, American style, is an administrative procedure.

The photos themselves often show our troops casually moving about in the background. It was business as usual to punch, slap and kick prisoners; to jump on their naked feet; to videotape and photograph naked male and female prisoners; to forcibly arrange prisoners in various sexually explicit positions for photographing; to force prisoners to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several days at a time; to force naked male prisoners to wear women’s underwear; to force groups of male prisoners to masturbate themselves while being photographed and videotaped; to arrange naked male prisoners in a pile and then jumping on them; to position a naked prisoner on a box, with a sandbag on his head, and attach wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture.

On and on the various means for inflicting pain and humiliation on helpless human beings. Oh, the casual or gleeful sadism, often sexual, of our conquering heroes! These all-American men and women will go home, marry, raise children and become realtors, policemen, accountants and teachers. We freak out when a sexual predator moves into the neighborhood, but how many honorably discharged and decorated torturers and mass murderers are chummying up among us?

“Dad, what did you do in the Iraq?”

“Oh, nothing much, I broke chemical lights and poured the phosphoric liquid on prisoners; beat prisoners with a broom handle and a chair; threatened male prisoners with rape; sodomized a prisoner with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick. Now, what would you like for Christmas, Son?”

General Antonio M. Taguba’s list of Abu Ghraib abuses, summarized above, was leaked to the press by an unknown source. Though not a whistleblower per se, Taguba did not flinch from accusing his own comrades, and he didn’t scapegoat but pointed his finger at the very top. In 2008, Taguba wrote: “After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the [Bush] administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”

For showing courage and integrity, Taguba was forced into retirement, but Bradley Manning, a mere private, is already paying a much heavier price for exposing yet more crimes by the U.S. Army. Kept in solitary confinement for seven months now, Manning faces up to 52 years in prison, with many, including Congressman Mike Rogers, calling for his execution.

Manning’s physical and psychological conditions are deteriorating rapidly. He turned 23 just yesterday. Friends who have visited Manning in prison are being intimidated by our government from speaking out, according to the Guardian. People are being stalked, computers seized without warrants. A staple of Fascism, extra-judicial harassment should never be tolerated in any genuinely free society.

So after decades of appalling disclosures by human rights organizations, the media and even the government itself, nothing has changed. We have enough evidence to convict just about everybody and everything inside that Beltway, save a potted plant or two, perhaps, so what’s missing is not more information, but an ability to deduce and to synthesize, that is, to think, and, even more importantly, some semblance of moral clarity.

The same scene that outrages one person will titillate another. To a Nazi, photos of Dachau and Bruchenwald are a turn on. Atrocity and torture images also confirm the status quo, since they illustrate most vividly who has the power, who can do what to whom, who can be stripped naked, bloodied and blown to bits.

Susan Sontag rightly compared the Abu Ghraib images to trophies. Proud of our bloody trophies, and not just photos but ears, fingers and whatnot, many Americans still subscribe to our full spectrum domination, ass-kicking aspirations, so protests or no, Wikileaks or no, the American Empire will not be shamed or persuaded into changing its ways. It will not reform itself. Cornered, it’s likely to become even more vicious. Evil will bare its fangs most nakedly.

Obey orders and torture and the worst that can happen to you is an administrative reprimand, whatever that means, but if you follow your conscience, be prepared to be locked up, tortured or even killed. It’s already in the book.

In the past year, criminal investigations have been opened against more than 1,200 Palestinian minors in Jerusalem on stone-throwing charges, according to police statistics gathered by the Association of Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI). That was nearly twice the number of children arrested last year in the much larger Palestinian territory of the West Bank.

Most of the arrests have occurred in the Silwan district, close to Jerusalem’s Old City, where 350 extremist Jewish settlers have set up several heavily guarded illegal enclaves among 50,000 Palestinian residents.

Late last month, in a sign of growing anger at the arrests, a large crowd in Silwan was reported to have prevented police from arresting Adam Rishek, a seven-year-old accused of stone-throwing. His parents later filed a complaint claiming he had been beaten by the officers.

Tensions between residents and settlers have been rising steadily since the Jerusalem municipality unveiled a plan in February to demolish dozens of Palestinian homes in the Bustan neighbourhood to expand a Biblically-themed archeological park run by Elad, a settler organisation.

The plan is currently on hold following US pressure on Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister.   Fakhri Abu Diab, a local community leader, warned that the regular clashes between Silwan’s youths and the settlers, termed a “stone intifada” by some, could trigger a full-blown Palestinian uprising.

“Our children are being sacrificed for the sake of the settlers’ goal to take over our community,” he said.

In a recent report, entitled Unsafe Space, ACRI concluded that, in the purge on stone-throwing, the police were riding roughshod over children’s legal rights and leaving many minors with profound emotional traumas.

Testimonies collected by the rights groups reveal a pattern of children being arrested in late-night raids, handcuffed and interrogated for hours without either a parent or lawyer being present. In many cases, the children have reported physical violence or threats.

Last month 60 Israeli childcare and legal experts, including Yehudit Karp, a former deputy attorney-general, wrote to Mr Netanyahu condemning the police behaviour.

“Particularly troubling,” they wrote, “are testimonies of children under the age of 12, the minimal age set by the law for criminal liability, who were taken in for questioning, and who were not spared rough and abusive interrogation.”

Unlike in the West Bank, which is governed by military law, children in East Jerusalem suspected of stone-throwing are supposed to be dealt with according to Israeli criminal law.

Israel annexed East Jerusalem following the Six-Day war of 1967, in violation of international law, and its 250,000 Palestinian inhabitants are treated as permanent Israeli residents.

Minors, defined as anyone under 18, should be questioned by specially trained officers and only during daylight hours. The children must be able to consult with a lawyer and a parent should be present.

Ronit Sela, a spokeswoman for the Association of Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), said her organisation had been “shocked” at the large number of children arrested in East Jerusalem in recent months, often by units of undercover policemen.

“We have heard many testimonies from children who describe terrifying experiences of violence during both their arrest and their later interrogation.”

Muslim, 10, lives in the Bustan neighbourhood and in a house that Israeli authorities have ordered demolished. His case was included in the ACRI report, and in an interview he said he had been arrested four times this year, even though he was under the age of criminal responsibility. On the last occasion, in October, he was grabbed from the street by three plain-clothes policemen who jumped out a van.

“One of the men grabbed me from behind and started choking me. The second grabbed my shirt and tore it from the back, and the third twisted my hands behind my back and tied them with plastic cords. ‘Who threw stones?’ one of them asked me. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. He started hitting me on the head and I shouted in pain.”

Muslim was taken into custody and released six hours later. A local doctor reported that the boy had bleeding wounds to his knees and swelling on several parts of his body.

Muslim’s father, who has two sons in prison, said the boy was waking with nightmares and could no longer concentrate on his school studies. “He has been devastated by this.” Ms Sela said arrests had risen sharply in Silwan since September, when a private security guard at a settler compound shot dead a Palestinian man, Samer Sirhan, and injured two others.

Clashes between the settlers and Silwan youths came to prominence in October when David Beeri, director of settler organisation Elad, was shown on camera driving into two boys as they threw stones at his car.

One, Amran Mansour, 12, who was thrown over the bonnet of Mr Beeri’s car, was arrested shortly afterwards in a late-night raid on his family’s home.

Also in October, nine right wing Israeli MPs complained after stones were thrown at their minibus as they paid a solidarity visit to Beit Yonatan, a large settler-controlled house in Silwan. Israel’s courts have ordered that the house be demolished, but Jerusalem’s mayor, Nir Barkat, has refused to enforce the order.

In the wake of the attack, Yitzhak Aharonovitch, the public security minister, warned: “We will stop the stone-throwing through the use of covert and overt force, and bring back quiet.” Last month police announced that house arrests would be used against children more regularly and financial penalties of up to $1,400 would be imposed on parents.

B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, reported the case of “A.S.”, a 12-year-old taken for interrogation following an arrest at 3am.

“I sat on my knees facing the wall. Every time I moved, a man in civilian clothes hit me with his hand on my neck … The man asked me to prostrate myself on the floor and ask his forgiveness, but I refused and told him that I do not bow to anyone but Allah. All the while, I felt intense pain in my feet and legs. I felt intense fear and I started shaking.”

In a statement B’Tselem said: “It is hard to believe that the security forces would have acted similarly against Jewish minors.”

Micky Rosenfeld, a police spokesman, denied that the police had violated the children’s rights. He added: “It is the responsibility of parents to stop this criminal behaviour by their children.”

Jawad Siyam, a local community activist in Silwan, said the goal of the arrests and the increased settler activity was to “make life unbearable and push us out of the area”.

The 60 experts who wrote to Mr Netanyahu warned that the children’s abuse led to “post-traumatic stress disorders, such as nightmares, insomnia, bed-wetting, and constant fear of policemen and soldiers”. They also noted that children under extended house arrest were being denied the right to schooling.

Last year the United Nations Committee Against Torture expressed “deep concern” at Israel’s treatment of Palestinian minors, saying Israel was breaking the UN Convention on the Rights of Children, which it has signed.

Over the past 12 months, Defence for Children International has provided the UN with details of more than 100 children who claim they were physically or psychologically abused while in military custody.

One reason being that church leaders, by and large, ignore the fate of the Holy Land, which, of course, underpins the whole structure of their faith.  The performance of our bishops, who have a voice in the House of Lords but never use it, is beyond pathetic.

However, every year at this time I make a point of visiting the parish church in the small market town of Fakenham, in Norfolk, to enjoy their dazzling Christmas Tree Festival. The event has been going for 10 years and this year raised money for 78 local and national charities.

Each charity decorates a tree supplied by one of the festival’s sponsors, a local garden centre, and under each tree is a collection box. The trees are displayed in the church for a week, then taken down in time to be used to good effect somewhere else in the run-up to Christmas. Last year 25,000 people visited the magical festival. This year the church was crowded and the admiring chatter was accompanied by a continual chink-chink of money falling into the boxes.

The charities taking part ranged from the Gurkha Welfare Trust and the East Anglian Air Ambulance to Chernobyl Children and numerous local nursery schools. Prayers are said every hour for the charities in turn. As usual I looked around hopefully for an appeal on behalf of the children of the brutally occupied Holy Land – and especially Gaza – who are always on my mind as Christmas approaches.

But no luck.

People are at their most generous about now, and there’s perhaps an opening here for those who work to alleviate the awful suffering of young and old living amid the wreckage of homes and infrastructure in the Gaza Strip. The rector at Fakenham believes his church more or less pioneered the tree festival but he’s aware that other churches are taking up the idea. Are any of the UK’s 1500 mosques doing it? Is there an opportunity for inter-faith joint working?

I phoned the Islamic centre in the two nearest cities several times but they don’t answer. I left voice and email messages but no-one got back to me. So much for their front-line communication…

Last Christmas I wrote that our then prime minister, Gordon Brown, wished the Jewish community a happy Chanuka from Number10.gov.uk and recalled how he celebrated Israel’s 60th birthday with them.

But he had no festive greeting for the shivering and shattered Gazans who had been bombed and blasted by his ‘friends’ during their Christmas festival. And no word of cheer, either, for the Christian communities in Gaza and the West Bank endlessly persecuted by the Israelis.

One presumes that Brown, a staunch ally of Israel, knew about the hell that his friends were about to inflict on Gaza during the Christmas celebrations of 2008/9, just as Mr Abbas did according to leaked US cables. Christians living in the Strip were certainly aware of the invasion threat and abandoned plans to celebrate the midnight Christmas mass in protest. But they couldn’t have imagined the enormity of the devastation and slaughter that was about to be unleashed on them and their children while Western leaders stayed shtum.

And Brown is the son of a Church of Scotland minister.

Many of the 1.5 million people packed into the ravaged Strip, I hear, have had to scavenge through rubbish tips for food to survive.

So what sort of Christmas is in store for their little ones this year while the criminals who inflicted such savagery and torment, and continue to deny them their human rights, have their snouts in the Yuletide trough and enjoy a warm bed?

This year The Jewish Chronicle reports that David Cameron, our new prime minister, has wished the Jewish community around the world “a happy and peaceful Chanucah”.

He called the story of Chanucah “an inspiring message of the power of hope to sustain people through the toughest of times”.

From his echo-chamber Foreign Secretary William Hague, in a Chanucah video message, added: “It’s a great pleasure to send warm good wishes to the Jewish community in Britain and all over the world.”

I wonder if either of them will have the good grace to send similar messages of hope to sustain the good people of Gaza “through the toughest of times”.

The UN says that imports are only at 36 per cent of pre-siege levels, thanks to Cameron’s friends, and exports are still not allowed (except a few strawberries), so the hardship must still be unimaginable.

Last week, here in England, we were treated to the spectacle of the Royal Navy’s flagship, the aircraft carrier Ark Royal, returning to her home port for the last time, to be de-commissioned and turned into a museum or tourist attraction – or sold for scrap – after only 25 years’ service. The original Ark Royal was Lord Howard’s flagship in the naval actions to beat off the Spanish Armada’s invasion force in those swashbuckling days of 1588.

Fighting for freedom, you see.

A pity the present Ark Royal couldn’t have gone to her grave with a bang rather than a whimper… for example, by making a last voyage to the Eastern Med, perhaps with a multi-national crew, to bust the evil blockade and land supplies on Gaza’s beach… a long-overdue Christmas present for the imprisoned Christians and Muslims alike from a heroic Santa.

Fanciful thinking? Of course, given the international community’s spineless leaders.