I am not speaking of simple irrationality; although such strangeness rides irrationality as a surfer might ride a wave. This is beyond irrationality: this is the human capacity trying to work in a design and with “responsibilities” well beyond its powers. We could think of movies where a ‘primitive’ is thrust into the present. We have, small step by small step, made the details of our world in such a way that they integrate into a whole that is beyond our comprehension and our powers of adaptation. We are all ‘Encino Man.’

Economists are struggling to understand and, in some way, control a global process of exchange that has grown to become like the energy economy of a rainforest in which only 5% of the species are even identified much less known in any comprehensive way. These people are very smart and yet, ultimately, they are seen to fall back on ideological prejudgments: the conflicts and dueling pronouncements are really statements of largely unfounded belief. Such situations lead only to the opportunism of personal aggrandizement and gain, and not to rational options for whole communities living more successfully in integration in an ecosystem.

I have long felt this strangeness because of training in the standards of biological integration and adaptation. Actions that remove from the universe thousands of species integrated into adapting ecosystems, remove millions of biochemical systems that have evolved through the same processes, over the same immense time, actions that remove these things without the slightest awareness, are incomprehensible. They are exceedingly strange. But there has been a quantum leap in the presentation of strangeness; it requires no special sensitivity or training for its recognition.

I spend a great deal of time with “children” (14 to 18) who are fighting the strangeness, fighting the upsets and uncertainties of their days. The strangeness has left them without a solid surface to build their lives on.

The transition years have always been difficult – the transition from protected childhood to responsible adult. Our ancestors had a solution to this change: a child observed, as he or she grew into pubescence, the behaviors of adults and at a point, decided by tradition, was initiated into the next stage with ceremonies and specific instruction. After such an initiation the child was then a baby-adult, just as he or she had been, at their beginning, a baby-child. A degree of certainty surrounded these human lives like water surrounds a coral reef.

The children I spend time with, for the most part, are overwhelmed by the strangeness and uncertainty that pervades their every moment. They don’t believe anyone or anything and thus contribute to another layer of strangeness. Adaptation for them is an impermanent process of the moment laid over a desperate desire for stability, safety and a future that they can count on – precisely the qualities of life they are denied. And in a dramatic act of strangeness they come to believe in commercial advertising, celebrity and subculture reality.

That they select these things as a reliable source for reality is not in itself strange at all: a large part of the economic world is devoting considerable energy to create just such a platform from which to communicate, sell to and control these children. What is exceedingly strange is that the so-called adult world has allowed its children to be stolen – Pied Piper fashion – from them. But these children are not secreted away behind a cleft in a rock, but are there in front of us, just beyond our comprehension; a condition, they have been told, that is good for them. Our youth and what they will become, what they will do with the increasingly complex world using their decreasingly effective education, is another strange conundrum. It adds to the sense of weightlessness.

The adults, those grown into full size and needing some job to sustain themselves, are barely adult-like in the sense of competent practitioners of the human way. The strangeness settling over them leaves them angry and frightened; uncertain and grasping for the hand-up offered by religion, militancy or materialism, or by almost anything that will seem to let them see a bit of acceptable future through the strangeness.

The world has grasped for Obama to clear away the uncertainty, the lies, the terrible incomprehensibility; yet this only adds to the strangeness. We want our leaders to make sensible decisions; we want them to make our world safe and understandable. But leaders haven’t done that since we lived in small nomadic communities. Leaders have for thousands of years struggled against the grounding reality; their power only comes from the illusions of their followers. It is this that has finally resulted in whole populations living in ungrounded strangeness. It is left to us to find our way through the strangeness, to find the grounding structures in our lives.

I seem always to find my way back to this place. Either I have little imagination or this is, like the bottom of one of those spiraling coin funnels used for charity donations, the final destination for our efforts. We are turned back on our own resources, and they have to be enough. Ultimately, we must accept that the strangeness is not a condition that we can make sense of and thereby overcome or correct. It is the product of billions of individual actions disconnected from reality coming more and more each day into collision with each other and reality. The consequences seem strange and overwhelming because they are; and they are not to be made sense of. Sense is to be made of our own lives and our daily contact with The Real. The trick is to discover what that is. It is a first step, at least, to know what not to consider.

A prisoner of war must not be left in captivity. A wounded soldier must not be left in the field. The state signs an unwritten contract with every person who joins the army, and most definitely with everyone who serves in a combat unit.

The behavior of the Israeli governments in these 1196 days, of the politicians and the generals who are responsible for this outrage, is a violation of this contract, a betrayal of trust. In short: an infamy. It enrages and infuriates every decent person, and not only combat soldiers.

The betrayal is already in the terminology used. In the words of the Book of Proverbs (18:21): “Death and life are in the power of the tongue”.

A soldier captured by the enemy in a military action is a prisoner of war – in every language, in every country.

Gilad Shalit was captured in a military action. He was an armed soldier in uniform. In this context, it does not matter whether the action itself was legal or illegal, and whether the captors were regular soldiers or guerrillas.

Gilad Shalit is a prisoner of war.

The denial started at the first moment. The Israeli government refused to call the capture by its proper name and insisted that it was an “abduction” or even “kidnapping”.

The disciplined Israeli media, marching behind the generals in lockstep like the Prussian guard, joined the chorus. Not a single newspaper, not a single radio or TV announcer ever spoke about the “prisoner of war”. All of them, almost without exception, from the first day on, spoke about the “abducted” or “kidnapped” soldier.

The words are important. All armies are familiar with exchanges of prisoners of war. Generally, this happens after the end of hostilities, sometimes while the war is still going on. The army releases the enemy fighters in return for the release of its own captured soldiers.

This does not apply to abducted persons. When criminals abduct a person and hold them for ransom, the question arises whether the price should be paid. Payment may encourage more abductions and reward the criminals.

The moment Gilad was defined as “abducted”, he was condemned to what followed.

He also lost his honor as a soldier. A soldier is not “abducted”. The millions of soldiers captured during World War II – Germans, Russians, Britons, Americans and all the others – would have felt insulted by any suggestion that they were “abducted”.

The greatest danger hovering over the head of Gilad since falling into captivity does not come from Hamas, but from our own army.

It was clear that, given an opportunity, the army would try to free him by force. That is deeply embedded in its basic ethos: Never give in to “abductors”.

If I were Gilad’s father and a praying man, I would pray every day: Please, dear God, don’t let the army find out where Gilad is being kept!

Our army commanders are prepared to expose prisoners to immense risks in order to free them by force, instead of exchanging them for Palestinian prisoners. For them it is a matter of honor.

In such an operation, the lives of the liberators are put at risk. But above all, it’s the life of the prisoner that is endangered.

One of the most celebrated operations in the annals of the Israeli Army took place in Entebbe in July, 1976. It freed the 98 passengers of a hijacked Air France plane, which had been forced to land at Entebbe airport in Uganda. The operation elicited worldwide admiration. Only one of the liberators lost his life – the brother of Binyamin Netanyahu.

In the ensuing intoxication of success, one fact was overlooked: in the daring operation, huge risks were taken. If even one detail of the complex action had gone wrong, it would have meant disaster for the abducted passengers. It could have ended in a bloodbath. Since it succeeded, nobody dared to raise questions.

The results of the operation to release the abducted athletes at the Munich Olympic games in 1972 were very different. When the German police, with the encouragement of the Golda Meir government, tried to free them by force, all the athletes lost their lives. Most of them were probably killed by bullets from the guns of the German policemen. How else to explain the fact that to this very day, the governments of Israel and Germany have both refused to release the post mortem results?

The same happened two years later when the Israeli army was ordered by Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan to free the 105 children who were being held by Palestinian commandos in the Northern Israeli town of Ma’alot. The action miscarried, and 22 children and 3 teachers lost their lives. In this instance, too, it seems that some – if not all – of them were killed by the bullets of the liberators. These post mortem reports also remain unpublished.

The same happened in 1994 when the army tried to free the “abducted” soldier Nachshon Waxman in the West Bank. The army had exact intelligence, the action was planned meticulously, something went wrong, and the prisoner was killed.

Lately it was learned that a senior officer had called on his soldiers to commit suicide rather than be captured. He has given orders to fire on the “abductors”, even when it means endangering the life of the captured soldier.

It may well be that one of the reasons for the prolongation of Gilad Shalit’s suffering lies in the hope of the army commanders to obtain intelligence about his whereabouts, so as to try to free him by force. It is no secret that the Gaza Strip is crawling with informers. The dozens of “targeted killings” and many of the actions of the “Molten Lead” operation would not have been possible without a dense network of collaborators, recruited during the long years of the occupation.

Incredibly – it borders on a miracle – the Israeli security service has been unable to fulfill this hope. It seems that Shalit’s captors are succeeding in maintaining rigorous secrecy. That, by the way, explains why his captors have adamantly refused to have him meet with the International Red Cross representatives and to convey letters by and to him, including parcels (that could well have contained sophisticated locating devices). That may have saved his life.

It can be assumed that the video that was conveyed yesterday by the German mediator, in exchange for the release of 21 female Palestinian prisoners, was meticulously prepared so as to prevent any possibility of identifying the place where he is being kept.

This affair also shows the absolute superiority of the Israeli propaganda machine over all competitors – if there are any.

The world media have adopted, almost without exception, the Israeli terminology. All over the world, they talk about the “abducted” Israeli soldier, rather than about a prisoner of war. British or German newspapers which use this word would not dream of applying it to one of their own soldiers in Afghanistan.

The name of Gilad Shalit was mouthed by the world’s leaders as if he were, at the very least, one of them. Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel spoke about him freely, certain that the listeners at home knew who he was. Liberating the “abducted Israeli soldier” has become a declared aim of several governments.

This formulation is by itself a triumph for Israeli propaganda. The negotiations are about an exchange of prisoners between Israel and Hamas, with German and/or Egyptian mediation. An exchange of prisoners has two sides – Shalit on the one side, Palestinian prisoners on the other. But throughout the world, as in Israel, they speak only about the release of the Israeli soldier. The Palestinian prisoners to be freed are just objects, merchandise, not human beings. But don’t they also count the days, like their parents and their children?

The greatest obstacle to such an exchange is mental, a matter of language. If it had been about “Palestinian fighters” there would have been no problem. The release of fighters in exchange for a fighter. But our government – like all colonial governments before it – cannot recognize local insurgents as “fighters” who act in the service of their people. The colonial ethos – like the “ethical code” of our ethical Professor Assa Kasher – demands that they be called “terrorists” with “blood on their hands”, base criminals, vile murderers.

A touching Irish song tells of an Irish freedom fighters who, on the morning of his execution, asks to be treated like an “Irish soldier” and be shot, not “hanged like a dog”. His request was denied.

When one speaks about the release of “hundreds of murderers” in exchange for an Israeli soldier, one runs up against a huge psychological obstacle. Life and death in the power of the tongue.

In several respects, the Gilad Shalit affair can be seen as a metaphor for the entire historical conflict.

Charged words dictate the behavior of the leaders. The different and opposing narratives prevent an understanding between the parties even about minor matters. The psychological obstacles are immense.

The great propaganda advantage of the Israeli government, so clearly shown in the Shalit affair, is now also being tested in the matter of the Goldstone report. The efforts of the Israeli government to prevent the referral of the report to the UN Security Council or General Assembly, or to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, are now supported by President Barack Obama and the European leaders. The inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, like the Palestinians in Israeli jails, have become mere tokens, objects without a human face.

And about Gilad Shalit: the negotiations must be speeded up so as to effect a prisoner exchange in the very nearest future. Until then, the mediators should be given an unequivocal undertaking that there will be no effort to free him by force, in return for an agreement by Hamas to let him meet with Red Cross personnel, and perhaps also with his family.

Everything else is manipulation and lip service.

Could it be that with the others? Could it be that all war was basically sexual?… A sort of sexual perversion? Or a complex of sexual perversions? That would make a funny thesis and God help the race.

— James Jones, The Thin Red Line

War provides a good fuck routinely. Bad ones too, of course. Very bad. And not just for those who sublimate with missile or bayonet envy (generating mental masturbation), or enjoy the actual wild abandonment with others which mortal engagement stimulates.

Yet, I wanted to come from another angle. And so I almost gave this piece the title (and attendant blah blah) you see directly below. The reason for settling on “Consensual Sex During Wartime” will become apparent once you reach my orgasm at the end of the article.

Fucking Over War Good (FOWG)

(FOWG is pronounced “fowdge” … with the last phoneme pronounced the same as the first and last sounds in judge. A new word, a new sound is called for.)

As a transitive verb, fucking can be used in the imperative as a signal of angry dismissal. It also has the denotation of cheating. Yes, I’d like to cheat War out of all sorts of things.

I wasn’t going to use curse words, for obvious reasons. One loses a lot of potential recruits right off the bat — whatever one’s cause — by employing such language. BUT… this war shit has gone much too far, and it’s slated to get worse daily, forever. In short, however, there’s no fucking word on earth, Hell or beyond that can come remotely close to the unnecessary abomination of War. And I’m going to put a fucking end to it on this planet.

Out of respect to the Berrigan Brothers and their low-profile colleagues, Chief Seattle, Paul Robeson, Ida Wells, Cindy and tons of my known and unknown heroes (and for other reasons, of course), I’m going to put to bed The Horror, and bring a smile to the faces of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jesus, and a helluva lot of common folk. Even with the cursing. For they all live closer to me when I turn in and rise — and throughout the day, every day — than my complacent neighbors, than much of my indifferent blood. And with or without the bad words they will toast me by the time I am… toast.

Yes, you heard right. I’m going to put an end to war on earth . I’ll be glad to say “we” when I come across someone else who’s willing to devote 24×8 heartbeats to the cause. Still — for sure — whatever my language… I’m not going to be doing this alone.

And WE’RE in a fucking rush ’cause — at best — I have maybe ten or twenty years. And without knowing you at all, I can tell you with great assurance that you don’t have much longer either… the way things are going… just in terms of militarization alone.

This FOWG should be considered a branch of TOSCA. Recruitment for TOSCA has been coming along, but not at the pace that’s required for creating a watershed event in history. The arthritic snail’s pace I refer to moved me to come up with a branch of TOSCA which would do something monumental even if TOSCA doesn’t fly. An offshoot which would potentially accomplish enough of the same thing.

The fact is, whatever one’s cause, putting an end to war … U.S. wars for starters … will definitely benefit EVERYONE. Everyone except a handful. And that’s only the negative case if one uses that handful’s selfish, socially psychopathic criteria as a yardstick. No, if you want the economy to improve for the 80% of U.S. citizens who hold only 7% of the country’s financial wealth. If you want to address the environment, you’d do well to pull the rug out from under what’s arguably the greatest single polluter on earth, the U.S. military. Ditto for dealing with industrial agriculture, health care, gender issues, racism and every thing else. If anyone has the slightest doubt about this, I respectfully request that you contact me immediately. I have definitive documentation. In short, you disentangle the Pentagon from our Economy to any degree whilst closing bases and pulling troops and mercenaries out of other people’s land, and you’re well on your way to a New World, without the “order” that works against us .

I was in the San Francisco office of attorney Matt Gonzalez (Nader’s most recent running mate) not too long ago, trying to sell the idea of TOSCA. One of the people present was a young intern from Vassar who questioned my phrase “taking over” … as in Taking Over the State of California. He suggested that it might turn off a lot of people. Of course, his concern is quite legitimate on a very superficial plane. The notion that one could gain access to power in California or anywhere by not “taking over” the reins betrays a dangerous innocence regarding the prevalence of electoral fraud … and much else.

“Taking over” is a phrase that’s begged for … to underscore … where power lies. To spotlight the need for radical measures, a new paradigm for gaining control of decision-making. Ditto for the curse words employed here. For to deny in public discourse what is routinely used in private dialogue is to weaken our cause on several levels, from a number of angles.

Repeated, unnecessary, multifaceted abominations of the worst kind — paid for by hypnotized citizens — MUST begin to be greeted with the foulest language imaginable. We are absolutely obliged to use the same language in public that we would use in private for such horror lest we contribute to smoothing over what is taking place.

It’s kind of the same principle behind asking alternative media outlet reporters to stop referring to President Obama as president… in the name of journalistic tradition, in the name of maintaining objectivity. No, advocacy journalism is now called for in the extreme, and no one with their head on straight or heart in a healthy place can possibly — regardless of what one does for a living, regardless of the setting — can any longer avoid using murderer in lieu of president.

Hence, the fucking murderer Obama.

I’ve got a neighbor whose son works for the military. Has for over a decade. And the young guy is in Communications. Now Papa — sweet soul that he is — didn’t have a clue that his boy might be pushing buttons for deadly drones in Afghanistan … or worse. I mention this because I’m very proud of myself for (tactfully) broaching the subject. And I deeply feel that everyone has an obligation to encourage such confrontations, if possible.

If we don’t do that (at the very least), we’re all fucked.

There’s a negative correlation between polite language and moving toward Peace. The more you respect the parameters set, linguistic or otherwise, the more you buy into WAR.

The roots of our incessant wars are NOT to be found in what’s loosely referred to as human nature. A beautiful essay by Howard Zinn in his Declarations of Independence puts that notion to bed, as far as I’m concerned… even though both he and I, and all well-read activists are very aware of the ongoing atrocities on this earth from as far back as what’s indicated in the following (quoted at the beginning of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian):

“Clark, who led last year’s expedition to the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, and UC Berkeley colleague Tim D. White, also said that a re-examination of a 300,000-year-old fossil skull found in the same region earlier shows evidence of having been scalped.”

Including that excerpt from the Yuma Daily Sun of June 13, 1982 here, I trust will demonstrate that I’m not ignorant about the history of violence on earth. However, I also trust that the reader can make the imaginative leap to entertain what’s possible on this earth, to reach deep down into her/his own immortal soul, and let the Face of Beauty shine through. Beauty being Possibility Born of Love.

No, the roots of our incessant wars lie — obviously — in World War I, where — in the dugouts and funk-holes — the great numbers of what were called Neverendians suffered immeasurably. And planted the seeds for all our subsequent/uninterrupted ferocity, East, West, North and South. Consider what was written about a pessimistic officer in the summer of 1917 who

“roughed out the area between the ‘front’ of that date and the Rhine,… and divided this by the area gained, on the average, at the Somme, Vimy and Messines. The result he multiplied by the time taken to prepare and fight those offensives, averaged again. The result he got was that, allowing for no setbacks, and providing the pace could be maintained, we should arrive at the Rhine in one hundred and eighty years.”

They… we… never will get to the Rhine — not what it stands for (the elimination of Auden’s “trespasser,” the removal of Fuller’s barbarian, independent-minded foreigners, whatever) — the way in which we’re proceeding… ’cause the powers that be have EVERYTHING (of ours) invested in perpetual warfare. It’s all a neverending chase now, or insatiable voyeuristic battle sex with drones and the like.

Some of the scenes of WWI battle — to this day — are the saddest places on earth. Right there in prosperous France! Take Albert, for instance. It’s been restored to its original ugliness, AND appearances of adequacy notwithstanding, it offers up an air which is — forgive the language — fucking unforgivable, unbreatheable. For everything that’s human has been defeated there permanently.

We are headed for that boneyard. We are slated to gas ourselves, and make life more unliveable than it already is. On schedule to become more rushed, more dour, more bitter, and to inflict the same on others with increasing cruelty. Imagine 9/11 — in the U.S. or Chile — with no one interested in cleaning up. That should convey what I’m trying to describe here.

What the Peace Movement needs is a good fucking.

That is, consensual sex.

Israel Katz, the transport minister, announced this week that signs on all major roads in Israel, East Jerusalem and possibly parts of the West Bank would be “standardised”, converting English and Arabic place names into straight transliterations of the Hebrew name.

Currently, road signs include the place name as it is traditionally rendered in all three languages.

Under the new scheme, the Arab identity of important Palestinian communities will be obscured: Jerusalem, or “al Quds” in Arabic, will be Hebraised to “Yerushalayim”; Nazareth, or “al Nasra” in Arabic, the city of Jesus’s childhood, will become “Natzrat”; and Jaffa, the port city after which Palestine’s oranges were named, will be “Yafo”.

Arab leaders are concerned that Mr Katz’s plan offers a foretaste of the demand by Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, that the Palestinians recognise Israel as a Jewish state.

On Wednesday, Mohammed Sabih, a senior official at the Arab League, called the initiative “racist and dangerous”.

“This decision comes in the framework of a series of steps in Israel aimed at implementing the ‘Jewish State’ slogan on the ground.”

Palestinians in Israel and Jerusalem, meanwhile, have responded with alarm to a policy they believe is designed to make them ever less visible.

Ahmed Tibi, an Arab legislator in the Israeli parliament, said: “Minister Katz is mistaken if he thinks that changing a few words can erase the existence of the Arab people or their connection to Israel.”

The transport ministry has made little effort to conceal the political motivation behind its policy of Hebraising road signs.

In announcing the move on Monday, Mr Katz, a hawkish member of Likud, Mr Netanyahu’s right-wing party, said he objected to Palestinians using the names of communities that existed before Israel’s establishment in 1948.

“I will not allow that on our signs,” he said. “This government, and certainly this minister, will not allow anyone to turn Jewish Jerusalem into Palestinian al Quds.”

Other Israeli officials have played down the political significance of Mr Katz’s decision. A transport department spokesman, Yeshaayahu Ronen, said: “The lack of uniform spelling on signs has been a problem for those speaking foreign languages, citizens and tourists alike.”

“That’s ridiculous,” responded Tareq Shehadeh, head of the Nazareth Cultural and Tourism Association. “Does the ministry really think it’s helping tourists by renaming Nazareth, one of the most famous places in the world, ‘Natzrat’, a Hebrew name only Israeli Jews recognise?”

Meron Benvenisti, a former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, said Israel had begun interfering with the Arabic on the signs for East Jerusalem as soon as it occupied the city in 1967. It invented a new word, “Urshalim”, that was supposed to be the Arabic form of the Hebrew word for Jerusalem, “Yerushalayim”.

“I was among those who intervened at the time to get the word ‘al Quds’ placed on signs, too, after ‘Urshalim’ and separated by a hyphen. But over the years ‘al Quds’ was demoted to brackets and nowadays it’s not included on new signs at all.”

He said Mr Katz’s scheme would push this process even further by requiring not only the Arabic equivalent of the Hebrew word for Jerusalem, but the replication of the Hebrew spelling as well. “It’s completely chauvinistic and an insult,” he said.

Meir Margalit, a former Jerusalem councillor, said official policy was to make the Palestinian population in East Jerusalem as invisible as possible, including by ignoring their neighbourhoods on many signs.

The transport ministry’s plans for the West Bank are less clear. In his announcement Mr Katz said Palestinian-controlled areas of the territory would still be free to use proper Arabic place names. But he hinted that signs in the 60 per cent of the West Bank under Israeli military rule would be Hebraised, too.

That could mean Palestinians driving across parts of the West Bank to the Palestinian city of Nablus, for example, will have to look for the Hebrew name “Shechem” spelt out in Arabic.

Mr Benvenisti said that, after Israel’s establishment in 1948, a naming committee was given the task of erasing thousands of Arab place names, including those of hills, valleys and springs, and creating Hebrew names. The country’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, told the committee: “We are obliged to remove the Arabic names for reasons of state.”

In addition, the Arabic names of more than 400 Palestinian villages destroyed by Israel during and after the 1948 war were lost as Jewish communities took their place.

Israel’s surviving Palestinian minority, today one-fifth of the population, have had to battle in the courts for the inclusion of Arabic on road signs, despite Arabic being an official language.

Many signs on national highways were provided only in Hebrew and English until the courts in 1999 insisted Arabic be included. Three years later the courts ruled that Arabic must also be included on signs in cities where a significant number of Arabs live.

However, as the political climate has shifted rightward in Israel, there has been a backlash, including an unsuccessful bid by legislators to end Arabic’s status as an official language last year.

Recently the Israeli media revealed that nationalist groups have been spraying over Arabic names on road signs, especially in the Jerusalem area.

Israel has also antagonised Palestinians in both Israel and the West Bank by naming roads after right-wing figures.

The main highway in the Jordan Valley, which runs through Palestinian territory but is used by Israelis to drive between northern Israel and Jerusalem, is named “Gandhi’s Road” – not for the Indian spiritual leader but after the nickname of an Israeli general, Rehavam Zeevi, who called for the expulsion of Palestinians from Greater Israel.

Predictably, Barak Obama’s speech in Cairo came under hysterical criticism from the right. Sean Hannity screamed that Obama gave “sympathizers of 9/11” a voice on the world stage, Charles Krauthammer derided the apologetic tone, and Sen. James Inhofe called it “un-American.” At the same time, Bill O’Reilly called the speech a “big success,” and David Horowitz wrote that conservatives should support Obama on this.

What explains this strange schizophrenia among conservatives?

At root, Obama’s Cairo speech heralds a decisive shift in the rhetoric of U.S. imperialism. It marks a recognition that the virulent Islamophobic rhetoric of the Bush regime has failed, and that it is necessary to begin a process of rebuilding the U.S.’s image in Muslim-majority countries.

But if the speech marked a rhetorical shift, it did not chart new ground in terms of U.S. foreign policy. Instead, it signals the reemergence of liberal imperialism, packaged deftly and skillfully through the person of Barack Hussein Obama.

Sections of the conservative bloc recognize the need for this shift. 9/11 presented the neoconservatives with an alibi to unleash their vision of U.S. foreign policy. They seized this unprecedented opportunity to launch a program that would reshape the Middle East and establish a new Pax Americana. Ideas that were considered off the wall by the Bush Sr. and Clinton administrations, such as the “clash of civilizations” thesis, became dominant.

So all-encompassing were these ideas that even sections of the left accepted the notion that Muslim-majority nations were mired in backwardness, and that these nations, as well as domestic Muslim communities, needed to be modernized by an enlightened West (note, for instance, the arguments about bringing democracy to Iraq, banning the hijab under the guise of secularism, etc.). The lack of a principled anti-racist position within the mainstream antiwar movement then had serious consequences for Arabs and Muslims.

It is therefore important that we begin our assessment of Obama’s speech by acknowledging the shift away from Islamophobic rhetoric.

Rejecting the “clash of civilizations” argument, Obama emphasized the shared common history and common aspirations of the East and West. Whereas the “clash” discourse sees the West and the world of Islam as mutually exclusive and polar opposites, Obama emphasized “common principles.” He spoke of “civilization’s debt to Islam” because it “pav[ed] the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment,” and acknowledged the contributions made by Muslims to the development of science, medicine, navigation, architecture, calligraphy and music.

Obama then took on many of the myths that became commonplace after 9/11. Breaking with the notion that Islam is inherently violent, Obama emphasized, several times, Islam’s history of tolerance. He quoted from the Koran to show that Islam does not accept violence against innocent people, and pointed to the tolerance shown by Muslims in Spain during the violent period of the Christian Inquisition.

He observed that Indonesia, Bangladesh, Turkey and Pakistan—all Muslim-majority states—had elected women to leadership roles and added that “the struggle for women’s equality continues in many aspects of American life.” He thus cast aside the notion that the enlightened West inherently recognizes women’s rights.

He rejected the widely held view that women who wear the veil are “less equal,” stating that this should be a woman’s choice. And he argued against actions taken by Western nations to dictate what Muslim women should wear, stating: “We cannot disguise hostility towards any religion behind the pretence of liberalism.”

Obama subtly acknowledged the U.S.’s double standards. He admitted that the U.S. had acted contrary to its “ideals” by instituting torture. He also noted that one nation should not pick and choose who should have nuclear weapons, a reference to the U.S.’s opposition to Iranian nuclear ambitions and its lack of criticism of Israel’s nuclear arsenal.

He further admitted to the U.S. role in the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq in 1953, and to the ways that colonialism and the Cold War thwarted aspirations in other parts of the world. Marking a shift from the traditional one-sided emphasis on Israel’s problems, he described the Palestinians as a dispossessed people.

Yet as significant as these comments are in challenging the racist and Islamophobic rhetoric under the Bush regime, Obama’s policy in the Middle East and South Asia does not signal a break with the policies of previous administrations. While there are minor points of difference with the Bush administration, Obama’s foreign policy stays within the broader framework of US imperial aims in the region.

Consistent with previous Democratic and Republican presidents going back to 1979, Obama views Iran’s independence from, and resistance to, U.S. dominance in the region as a problem. While he has called for a halt to further settlements in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, he champions a toothless two-state solution that emerged in policy circles in the U.S. in the early 1990s—and he says nothing about dismantling existing Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

In Iraq, he proposes to withdraw U.S. combat troops while leaving about 50,000 troops still in the country to maintain U.S. control. And in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Obama “Af-Pak” strategy has only increased U.S. troops and involvement in Afghanistan and created a massive refugee crisis in Pakistan, all to further its oil/natural gas interests and geopolitical aims in the region.

What Obama’s speech represents is a repackaging of U.S. imperial aims in liberal terms. It heralds a new rhetorical approach built on the ashes of the now widely discredited cowboy diplomacy of the Bush era.

This is why the speech earned praise from even right-wing hacks like David Horowitz. In an article titled, “Fellow conservatives, admit it: Obama gave a great speech,” Horowitz argues that Obama deserves support because he defended U.S. policy in relation to Israel and the Iraq and Afghan wars. Republican Sen. Richard Lugar similarly dismissed criticisms from Republicans, calling the speech a “signal achievement.” Speaking about the Middle East peace process Lugar stated that the speech tried to “strike some of the right notes rhetorically,” while it would have little impact materially.

Indeed, Horowitz and Luger are not alone in seeing the usefulness of such a rhetorical shift. Over the last few years, in response to the plummeting U.S. image around the world, and in Muslim-majority countries in particular, a section of the political elite has sought to find new approaches to bolstering America’s image.

One such effort got underway in January 2007 under the leadership of former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, former Deputy Secretary of State (under Bush) Richard Armitage, and others. The group published a document titled, “Changing Course: A New Direction for U.S. Relations with the Muslim World,” which received high praise from political figures like Lugar, Howard Berman and Leon Panetta, and former generals like Anthony Zinni, among others.

The “Changing Course” document states in its opening pages that distrust of the U.S. in Muslim-majority countries is a product of “[p]olicies and actions—not a clash of civilizations.” It goes on to argue that to defeat “violent extremists,” military force is necessary but not sufficient, and that the U.S. needs to forge “diplomatic, political, economic, and cultural initiatives.” The report urges the U.S. leadership to improve “mutual respect and understanding between Americans and Muslims,” promote better “governance and improve civic participation,” and help “catalyze job creating growth” in Muslim countries.

The call to action stated that it would be vital for the next president to talk about improving relations with Muslim majority countries in his or her inaugural speech, and to reaffirm the U.S. “commitment to prohibit all forms of torture.” Obama has carried out these and other suggestions, and the Cairo speech reflects many of the themes raised in this report.

Yet behind this liberal veneer of promoting “better understanding” and “mutual respect” is a report that in no way, shape or form attempts to “change course” on U.S. foreign policy objectives. Instead, it simply urges the use of more subtle and diplomatic means to achieve these aims.

It states that the U.S. should engage Iran while insisting that it conform to non-proliferation standards; create a path for a two-state solution in Israel/Palestine; promote political reconciliation in Iraq and specify the U.S.’s long term goal; and renew an international commitment to stem the resurgence of extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In short, it promotes the goals of U.S. imperialism, but through means that mark a shift from the arrogant and unilateralist ways of the Bush regime.

It is no wonder then that Obama’s speech received a lukewarm reception in Muslim-majority countries. While some have understandably welcomed Obama’s gesture of goodwill and respect, many have expressed skepticism, asking Obama to match his words with deeds. The sentiment expressed in many newspaper editorials, and by ordinary people, is one that challenges Obama to change course in terms of foreign policy.

This should come as no surprise given the history of U.S. propaganda in Muslim-majority countries and the healthy skepticism that has been built up against it. To counter the influence of the Soviet Union and present the U.S. in a positive light, the U.S. developed an intensive propaganda strategy that included the use of posters, radio programs, books, pamphlets, intervening in school curricula, etc.

For instance, one short story distributed in Iran was about two boys, one who studied hard and was industrious, and the other who chose communism. Unsurprisingly, the latter met with an untimely death in a street demonstration, while the former prospered. Some of the more comical efforts include the USIS office in Iraq distributing posters of the Soviet Union depicted as a “greedy red pig,” complete with a hammer and sickle for a tail!

U.S. Cold War propaganda emphasized the Christian and religious roots of the U.S., in contrast to the godless atheism of the USSR. Concretely, this meant, for instance, the use by the U.S. embassy in Iraq of posters that featured photographs of Washington D.C.’s Islamic center, meant to depict the U.S. as an inclusive and tolerant nation. When Obama talks of a mosque in every state of the U.S., he is simply using already tried strategies.

Some of the key themes of Cold War propaganda in the Middle East involved portraying the U.S. as a beacon of freedom and democracy for the world, as a peace-loving nation, and as a friend of Islam in the “common moral front” against the USSR.¹ Yet this propaganda could only be so effective, since the U.S.’s actions in toppling democratically elected regimes and supporting Islamists told a different story.

We in the U.S. need to develop a similar skepticism of imperial rhetoric. Liberal imperialism has a long history in the U.S. Starting with the Spanish-American War, political elites have argued that U.S. interventions in various countries were for humanitarian goals.

The U.S. claimed to be liberating the Cubans from Spain, yet they simply took over the reigns of power from the latter. Woodrow Wilson championed the right of nations to self-determination, but conveniently applied it only to the break-up of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires in his “fourteen points” program.

FDR claimed to be championing democracy during the Second World War, yet African Americans did not have the right to vote under Jim Crow laws. JFK claimed to want to “help” Third World countries to develop economically and to foster democracy, and created the Peace Corps for this purpose. Yet he sent more troops into Vietnam, and attempted to overthrow Castro through the “Bay of Pigs” invasion.

In short, the U.S., like all empires, has always sought to disguise its real aims behind fine-sounding phrases and goals. While Obama’s speech is a step forward in that it eschews the hate-filled Islamophobic rhetoric of the Bush regime, it does little for the real Muslims and Arabs who continue to face discrimination, harassment, rendition, torture, war and occupation.

To address these problems, a reinvigorated antiwar movement should use Obama’s rhetoric to build a struggle that can champion the rights of Arabs and Muslims around the world, and hold Obama accountable to his own words.

1. The material in this and the last two paragraphs are taken from National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 78, US Propaganda in the Middle East—the Early Cold War Version edited by Joyce Battle.

In desperation I’ve put together this brief guide — just follow three basic steps to win back your reputation in style.

Step 1: Look for a Serious Relationship

You’re a mature and serious author, not a serial dater, so don’t be so self-centered that you forget why you write. Write only about things you really care about. If you do, you’ll want to say something true and valuable about them; if you don’t, you’ll turn everybody off.

Sorry, but you can’t cover up a poor performance by going on and on — a text that is long as well as dull is unbearable. Gary Provost said it — ‘writing gets more interesting as it acquires precision, not length.’

If your commitment slacks, you need to work harder. Do your research. The more you know about your topic, the more irresistible you’ll find it.

Step 2: Hold the Other Person Your Equal

Think of writing as a love triangle between author, topic and reader. This ménage will only work if you grant the reader the same dignity you owe the topic and yourself.

Be clear and direct, but don’t dumb yourself down. Share your insights, but don’t try to impress or intimidate. Avoid jargon. ‘The great enemy of clear language is insincerity,’ said George Orwell, so don’t cheat. When in doubt follow the Writer’s Golden Rule as laid down by Joseph Williams: ‘Write to others as you would have others write to you.’

Step 3: Prepare for Your Big Night Out

Now that you have respect for topic and reader, it’s time to groom your writing skills.

You wouldn’t show up on a date in an egg-stained sweater; then don’t neglect to check your facts, spelling, grammar and punctuation. Find a decent outline and polish every detail. Have you cleaned your nails and smoothed your transitions? Are you using too much make-up or not enough verbs? How enticing is your lead? How satisfying your ending?

If this final step terrifies you, do seek professional help – study the best in the trade, join a class and read as many how-to books as you can. Be humble enough to realize your job is not only to seduce but also to learn, and you’ll quickly gain confidence as well as wisdom.

I asked Dan Lazare, a writer with thirty-five years’ experience, how he does it. ‘It’s easy,’ he said. ‘I love good literature of all kinds. I do my best to emulate the clear, simple prose of people like Orwell. Yes, politically he’s all over the place, but as a stylist he’s top notch. I’ve a four-volume collection of his essays, letters and journalism that I’ve read cover to cover…’

Plus, you couldn’t picture Orwell in one of those t-shirts.

FOR YOUR BEDSIDE TABLE

Fryxell, David A. Structure and Flow. Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest Books, 1996.

Orwell, George. George Orwell: The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters. Edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. Boston: DR Godine, 2000.

Provost, Gary. Make Every Word Count: A Guide to Writing that Works – for Fiction and Nonfiction. Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest Books, 1980.

Strunk, William. The Elements of Style: With Revisions, an Introduction, and a Chapter on Writing by E.B. White. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1999.

Ueland, Brenda. If You Want to Write. Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 1987.

Williams, Joseph M. Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace. New York: Longman, 2000.

Zinsser, William. On Writing Well: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction. New York: HarperCollins, 1994.

But isn’t that part of the problem? Selling this idea that you don’t have to do anything. Anytime you sell people the idea that sit back and you’ll get 10 to 20 percent on your money, don’t you always know that that’s going to be a lie? When are we going to realize in this country that our wealth is work. That we’re workers and by selling this idea that of “Hey man, I’ll teach you how to be rich.” How is that any different than an infomercial?

At that moment, I hoped that the studio audience would give Stewart a standing ovation for a statement so refreshing in its common sense that it seemed almost revolutionary. Yet not a peep could be heard. True, it must be considered that the crowd was probably in a state of rapt attention at not only at the overdue humbling of one TV personality, but also at the rare serious form of another. And so it was understandable that they did not want to risk breaking the taut string of interrogation that was keeping Cramer squirming on the hook.

But I still can’t shake this thought: if the truth of Stewart’s statement was the equivalent a bucket of cold water in Cramer’s face, it must have been a tidal wave onto the audience. That is, I can safely bet that many of the people in that crowd – us – had bought into that same infomercial, the idea of getting something for nothing. And we’re now feeling pretty stupid about it.

It was easy to be fooled into thinking that our financial system was a legitimate enterprise with “solid foundations.” After all, the system seemed to work well for our parents. When it was our turn to invest, we were dazzled (and confused) by complicated terms typed on elaborate contracts printed on expensive letterhead, which were pushed across a rich mahogany table by men in crisp, clean suits with large salaries and offices in glassy skyscrapers. If that wasn’t legitimate, what was? And as a famous man once said, most people usually cannot conceive that those in power “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”

Yet there is more to it than that; this was – and continues to be – much more complex than a run-of-the-mill scam. How could a country built with such brave, valiant effort be seduced into such a lazy, irrational mode of thinking? Not the idea that we could make money without working, but the idea that we could do it legitimately, legally, and morally? There are plenty of possible reasons, but I’d like to discuss something that is easy to overlook: the power of words.

As the public relations industry matured throughout the last half of the twentieth century, powerful institutions with a lot to lose became increasingly adept at manipulating the semantics of our popular discourse. Take our government, for example. Violent, bloody interventions into other countries came to be known as “defense,” anyone who opposed our foreign policy could be labeled a “terrorist,” and whenever “democracy” was mentioned, it was sure to be paired with “capitalism” – to list a just a few examples.

Perhaps a few people noticed at first, scoffed, rolled their eyes. But it wasn’t enough. Before long, we had unconsciously digested these terms more palatable to the powers-that-be and started using them with a straight face, just as their creators intended – nowadays, you’d probably be laughed out of the room of you called the Department of Defense by its more archaic, politically incorrect name: the War Department.¹ The victors not only have the power to write history, but construct the language that tells that history.

It is little secret that many of those in government move back and forth between Washington and Wall Street. So it is not much of a surprise to find out that our business moguls also understand the huge potential of words. Just as our government had ensnared hundreds of formerly useful words and turned them into their zombified foot soldiers, so too did Wall Street invent their own Newspeak (which, in Orwell’s words, “was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought.”) and co-opt the English language to meet their ends.

With plenty of money to spend on PR, the titans of Wall Street transformed what seemed like brash, risky bets into “aggressive portfolios.” The winnings of these bets are now regarded as “returns.” And of course, the term “gambling,” so loaded with the baggage of addiction and broad public scorn, is rarely ever broached.

As Wall Street became more criminal, the words that they used to describe what they were doing became more complex. This more recent era of looting saw the birth of “credit default swaps,” “collateralized debt obligations,” “structured investment vehicles,” and “mortgage backed securities,” all very professional-sounding but utterly incomprehensible terms (even to the bankers themselves!) that served to hide an underbelly of shady trading that grew shadier by the day. The more often we heard these phrases, the more that they were uttered by knowing, professional faces, the fewer questions we raised.

There are many tasks ahead of us if we wish to return to a sane, sustainable mode of living. One of those tasks is to make a concerted effort to mean what we say. We must reinvigorate the words that we have left prey to PR spinsters and politicians to be used to manipulate our thinking. And sometimes, we must capture the words that the oligarchs themselves invented. How can we do that? By following Wall Street’s example: using them over and over and over again in our conversation and writing – in the context that suggests the meaning that we’d want for them to convey.

Let’s take the term “invest,” for example. In the 2009 edition of the Random House Dictionary, the first three definitions of the word are as follows:

   1. to put (money) to use, by purchase or expenditure, in something offering potential profitable returns, as interest, income, or appreciation in value.

   2. to use (money), as in accumulating something: to invest large sums in books.

   3. to use, give, or devote (time, talent, etc.), as for a purpose or to achieve something: He invested a lot of time in helping retarded children.

Dictionaries list several definitions of one entry in a numerical order based on their perceived order of importance. Because most dictionaries these days tend to be descriptive (reflecting how the language is actually used, “ain’t” included) rather than prescriptive (prescribing how the language should be used, “ain’t” excluded), the definition’s placement usually correlates to its how often it is used, which creates a numerical scale ranging from the everyday to the archaic.

In the spirit of the sobering bucket of cold water that is the global recession, I believe we should begin the process of pushing the #3 definition up to the #1 spot, through the means of verbal and literary labor. Why? To put it simply, the first two are narrow definitions which imply self-serving motives, while the third is more open and entails any possible range of motives, from the most selfish to the most altruistic. In today’s world, the #1 definition of “invest” exists mostly in the realm of the abstract, in a Matrix-like sea of digitized numbers; what is “invested” in has no face, no heart, and nothing for you to hold. Like a gambler and his dice, the average investor has no emotional connection to his investments outside of their capacity to make him money. Speaking of investments strictly in dollar terms is just one symptom of the diseased mentality that got us into this mess in the first place.

The third definition of “invest”, on the other hand, is very capable of referring to the real, the tangible, and the concrete. That “something” referred to could be to amass a personal fortune, but it could also be a host of other things – educating your child, taking charge of your health, bettering the relationship with your parents (Acknowledging the cynics in the audience: yes, it could also be world domination). While definition #1 only has fearful hope to keep the investor and his investments together in hard times, definition #3 has room to consider a sense of honor, personal obligation, or love (qualities which are especially useful in hard economic times). While definition #1 entails only risks, definition #3 entails risks and responsibilities.

When we as individuals accept more responsibility for our actions, the nation as a whole will benefit. How can we act more responsibly? Using words that meant to communicate, not to conceal, would be an excellent start. When we can speak more directly and frankly with each other, when the carefully constructed facades are torn away by clear logic, we’ll be able to see that our economy does not need an investment of more money, but common sense. We would accept, as Mr. Stewart said, that our wealth is work, and that we certainly can’t get something for nothing.

1. The Department of War was renamed the Department of Defense in 1949, only one year after the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) was founded.

The Israeli Defense Force is the most moral army in the World!

– Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert

Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany bombed, invaded and annexed countries and territories as a prelude to their quest for World Empire. Israel’s drive for regional dominance has followed in their footsteps, imitating their style: Indiscriminate aerial bombings of civilian and military facilities, a savage blitzkrieg led by armored vehicles, disdain and repudiation of all criticism from international agencies was accompanied by an open, military buildup for a new and bigger war against Iran. Like the Nazi leadership, who played on the ‘Bolshevik threat’, the Israeli high command has set in motion a vast world-wide propaganda campaign led by its world Zionist network, raising the specter of ‘Islamic terror’ to justify its preparations for a military assault on seventy-four million Iranians. Just as Nazi Germany interpreted the passivity, sympathy and impotence of the West when confronted by ‘facts on the ground’ as license for aggression, the Israeli military machine receives a powerful impetus for new wars by the Western governments’ inaction and flaccid response to its invasion of Lebanon, the bombing of Syria and now its Nazi style blitz and conquest of Gaza. For the Israeli high command, the impotence and complicity of the Western states, marks the way to bigger and bloodier wars to establish Israel’s supremacy and dominance of the Middle East, from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf.

Gaza Blitz: Dress Rehearsal for an Assault on Iran

Israel’s military victory in Gaza is a dress rehearsal for a full-scale military assault on Iran. In the course of their Gaza extermination campaign, Israeli political and military strategists gained a great deal of vital information about: (1) the levels of complicity and impotence of European, North American and Arab states; (2) the high degree and depth of material and political support obtainable from the United States government in pulverizing adversaries; (3) the high degree of internal support among the Jewish electorate for even the most brutal killing fields; (4) the massive unquestioning backing of an offensive war from all the biggest and most politically influential and wealthiest Jewish-Zionist organizations in the US and Western Europe; (5) the weakness and ineffectiveness of the United Nations and the incapacity of the entire range of humanitarian organizations to limit Israel’s extermination campaign directed at destroying the very existence of an entire people; (6) the unconditional backing of the entire mass media and news agencies in the US and most of the mass media in Europe and the rest of the world; (7) the willingness of the liberal critics to equally blame the victims of extermination and the exterminators for the ‘violence’, thus neutralizing any effective consequential condemnation of the Israeli state; and (8) the adaptation of practically all the journalists, writers, academics and politicians to the entire euphemistic vocabulary of the Israeli propaganda office.

For example, sustained total war is called an ‘incursion’. Ten thousand aerial assaults by hundreds of Israeli helicopters and fighter-bombers are equated with sporadic harmless homemade rocket attacks as ‘violence’. Israeli targeting of thousands of civilian homes, hospitals and basic infrastructure are labeled ‘terrorist’ targets. Resistance fighters are labeled ‘Hamas terrorists’. The bombing of the Red Cross, the United Nations relief facilities, hospitals, mosques are called ‘mistakes’ or justified as ‘launching sites for Hamas terrorists.

Israeli political leaders have drawn the lesson from their dirty little ‘war’ that they can totally destroy a nation, decimate a society and murder and maim 7000 civilians with impunity. Israeli leaders learned they can carry out an offensive genocidal war without suffering breaks in diplomatic relations (except Mauritania, Qatar, Bolivia and Venezuela). The Israelis have successfully tested the loyalty and submissiveness of the major Arab regimes in the region and secured cooperation and acquiescence from Egypt, the ‘Palestinian Authority’, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Israeli civilian-military leaders calculate that with this high degree of governmental complicity, combined with support from all the major Zionist leaders and mass media moguls, they can dismiss even large-scale street protests, repeated calls for boycotts and United Nations denunciations. Israeli leaders know that the criticism of major religious leaders and the growing number of Jewish dissidents, critical intellectuals and activists will have no consequential impact on Western governments nor lessen the fervor and loyalty of the major Jewish organizations.

Invisible Threats and Visible Impunity

The two potential threats to Israel’s genocidal offensive wars, namely, economic boycotts by important trading and investing countries and a cut-off of military aid, did not materialize. In North American the leading Zionist organizations ensured that the issue of a boycott was never even raised in the legislature and executive branches. In the US, AIPAC wrote resolutions and secured near unanimous passage (100% in the Senate, 90% in the Congress) of an AIPAC dictated resolution endorsing Israel’s invasion and slaughter. Moreover the Zionist colonized Pentagon authorized massive new shipments of missiles and 1000 pound bombs to re-supply Israel in the midst of its massacres of the Palestinians. Israel’s leaders gloated over the fact that Jewish Zionist Lobbies control over US policy went un-contested by the anti-war protestors. Few, if any, of the demonstrators around the world identified and denounced the role of the Zionist organizations in their own countries in making US, Canadian and European policy toward the Middle East.

Nothing exemplifies the total and blind subordination of the 51 Major American Jewish Organizations (see appendix #1) to Israeli foreign policy goals as two incidents during the Gaza Genocide. When the ‘51’ got wind that Secretary of State Condeleeza Rice was working to come up with a Security Council resolution calling for a cease fire in Gaza, to stop Israeli genocide, every major Jewish organization mobilized their entire membership to oppose her. As the Jewish weekly magazine, Forward, reports: “During a January 5 (2009) conference call with Jewish activists, Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of President of Major American Jewish Organizations, gave special priority to blocking the international body from taking a stand on the Gaza issue. ‘We need to work hard to ensure the Security Council doesn’t pass the resolution, Hoenlein said.’” (Forward, January 15, 2009)

The second example of Zionist belief in Israeli supremacy over US Middle East policy and Presidential servility came in response to Israeli Prime Minister Olmert’s boast that he successfully dictated and imposed White House policy in the United Nation. According to the Forward: “Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert didn’t do anything wrong but he should have kept his mouth shut. That was the reaction of several Jewish leaders…’I have no problem with what Olmert did’, said Abraham Foxman, National Director of the Anti-Defamation League.” (Forward, January 15, 2009) Former AIPAC chief lobbyist Douglas Bloomfield, stated that he (an American citizen) had no problem with Israel dictating US policies but ‘it is a mistake to talk about it.’ (Forward, January 15, 2009). By talking about Israel’s power in Washington, it exposes the role of the Zionist Power Configuration in deciding US policies.

These examples demonstrate once again the indivisible links between Israel and its US-Zionist Fifth Column and their power to make US policy – even when it is a question of supporting genocide. These cases also illustrate the fact that the major American Jewish organizations will not tolerate the smallest White House deviation from any Israeli policy, even if it involves mass murder. It wasn’t enough that for 8 years, President Bush slavishly followed and funded Israel’s war machine: For US Jewish leaders it is 100% subservience up to and including his last day in office. As the Forward writes, “That tough words from Israel and the Jewish groups…serve as a message to the incoming (Obama) administrations…” (Ibid).

In addition to capturing positions of political power, one of the highest priorities of all the major Zionist Jewish organizations in the US is to propagandize, apologize and fabricate stories on behalf of Israel. Even in the face of Israel’s most blatant violent crimes against Palestinians, condemned by the UN General Assembly, the International Red Cross and every humanitarian group, the principle American Jewish religious institutions and lobbies have demonstrated their loyalty to the state of Israel. The modus operendi as documented by their internal memos is to dominate the mass media through ‘plants’ – pro-Zionist journalist, academics, ‘experts’ and editors – who write and broadcast justifications and apologies for Israeli war crimes (parroting the line of the Israeli state) in the mass media. The Zionist propagandists then circulate the planted articles by their colleagues, giving the impression of broad public support when in fact they are reproducing prepared Israeli-Zionist propaganda. The style and substance of the Zionist propaganda operation is evident in its defense of Israel’s Gaza bloodbath. The style is the Big Lie, reminiscent of totalitarian regimes. It is worthwhile to sample a few examples from the main mouthpiece of the 51 Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations (PMAJO):

1. Denying Israeli war crimes and fabricating accounts minimizing the Jewish State’s killings. The Daily Alert (January 22, 2009) claimed that Israel killed only 600 Palestinians and “most were fighters.” The Daily Alert denied on site reports by major human rights workers, Red Cross officials, Palestinian and international doctors and medical workers and journalists, who risked their lives (and some died) documenting the nearly 1,400 deaths, over 2/3 of which were children, women and non-combatants.

2. Repeating Israeli propaganda justifying the bombing of the United Nations-run schools by claiming the schools were ‘infiltrated by Palestinian terrorists’ among the thousands of refugees (Daily Alert, January 22, 2009). There was not a single armed resistance fighter found among the 40 bodies recovered from the rubble by the United Nations workers, International Red Cross and Palestinian medical crews at the girls’ elementary school; all were children, teachers and refugees. Every organization and individual eyewitness refutes the Zionist-American apology of the Israeli bombing of the school, including the entire European Union. The most bizarre fabrication printed in the Daily Alert is a headline, which read: “Hamas Shot from Civilian Neighborhoods” over an article by Rod Nordland (Newsweek), which, in fact, reports the opposite, “Everyone of the residents interviewed in eastern Jabeliya insisted that there had been no provocation from the area, no resistance fighters and no rocket launchings.”

3. The third lie is a whopper: “Israel Doing its Best to Help Gazans”, (Daily Alert, January 16, 2009). In fact, Israel blocked all medicine and medical equipment from entering Gaza, bombed hospitals, shot up ambulances, murdered doctors and medical aid workers and blocked all shipment of water, food and fuel. The Israelis bombed the main United Nations food and medical supply warehouse, destroying its entire contents. The US Zionists defended this bombing by citing Olmert’s blood libel that the destruction of thousands of tons of food was a “response to fire coming from the building.” The United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon was outraged by this barefaced lie as he visited the still smoldering UN warehouse to view the destruction while the US Secretary of State Rice crawled before the Israelis, begging them to “avoid (a repeat of) such incidents.” (Daily Alert, January 16, 2009)

4. “Saving Gaza by Destroying the Heart of Terror” (Daily Alert, January 16, 2009). The Jewish propaganda sheet reproduces an article by the ultra-nationalist Natan Sharansky, who advocates expelling all Palestinian Arabs from ‘Greater Israel’. In an article published in Bloomberg, Sharansky defended the destruction of over 10,000 houses, damaging over 40,000 homes, roads, hospitals, power installations, water and sewage installations, 121 industries and commercial workshops, 30 mosques, 29 educational institutions, farms, poultries, dairies, small fishing vessels and the fishing port (according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights and cited in Stephen Lendman’s essay, “Israel Killed Everything but the Will to Resist”, January 25, 2009).

5. The Fifth Big Lie: “Israeli Pilot Tries to Avoid Hitting Civilians”, (Daily Alert, January 14, 2009). Photos published in all the international mass media refute this Zionist propaganda claim. The ghostly rubble of whole apartment blocks resembles a nuclear strike or an earthquake, according to the BBC reporters who finally made it into Gaza. Numerous European Parliamentary representatives and other on site visitors from throughout the world were shocked by the devastation. Not only did Israeli pilots target all civilian targets, but their ground troops assassinated unarmed civilians holding white flags and in some cases even small children attempting to flee. Surviving Palestinian children tell of their fathers executed in front of their families.

The Big Lie promoted by the leading Zionist organizations resonates from the Rabbinical pulpits, to their members and beyond: Informal phone surveys with rank and file members of local Zionists groups echoes the same lies and apologies, almost verbatim. In a word, neither facts, nor reports, nor universal condemnation, nor challenges by dissident rabbis, Jewish notables, writers and activists have made a dent on the major Jewish organizations and their agents in influential positions in the new Obama administration. They are the willing accomplices to mass murder in Gaza. They are active promoters of a pre-emptive aerial assault on Iran. They will unconditionally apologize for any crime against humanity that Israel perpetrates. Their academic apologists at Harvard defend Israeli Genocide as part of a ‘Just War’. In the face of universal condemnation they continue to cite the Holocaust and claim that they and their State are the only Moral People entitled to decide and judge, what is just and what is sacred Truth.

The Israeli leaders are perfectly aware of the ‘free hand’ with which their ‘Fifth Column’ operates, up to and including their prominent role in defense of genocide. Israeli leaders are assured that even when they launch a bigger, bolder and more destructive war (including the possibility of pre-emptive nuclear strike) against Iran or Syria/Lebanon, they can count on the million-member US Zionist lobby securing White House and US Congressional support. Israeli leaders now know for a fact that the anti-war movement will once again engage in inconsequential protests against the ‘shadows of power’ and not the real power wielders embedded in the Zionist Power Configuration.

Gaza: Testing the Subservience of the US Congress and the White House

By savaging Gaza with extreme brutality, Israel is testing the waters of US support for more offensive wars. Gaza allowed the Jewish leaders to measure the depth and scope of US Zionist political influence and their willingness to ‘go all the way’ when Israel decides to bomb 74 million Iranians in to the stone age. Or as the famous Israeli Zionist historian Benny Morris suggested in the New York Times, July 18,2008: turn Iran “into a nuclear wasteland”.

Prime Minister Olmert’s public boasting that he pulled President Bush off the stage from an official public appearance and successfully ordered him to instruct the Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice to abstain from voting on her own authored resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza before the Security Council has many profound meanings. On the most obvious level Olmert’s revelation confirms the power of Israeli leaders over the White House. Secondly, the public nature of the exercise of power, tells the world that Israel can openly flaunt its capacity to humiliate and ridicule the President of the United States and later brag before Israeli officials with no adverse consequences. Thirdly it tells us that Israel has a greater say in US foreign policy than the American Secretary of State (or Foreign Minister). Fourthly it tells us that Israel decides how the US behaves, votes, vetoes and abstains in the Security Council, subject to Israeli approval.

Israel, the Zionist Fifth Column and Iran

Israel exercises power in the Middle East through its military weaponry. Its repeated threats and aerial and ground assaults on neighboring countries is a deliberate strategy to assert its regional supremacy. In recent years, Israel’s regional power has been enhanced by the Zionist Power Configuration in the US and Canada, who use the armed forces in their own countries to destroy any country that contests Israeli military supremacy. The classic case was the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq and the follow-up occupation, in which long-term Israel Firsters in the US Government played a deadly role in promoting the war.

From the late 1980’s to the present, the US Zionist Power Configuration has been in the forefront of a campaign to promote a US military confrontation with Iran in collaboration with Israel. The Zionist military proposals gained tremendous momentum during the eight years of the Bush Administration. The ZPC mounted an unrelenting mass media propaganda campaign demonizing Iran, fabricating and disseminating falsified accounts of its nuclear programs, infiltrating and occupying key positions in the US Treasury Department (led by Stuart Levey) aggressively bludgeoning other governments, industries, banks and investors to boycott Iran. Zionist Treasury Department officials hope to strangle and weaken Iran’s economy in order to soften it up for a military strike. No other single or combined force in North America, or, for that matter, any place in the world (except Israel) has played as big a role in promoting an offensive war against Iran as the Zionist politicians and officials in the US government. They were aided and abetted by Jewish lobbies, Zionist propaganda centers, multi-billionaires and hundreds of Jewish community organizations.

Major Jewish religious organizations play a very influential role as conduits of Israeli propaganda and are an important force within the principle Zionist umbrella organizations (e.g. Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations or CPMAJO). Fully one-fifth of the Conference (see appendix for a full list) is made up of clerical-Zionist organizations, whose principle function is promoting Israeli goals through direct intervention in US politics at all levels. A memo from one group, the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, issued on January 3, 2009, outlines their detailed strategy in defense of Israel’s Gaza massacre: “Every congregation should issue a statement supporting Israel. Solicit statements from elected officials at the city, state or provincial, or federal levels. Solicit statements from local religious, ethnic and other prominent personalities. Monitor and respond to media coverage. Whenever possible, enlist non-Jews as well as public officials and prominent spokespeople to demonstrate their support for Israel.” The memo then proposes a series of “talking points on the situation in the Gaza Strip” that repeats verbatim the identical propaganda fabrications of the Israeli political-military high command: Affirming Israel’s peaceful intentions, blaming Hamas as the aggressor and claiming that “Israel, as always, is doing everything within its powers to limit non-combatant casualties in Gaza.” The Jewish clerics in the United Synagogues tell their faithful congregants to ignore the more than 5000 civilian casualties and the 1,300 deaths, of which three quarters are women, children and unarmed civilians, the sixty schools and the tens of thousands of homes and the dozen mosques demolished, the condemnations of war crimes by the United Nations, Red Cross and every Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups.

The strategy paper issued by the religious Conservative Jews is very similar to that followed by the entire network of 51 religious and secular groups affiliated with the ‘Presidents.’ This highlights the way in which a highly disciplined, well-financed minority captures and multiplies its power far beyond its own membership, ‘leveraging’ influential Gentiles, the mass media at all levels and public figures into a powerful juggernaut in defense of Israeli genocide in Gaza today and for war against Iran tomorrow.

Israel’s Military Threat to Iran

Israel, contrary to some leftist skeptics, had advanced operational plans to launch a massive aerial assault on Iran. On several occasions in the recent past, Israel has planned several aerial attacks on Iran, only to be thwarted by the Bush White House. The Jewish state has publicly announced that it will unilaterally strike Iran if it continues its legal, internationally recognized, right to enrich uranium. The most likely winner in this February’s national elections, Binyamin Netanyahu, has publicly stated that a military attack on Iran is at the top of his agenda – a message which has activated all the major Zionist-Jewish organizations in the US to redouble their efforts to secure US compliance, support and active collaboration. On January 7, 2009, the London Sunday Times, quoting several high level Israeli military sources, reported, “Israel has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities with tactical nuclear weapons. Two Israeli Air Force squadrons are training to blow up an Iranian facility using low-yield nuclear ‘bunker-buster’…Robert Gates, the new (sic) US Defense Secretary, has described military action against Iran as a ‘last resort’ leading Israeli officials to conclude that it will be left to them to strike. The preparations have been overseen by Major General Eliezar Shkedi, Commander of the Israeli Air Force.” (Times on Line, January 7, 2009). A subsequent article in the pro-Israel New York Times (January 11, 2009) by David Sanger, a prominent Zionist sympathizer, reported that “President Bush deflected a secret request by Israel last year (2008) for specialized bunker-busting bombs it wanted for an attack on Iran’s main nuclear complex…the Bush administration was particularly alarmed by an Israeli request to fly over Iraq to reach Iran’s major nuclear complex…The White House denied that request outright.” Sanger goes on to claim that the Israelis were furious at a detailed report by 16 US intelligence agencies (The National Intelligence Estimate) which demonstrated that Iran had halted development of a nuclear warhead in 2003 because it undermined Israeli efforts to secure US collaborations for a military attack on Iran. Sanger spends several paragraphs trying to bolster the Israeli unsubstantiated claims regarding Iran’s nuclear program framing the case for a unilateral Israeli attack…which he dates began “early 2008” but was stalled by opposition from the US military.

The forthcoming Israeli national elections (February 10, 2009) promise to accelerate Israeli plans for a massive military assault on Iran, as the polls indicate that the majority of Jewish voters will elect the ultra-militarist Zionist Binyamin Netanyahu, a favorite of the most influential Zionist-American organizations. In a very recent interview with the Wall Street Journal (January 24, 2009), Netanyahu speaks of Iran as the “terrorist mother base” and “that Israel cannot accept an Iranian terror base (Gaza) next to its major cities.” He then goes on to justify the Israeli murder of civilians because, he claims, the Palestinian resistance (“terrorists”) “hide behind civilians”. The Wall Street journalist, one Brett Stephens, in complete awe and wonder at the feet of the Israeli leader, writes approvingly of Netanyahu’s justifications for an attack on Iran, “the threat of a nuclear Iran poses a much greater danger to the world than the economic crises…this poses an existential threat to Israel directly…” Stephens goes on to sum up Netanyahu’s position toward Obama: “If diplomacy fails and the US does not resort to military force, Israel will decide to go it alone…”

Israeli leaders have temporarily backed off attacking Iran – launching, instead, the Gaza assault to weaken any possible resistance among Palestinians to an Israeli war against their Muslim ally in Tehran. The Israeli war plans toward Iran will be reinforced with the new Obama Presidency. With the rise to power of the ultra-Zionist Dennis Ross as Chief Adviser on to President Obama on Iran and Hillary (“We will obliterate Iran”) Clinton as Secretary of State, the question of a US backed Israeli preemptive attack on Iran looms closer to becoming a reality. As late as two months ago Ross signed on to a document, which provided a ‘roadmap’ to war with Iran. Zionist infestation of the entire policy-making apparatus of the Obama regime means that any official military or intelligence opposition to an Israeli attack on Iran will be blunted and their spokespersons marginalized.

The Obama Regime and Israel

The Obama regime is, if anything, even more penetrated from the top to bottom and from Executive offices to Congress with Zionists in positions to influence every strategic decision having any relation to Middle East policy.

The Jewish Telegraph Agency (January 20, 2009), the principle news agency of American Jewish-Zionist publications, provides a detailed list of the ‘pro-Israel’ Zionists in strategic Middle East positions in the Obama regime. The evidence of Zionist control is overwhelming and the consequences are deadly to any ‘balanced’ peace negotiations and extremely promising for Israel’s war ambitions in the regions:

1. Dennis Ross will be an influential adviser on Iran policy. Ross is an advocate of intensifying sanctions to undermine negotiations and force the military option.

2. Richard Holbrooke, appointed as Obama’s envoy to Afghanistan, is a prominent Zionist who served as UN envoy under Clinton. He has recently headed an ad hoc group called United Against a Nuclear Iran, which advocates military action against Iran if it does not submit to an Israeli-dictated cessation of its legal nuclear energy program.

3. George Mitchell, Obama’s envoy to the Palestine-Israel conflict, is one of the four co-chairs of the Zionist front group, Bipartisan Policy Center, which propose a step by step approach, from sanctions to embargo to naval blockade to a military strike on Iran.

4. Dan Shapiro and Puneet Talwar will collaborate on Middle East policy at the National Security Council. Shapiro, in consultation with Israel, was “key in shepherding the Syrian Accountability Act through the Senate (a measure that imposed tough sanctions on Syria). Shapiro drafted Obama’s cringing, belly crawling speech to the AIPAC conference in Washington on May 2008. Puneet Talwar will handle Persian Gulf issues – including Iran. He was a staffer of former Senator and current Vice President Joe Biden and was a close collaborator and conduit for AIPAC.

5. Eric Lynn is heading for a White House Middle East policy job. He started his career as an AIPAC intern in 1998 and continued as a staff person for Congressman Peter Deutsch, “one of the most committed pro-Israel figures in Congress.” Lynn spent a year in Israel, imbibing Zionist military culture and learning Hebrew.

6. James Steinberg and Jacob ‘Jack’ Lew have been named as Clinton’s deputies at the State Department. Steinberg has been in a ‘strong relation with the pro-Israel community’ and was a conduit for Israeli pressure on Arafat to capitulate to Israeli demands. Jack Law will direct economic stimulus overseas. He is an orthodox-Zionist, who will use American economic resources to back Israeli militarism and reward or punish its adversaries. A former head of a Citigroup investment unit, he holds between $50,000 to $100,000 in Israel State Bonds.

7. Samantha Power, once a critic of Israeli war crimes in 2002 for which the Zionist Power Configuration had her removed from the Obama campaign in March 2008. She was ‘rehabilitated’ and re-incorporated as a member of the Clinton transition team after an ‘abject apology’ to Israel.

8. Cass Sunstein, a lifetime Zion-Lib, is head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs – a key propaganda arm of the Obama regime.

9. Rand Beers was lead national security adviser to Senator Kerry during his presidential campaign of 2004 and ‘built close relations’ with the pro-Israel political apparatus. As adviser to Homeland Security, he will ‘likely be a linchpin as Israel and the US forge a closer alliance’ (Jewish Telegraph Agency January 20, 2009).

10. Lee Feinstein and Mara Rudman are Zionist veterans from the Clinton Administrations. Feinstein is a lead adviser of Secretary of State Clinton and Rudman is Senior Foreign Policy Adviser of President Obama.

11. Susan Rice, UN Ambassador appointed by Obama, signed on to a Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) paper last summer calling for greater Israeli-US coordination for an embargo and military attack on Iran. WINEP is a well-known propaganda mill for Israel’s most fanatical, bellicose and unconditional supporters. In her Senate testimony, Rice denounced the United Nation General Assembly’s criticism of Israel’s Gaza bloodbath.

At the head of Obama’s foreign policy regime, Vice Presiden Biden (“I am a Zionist”), Secretary of State Clinton (“demolish Iran”) and Secretary of Defense Gates (a holdover from the Israeli-dominated Bush Administration) have put in place the most Zionist-infested Middle East policy regime in US history. This regime is neither by background, loyalties or commitments prepared to open serious negotiations with Iran, or to ‘broker’ an end of Israeli occupation of Palestine. On the contrary, their close ties with the Zionist Power Configuration and long-term commitment to Israeli militarism and expansionist policies ensure that the Obama regime will proceed toward collaboration with the Jewish State in a military confrontation with Iran. Everyone on Obama’s team supported the Israeli carnage in Gaza and endorsed Israel’s efforts to destroy the democratically elected Hamas government and prop up the discredited and corrupt quisling clique headed by Abbas.

The Obama Presidency has achieved what many observers thought impossible: It has placed more Zionist in more strategic power positions with a greater commitment to war with Iran than even the Bush Administration. Given Obama’s appointments and his own personal subservience to Israeli leaders it is difficult to imagine the 16 major intelligence services issuing a report refuting Israel’s fabrications about Iran’s nuclear program, as happened under Bush. Even more egregious, given the Zionist stranglehold on the White House, it is unlikely that Obama would block a proposed Israeli air assault on Iran as Bush is reputed to have done.

The Israeli war strategy toward Iran follows the ‘salami tactics’ of its Nazi forerunner: Attacks are designed for maximum destructiveness against civilian infrastructure, against countries and leaders opposed to any Israeli aggression toward Iran. Israel bombed and invaded Lebanon. It bombed Syria. Israel savaged Gaza. Its ‘lobby’ has extended and enforced global economic sanctions through the forceful intervention of a Zionist infested Treasury Department. Obama’s top economic adviser, the ultra-Zionist Lawrence Summers, promotes tighter sanctions, boycotts and embargoes against the designated enemies of Israel: policies pointing toward war.

‘Peace’ Negotiations Geared Toward War

The likelihood that the Obama regime will move the world closer to an offensive war with Iran is not based on idle speculation or selected quotes from his presidential campaign. No one can take serious President Obama or his Secretary of State Clinton’s advocacy of ‘negotiations with Iran’, when they are accompanied by conditions unacceptable to Iran’s sovereignty or national interests. The Obama regime openly threatens war if Iran does not accept unilateral disarmament with intrusive inspection of its strategic defense installations, allowing Israel and the US a unique opportunity for pinpointing vital targets for their first wave of attack.

What conclusively demonstrates Obama’s drive to war with Iran is his appointment of the most zealous Zionist militarist, Dennis Ross, to the key strategic position dealing with Iran.

Obama appointed Ross to the post of ‘Special Envoy to Iran’. He will act as Czar of Middle East policy. George Mitchell is his envoy on Israel-Palestine negotiations, a typical ‘good cop’ (Mitchell) strategy to counter the ‘bad cop’ (Ross). Ross, who is often called ‘Israel’s Lawyer’, is the ultimate Zionist, a crown prince of the US Zionist Jewish Lobby in all of its major undertakings regarding Iran. Ross is a founding leader of AIPAC, the principle and most powerful Israel First Lobby in Washington. He has been a lifelong and influential ZionCon ideologue, who successfully led the campaign in favor of the invasion of Iraq. He is among the most prolific and influential writers and propagandists at the Zionist-financed propaganda mill, WINEP (Washington Institute for Near East Policy), which has produced the most bellicose position papers pushing US military intervention in favor of Israel’s expansionist ambitions. During the Clinton years, Ross was appointed head of the US ‘mediation’ committee during the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations (1999-2000). In that position, he acted as ‘Israel’s lawyer’ according to a fellow US Zionist diplomat. He scuttled all possibility of any acceptable compromise by “following Israel’s lead.” He set up the conditions, which made Palestinian rejection inevitable while placing the blame on that embittered people. Ross has a profound influence on Obama’s politics to Israel.

Ross is a leader in a relatively new Zionist front group, known as the ‘Bipartisan Policy Center’. The ‘Center’ recently published a report entitled, “Meeting the Challenge: US Policy Toward Iranian Nuclear Development.” This roadmap for war with Iran was produced by a task force, which included Ross and two other extremist Zioncons, the dual-Israel-US citizen Michal Makovsky and Michael Rubin. Ross’ endorsement of the ‘Report’ reflects his rejection of any possibility of a negotiated agreement with Iran, which would accept Iran’s legal right to a uranium enrichment program as recognized by international treaty.

A recently reported wrinkle in Dennis Ross’ appointment to the Obama Cabinet is his role as current Chairman of the Jerusalem-based Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, under the Jewish Agency, which is an official part of the Israeli Government. His current work for an Israeli government agency could place Ross at odds with the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), a Federal statute that requires individuals working on behalf of a foreign government to register as such — something Ross has never done.

The ‘Report’ advocates a preemptive Israeli aerial bombing and missile campaign against Iran should the US and Europe fail to strike first. This Dennis Ross-endorsed ‘Report’ proposes a total naval and air blockade and embargo of Iran as a prelude to a US attack on Iran’s vital infrastructure. This document called on Obama to ‘bring in troops and material to the region under the cover of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, thus maintaining a degree of strategic and tactical surprise.’ In other words, Obama’s forthcoming appointment of Ross to head his regime’s Middle East Policy Advisory Group places an unconditional advocate and promoter of genocidal war with Iran in a key strategic foreign policy position.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Dennis Ross will do everything in their power to promote and justify a US-Israeli joint attack on Iran. Ross and Clinton will begin with phony negotiations based on unacceptable ultimatums. This will be followed by acts of war in the form of Gaza style embargoes designed to starve and impoverish the people of Iran, and conclude with a Gaza-style aerial blitzkrieg. Given the extraordinary number of Zionists appointed by Obama in every key level of his government, the possibility of any internal debate or dissent over the Ross roadmap for war in Israel’s interest is minimal. Obama has put together a policy-making elite so closely linked and loyal to the Israeli military that it precludes any type of meaningful negotiations with Iran.

Possible External Constraints on Zionist-Israeli-US War on Iran

The only effective deterrent to a Gaza style Israeli assault on Iran is Tehran’s capacity for military retaliation, especially accurate long-range missiles capable of reaching Israel’s principle military sites, infrastructure and related support systems. Given the Israeli leaders lack of any moral constraints and their immersion in a militarist ideology, in which brutal force and widespread violence are the primary means of projecting power and securing Israeli public support, a costly massive military counter-attack is probably the most effective deterrent to force its leaders to reconsider Israel’s military-driven foreign policy.

While Israeli militarists adopt a ‘defensive’ rhetoric, their strategy is to weaken Iran’s defense capability and make it more vulnerable to military threats and diplomatic pressure in a lead-up to a pre-emptive aerial assault. International inspections by United Nation agencies are only carried out of Iranian sites but not of US regional military installations, including their nuclear-armed war ships and submarines, or of Israel’s nuclear weapons sites and nuclear weapon laboratories. The one-sided inspections provide a wealth of information on Iranian military capacity and defense locations and of advanced strategic research laboratories. UN inspections prior to the US invasion of Iraq identified key defense installations and Iraqi scientists, their places of work and homes, which were used in bombing missions and the subsequent assassination campaign against top Iraqi scientists. This kind of information was crucial in guiding Israel’s bombing and missile assaults and assassination of leaders and their families during its invasions of Lebanon and Gaza.

The Israeli dictated and US Zionist implemented economic boycott of Iran is clearly directed toward undermining both Iranian living standards and the performance of their economy, similar to what the Jewish state imposed on Gaza. It is part of the ‘softening up’ campaign prior to its all out attack.

To date however, despite a sustained effort by all top Zionist functionaries in the US government and the intense pressures of its lobbies on US pension fund managers, the embargo has not crippled the Iranian economy. Especially with the onset of the recession, the decline of world markets and the growing energy demands of China, there are numerous Western and Asian multinationals eager to trade with Iran and to ignore Israeli and US Zionist pressures.

Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has finally forced important cracks in the overseas Zionist monopoly over Jewish opinion. The leading Jewish communal organizations and their spiritual spokespeople continue to support each and every crime from the bombing of Red Cross ambulances and clinic to United Nations schools, food and medical supplies warehouses and refugee centers. This has finally provoked vigorous opposition among leading Jewish intellectuals, writers and other professionals.

New organizations and personalities have emerged within the Jewish community, which have forcibly repudiated Israel’s genocide. Some Jewish activists have taken bold direct actions, occupying Israeli consular offices in a few major cities and calling for a total boycott of Israeli goods and academic exchanges. Others have confronted Zionist apologists in public forums and press conferences. While the number and influence of Jewish critics of Zionist war crimes is small, their importance is found in giving legitimacy and encouraging millions of otherwise intimidated and silent Gentiles to ‘come out.’ As a result, an unprecedented number of people in the West have voiced their horror and opposition to the Zionist military juggernaut and expressed their support for economic boycotts against Israel. While Jewish and Gentile mass opposition neither stopped or weakened Israel’s massacre of Gazan civilians, it has laid the political and organizational basis to launch a massive campaign against the US Zionist war plans against Iran.

Israel’s military successes have created an irrational triumphalist war fever among all of its leaders and their enthusiastic supporters in the million member Jewish-Zionist organizations in the US. This has led them to underestimate the catastrophic costs of a war with Iran. An Israeli-US sneak attack on Iran will unleash major military and political retaliatory action throughout the Middle East. This will certainly inflict major human, military, political and economic losses on many US military installations in the Gulf region. This is especially the case in Iraq and the adjoining client Gulf States, where US military forces are highly vulnerable. An Israeli assault might lead to the destabilization or overthrow of Arab client states. Moreover, Iran may retaliate by successfully launching accurate long-range missiles, which will target major Israeli military complexes and adjoining population centers.

Given the enormous worldwide disgust and horror at Israel’s war crimes in Gaza and the hatred evoked by the prospect of new aerial assaults on millions of Iranians, Tehran’s reprisals against Israel and the US are not likely to raise much condemnation. More likely, most people will feel a sense of righteous vindication, that finally the arrogant bully is finally getting paid back for its assaults on unarmed, imprisoned civilians in Gaza. Just as the British survivors of Nazi V-2 rocket attacks on English population centers cheered the firebombing of Dresden, vast sections of public opinion may greet an Iranian retaliatory strike on Israel as a valid deterrent for its serial atrocities against humanity.

One of the most effective threats to Israel’s genocidal war drive is the launching of investigations into Israeli war crimes, the establishment of tribunals to try Israeli military and political leaders for their crimes against humanity (Financial Times, January 16, 2009 page 5). Israeli leaders have advised their soldier-criminals they will be provided with legal protection. The leaders have expressed concern that they themselves may be subject to citizen arrests and tried by overseas courts. Several governments are filing war crimes charges before the International Criminal Court in The Hague. The problem with laying charges on Israeli war criminals is where to draw the line between military-political leaders who directed the war crimes and the field officers, who implemented the policies violating the Geneva Conventions. For example, identifying the officials who specifically barred medical and emergency workers for over four days from evacuating wounded and starving civilians, including small children, from the site of a horrific Israeli massacre of Gazan civilians. What about the great masses of Israeli Jewish citizens who were so elated by the bombing of whole civilian neighborhoods that some Israelis set up observation posts with picnic baskets to survey the ongoing carnage? The same Israelis “delighted in the images, splashed across the front pages, of smiling Israeli soldiers riding homes on tanks in victory post.” (Financial Times, January 26, 2009). Mass Israeli elation, political intoxication and embrace of the perpetrators of the killing of unarmed people may be repugnant to world opinion, but it is nor a sufficient offense to merit an international tribunal. However it is subject to the same moral repudiation, which many of us felt toward the German people who celebrated Hitler’s savage bombing of Soviet, Polish and Balkan cities. Even if the Zionist-controlled White House succeeds in using its veto on the United Nations Security Council to prevent a war crimes investigation of Israeli leaders, the presentation of charges and possible arrests in several European countries will force the Israeli leaders to reflect on their pariah status and might inhibit their push for a murderous war with Iran. We have included a list (see Appendix #2) of the names of Israeli military leaders, their rank and operational role and responsibility for war crimes in Gaza.

Israelis currently dismiss out of hand the opprobrium of world opinion as irrelevant to its ongoing military offensive. This causes the Jewish state to overlook the importance of world opinion in eroding strategic political support in the future. Many observers believe hundreds of millions of Arab citizens and multitudes of non-Arabs and non-Muslims are coming to believe that Israel and its overseas Zionist Fifth column will only understand the language of force since they routinely practice state terrorism to impose their interests on captive, impoverished people. As a result, many analysts argue that it is understandable that the weapons of choice for the victims of Israel will inevitably rely on sustained, organized and militarized people’s resistance. In these circumstances, the current crop of anemic, impotent, collaborationist Arab leaders and regimes may be overthrown and a new combative and consequential leadership could emerge, one which consults and draws its mass support from the deepest feelings of national dignity and profound hatred of Zionist imposed humiliations.

Conclusions

Israel’s Gaza war is leading its leaders and its strategically placed overseas agents in the US political system to overreach and to pursue a new war with Iran, as part of a regional strategy to secure imperial power. The Obama Administration and the newly elected Israeli prime minister share more than overlapping policy-makers and long-term commitments to military-driven empire building. They have made it clear that they will proceed in setting in motion a series of diplomatic and economic moves destined to prepare the stage for launching a genocidal war against Iran. This will be in line with Obama’s rhetoric of recreating a Jewish-Afro-American alliance, one based on Israeli interests and American lives! The only deterrent to new wars of extermination is mass action, which increases the political, economic and military costs for Israeli aggression. Only when Israeli casualties mount, when Zionist exploiters and bankers suffer losses, when its academics and tourist sites are boycotted, then and only then will the Israelis and their US acolytes begin to rethink their blind adherence to militarist policies. It is only then that they will rethink their irrational Judeo-centric vision of a world made by and for the one Chosen People living in the Only Moral State in the world.

Unfortunately it may take some military shocks to dispel these tribal fantasies. History teaches us that there is nothing like a bloody defeat to end the Superman Complex.

Appendix #1

51 Member Organizations of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations:

1. Ameinu
2. American Friends of Likud
3. American Gathering/Federation of Jewish Holocaust Survivors
4. American-Israel Friendship League
5. American Israel Public Affairs Committee
6. American Jewish Committee
7. American Jewish Congress
8. American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee
9. American Sephardi Federation
10. American Zionist Movement
11. Americans for Peace Now
12. AMIT
13. Anti-Defamation League
14. Association of Reform Zionist of America
15. B’nai B’rith International
16. Bnai Zion
17. Central Committee of American Rabbis
18. Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America
19. Development Corporation for Israel/State of Israel Bonds
20. Emunah of America
21. Friends of Israel Defense Forces
22. Hadassah, Women’s Zionist Organization of America
23. Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society
24. Hillel: The Foundation of Jewish Campus Life
25. Jewish Community Centers Association
26. Jewish Council for Public Affairs
27. Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs
28. Jewish Labor Committee
29. Jewish National Fund
30. Jewish Reconstructionist Federation
31. Jewish War Veterans of the USA
32. Jewish Women International
33. MERCAZ USA, Zionist Organization of the Conservative Movement
34. NA’AMAT USA
35. NCSJ: Advocates on behalf of Jews in Russia, Ukraine, the Baltic States and Eurasia
36. National Council of Jewish Women
37. National Council of Young Israel
38. ORT America
39. Rabbinical Assembly
40. Rabbinical Council of America
41. Religious Zionist of America
42. Union for Reform Judaism
43. Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America
44. United Jewish Communities
45. United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism
46. WIZO
47. Women’s League for Conservative Judaism
48. Women of Reform Judaism
49. Workmen’s Circle
50. World Zionist Executive, US
51. Zionist Organization of America

Appendix #2

List of Israeli Officials involved in War Crimes during the Gaza Invasion. This a partial and growing list of potential war criminals compiled by a group of Israeli activists, despite Israeli government censorship, and as a challenge to the Israeli Attorney General Menachem Mazuz and his military counterpart, Judge Advocate General Brigadier General Avihai Mandelblit:

1. Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minster
2. Ehud Barak, Israeli War Minister
3. Tzipi Livni, Foreign Minister of Israel
4. Yuval Diskin, Shin Bet security service chief
5. Lieutenant-General Gabi Ashkenazi, IOF Chief of Staff
6. Colonel Hartzi Halevi, Paratroops Brigade Commander
7. Commander of the 401st Brigade Colonel Yigal Slovik
8. Brig Gen Jonathan Locker, head of Israeli air forces
9. Maj. Gen. Ido Nehushtan, Israeli air forces
10. Colonel Ron Ashrov, Commander of the Northern Gaza
11. Brigadier-General Eyal Eisenberg – Commander of all the IOF
12. Colonel Yigal Slovik, commander of 401st Armored Corps Brigade convoy
13. Sho’alay Marom, Brigadier (res.)
14. Lt. Col. Yoav Mordechai, Golani infantry brigade’s 13th Battalion in Gaza
15. Lt. Col. Oren Cohen, Battalion 13 in the Golani Brigade
16. Lt. Col. Avi Blot 101st Battalion Paratrooper Brigade
17. Lieutenant-Colonel Yehuda Cohen, Givati infantry Brigade’s Rotem Regiment
18. Lieutenant-Colonel Ronen Dagmi, deputy commander of the 401st Armored Brigade
19. Col. Avi Peled, commander brigade in Battalion 51
20. Brig.-Gen.( res.) Zvika Fogel former deputy OC Southern Command
21. Brigadier-General Yuval Halamish, Chief IOF Intelligence Officer
22. Paratrooper Brigade commander, Hartzi Halevi
23. Col. Hertzi Halevy, brigade commander
24. Col. Tomer Tsiter, participated in the massacre in Gaza during “Operation Cast Lead”, and previously he participated in the massacre “Operation Defensive Shield” in the Jeninrefugee camp in 2002.
25. Gur Rosenblatt, infantry reserve officer
26. Guy Ohaion, infantry reserve officer
27. Lt. Col. Erez
28. Maj. Nimrod Aloni
29. Lieutenant Colonel (res.) Shlomo Saban
30. Capt. Ron Vardi ,
31. Col. Pnina Sharvit-Baruch, head of the International Law Department, Military Advocate General’s Office,
32. Major-General Yoav Galant, southern command chief
33. Richard Awizrat, Senior Warrant Officer,
34. Major General Amos Yadlin, Military Intelligence chief

But you won’t see that in the NY Times or the Washington Post because they likely are getting their talking points directly from the National Information Directorate (NID), Israel’s spin machine whose job is to frame government lies and reduce them to sound bites for media consumption.

Mainstream media coverage of Gaza is beyond biased—it’s staged. Editorial pages and TV news shows are flooded with pro-Israel spokespersons. Interviews stick to a few repetitive talking points. Canned responses are never challenged. Underlying assumptions are never questioned. Dialogue is steeped in the simplistic “good versus evil” frame. No one questions, analyzes, or thinks. History, too, is violated, truncated to begin with the December 2008 barrage of rockets that, we are to believe, was the straw that finally broke the long-suffering patience of the Israeli government. Sound bites and spin have long substituted for journalism and analysis in the U.S. media; in the current Gazan conflict they have reached an apotheosis.

This disastrous situation—and if you’ve lived long enough, you would have seen it get progressively worse since Vietnam—demands to be challenged. Basic points of propaganda have to be unpacked and the entire picture must be reframed. We can begin with the two most pervasive cliches repeated ad nauseam by Israeli propagandists:

1. Israel has a right to defend itself. Israel had no choice but to launch a war. Against the onslaught of Hamas rockets, what would any other country have done?

2. Israel’s war is against the terrorist group Hamas, not against the Palestinian people. Israel does not target civilians, only terrorists. But, since terrorists use civilians as human shields, all civilian deaths and casualties are Hamas’ fault.

The reality? The larger picture is becoming crystal clear. But grasping it means giving up those insidious sound bites Americans are so addicted to and learning to frame events through logic and history.

Who has a right to self-defense? And what about those rockets?

That Israel, or any sovereign state, has a right to defend itself is not really at issue, and the fact that the Israelis continually resort to that smokescreen says a lot about the illegitimate nature of their assault on Gaza in particular and Palestinian society in general.

We’ve seen a new sound bite spring up in this war to bring the Israeli “self-defense against terrorists” claim to America’s doorstep: “If Canadians were lobbing rockets at Vermont wouldn’t the U.S. have a right to bomb Canada?”

Like most rationalizations born in desperation, this is pathetically void of reason. Canada and the U.S. are both sovereign states. International law gives sovereign states the right to defend their borders. Now, while Israel is a sovereign state, Gaza is an occupied territory. Despite Israel “leaving” Gaza in 2005, Gaza is still effectively occupied, since Israel controls land, air, and sea access, which it immediately sealed after pulling its troops and settlers out in 2005. This ongoing blockade has resulted in a grave humanitarian crisis.

We should also recognize that most Gazans are refugees from the very Israeli settlements Hamas is rocketing—driven out of their homes in the 1948 Israeli takeover of Palestinian land. This is all background information that is freely available in libraries and on the internet, but the Israeli government counts on Americans being as incurious as their leaders. Israel’s continued control and blockade over all means into and out of Gaza is a key issue in this present crisis: the siege is an immediate cause of the rocket resistance, and lifting the siege must be a part of a negotiated cease-fire.

The Israeli blockade of Gaza may be considered an act of war. Furthermore, denying an entire population food and medicine is a form of collective punishment and disproportionate violence, both of which are war crimes. So, even before we arrive at the latest brutality of the actual bombing of Gaza from land, air, and sea in December 2008, we have nearly three years of consistently tighter and stricter blockade measures that had humanitarian groups begging for international intervention.

Since so much of Israel’s propaganda around its right to defense depends on framing itself as the victim, it’s crucial that we be clear about who in this situation is legally and morally the victim and who is the victimizer. If we begin the narrative with a terrorist Hamas entering stage right and lobbying rockets at innocent civilians in Sderot, then we get one picture—the ahistorical NID picture. But if we widen the lens and go back a few years, we see that Hamas rockets are actually a defensive (and quite proportionate) response to the siege of Gaza and the violence of the occupation.

That the people of Gaza, and the West Bank, have a right to self-defense is recognized by United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2649, which: “Affirms the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples under colonial and alien domination recognized as being entitled to the right of self-determination to restore to themselves that right by any means at their disposal.” The Resolution also “Considers that the acquisition and retention of territory in contravention of the right of the people of that territory to self-determination is inadmissible and a gross violation of the [UN] Charter.”

Terrorists and Civilians

Since 9/11, “terrorists” have become the new communists. “Terrorist”—one who uses force or threats as a political policy to intimidate and subjugate—is a term with wide appeal to world governments. “Terrorist” is ambiguous and flexible: any individual, group, or nation can be labeled a terrorist by any other individual, group, or nation. “Terrorist” has the ability to instantly delegitimize any organized resistance by implying that resistance movements are a threat, not to their oppressors, but to the masses of civilians. “Terrorist” has great fear potential: it pushes our “security” buttons, so populations easily fall into compliance and willingly forfeit their civil liberties when the threat of terrorism is raised by their leaders. “Terrorist” also has long-term potential; unlike communists, who were more or less tied to the life and death of the Soviet Union, terrorists are linked to a religious ideology, Islam, and can endure indefinitely.

Although historically “terror” was understood to be the advantage of the dominant classes, particularly the state, to keep the masses in line, it is no surprise that in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict the term is redefined to mean any resistance to Israeli occupation. Had Hamas never used suicide bombings or rockets against Israeli civilians, had not one single Israeli civilian died in the last 60 years at the hands of a Palestinian, it would not have made any difference—the act of resistance itself is enough to earn the label of terrorist.

But civilians did die—and many thousands more Palestinians than Israelis—so the “Israel as victim” frame was redeployed to absolve the Israeli state from legal and moral responsibility for all civilian deaths. The state, it is argued, is just defending itself from terrorists who target civilians and use civilians as human shields. Every civilian death in Gaza has been attributed to Hamas—not only by Israeli propaganda, but publicly by the U.S. Congress.

The targeting of civilians by Hamas rockets is used by the Israelis to delegitimize Palestinian resistance and rationalize the massacre in Gaza. But it smacks of the double standard so common among states.

In Gaza, numerous accounts of Israel targeting civilians have been reported by the UN, human rights organizations, and European aid agencies. Amnesty International investigators have collected evidence that the Israeli army holds Palestinian families prisoner in their own homes as human shields: “Our sources in Gaza report that Israeli soldiers have entered and taken up positions in a number of Palestinian homes, forcing families to stay in a ground floor room while they use the rest of their house as a military base and sniper position,” said Malcolm Smart, Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Programme. “This clearly increases the risk to the Palestinian families concerned and means they are effectively being used as human shields.”

Nor is targeting civilians a new charge against Israel. The slaughter of Palestinian civilians by Israel or its puppet allies has been documented at Sabra and Chatila in 1982, where up to 3,500 civilians were murdered; in Qana in 1996, where 106 civilians were bombed; and in Lebanon in 2006, where more than 1,000 civilians were killed by an Israeli invasion. In addition, thousands of Palestinian youth were killed or maimed for the single crime of throwing stones at their military occupiers, and journalists and peace workers, like Rachel Corrie, have been murdered by the Israeli military just for taking photos and teaching Palestinian children. In fact, the practice of Israelis targeting civilians by using Palestinians as human shields has been so widespread that in 2005 Israel’s Supreme Court actually ruled that the Israeli Defense Forces were prohibited from continuing the practice. In this current crisis, the siege and destruction of Gaza is nothing if not the targeting of civilians and the civilian infrastructure.

Is it just about land?

Territory is certainly the major issue behind the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Since 1967, Israel has sabotaged every attempt at peace, including funding Hamas as a counter to Fatah, since it knew that Hamas at that time rejected the idea of a two-state solution. But now that Hamas has repeatedly agreed to peace based on the 1967 borders, Israel has had to find other obstacles to sabotage the peace process. Pulling out of Gaza in 2005 was only a prelude to building more settlements on the West Bank—it was meant to kill the two-state solution, not support it. There is more than enough historical documentation to argue that Israel does not want a two-state solution because it does not want to give up the Palestinian territory it has already annexed.

But behind the conflict over land is the deeper and more intransigent issue of racism, and the apartheid state that Israel is building speaks volumes to the bigotry that lies at the heart of the zionist project. It is embedded in Israeli laws, is inculcated early in Israeli children, and the Israeli press reports that anti-Arab racism is making ideas like population exchange and racial segregation more acceptable to the Israeli population. This can only further the true Israeli agenda of pushing the Palestinian population onto Egypt and Jordan, or keeping it locked indefinitely within an apartheid state.

Gaza, and the Islamic Resistance Movement (aka: Hamas), are paying the price for 60 years of terror, dispossession, and duplicity on the part of Israel and its U.S. and European allies.

With ‘all that jazz’ about values, democracy and freedom, it is, after all, the rhetorical machinery churning out buzzwords for sale. Noam Chomsky demonstrates how phrases like “free speech,” the “free market,” and the “free world” have little to do with freedom. “Among the myriad freedoms claimed by the U.S. government are the freedom to murder, annihilate, and dominate other people. The freedom to finance and sponsor despots and dictators across the world. The freedom to train, arm, and shelter terrorists. The freedom to topple democratically elected governments. The freedom to amass and use weapons of mass destruction-chemical, biological, and nuclear. The freedom to go to war against any country whose government it disagrees with. And, most terrible of all, the freedom to commit these crimes against humanity in the name of “justice,” in the name of “righteousness,” in the name of “freedom.” Attorney General John Ashcroft declared that the freedom of the Americans is “not the grant of any government or document, but… our endowment from God.” Arundhati Roy comments: “Basically, we’re confronted with a country armed with a mandate from heaven.

Perhaps this explains why the U.S. government refuses to judge itself by the same moral standards by which it judges others. Its technique is to position itself as the well-intentioned giant whose good deeds are confounded in strange countries by their scheming natives, whose markets it’s trying to free, whose societies it’s trying to modernize, whose women it’s trying to liberate, whose souls it’s trying to save. Perhaps this belief in its own divinity also explains why the U.S. government has conferred upon itself the right and freedom to murder and exterminate people “for their own good.”

Bush concluded his 20th September 2001 speech hence: “I will not relent in waging this struggle for freedom and security for the American people. The course of it is not known yet the outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty have always been at war, and we know God is not neutral between them. We are assured of the rightness of our cause and confident in the victories to come. May God watch over the United States of America.” Interestingly, the operation in Afghanistan was named ‘Infinite Justice’, which Muslims objected, was only a Divine attribute. The name was then replaced by another fantastical one, explosively overblown with self-righteousness and cocksure certainty of success: ‘Enduring Freedom.’ Some rhetorical mastery!

CRUSADE RHETORIC

Closely allied to this dimension is the use of the rhetoric of a moral crusade on the lines of traditional Christian rhetoric of a type that may have come from Pope Urban the Second in A.D 1099. Mainstream newspapers started developing a mindset for religious war. Abidullah Jan writing in ‘The Genesis of the Final Crusade’ lists some such article headlines: “This is a Religious War: September 11 was Only the Beginning”, “Yes, this is About Islam”, “The Core of Islamic Rage”, “Jihad, 101″, “Islamic Terror”, “Holy Warriors Escalate the Old War on a New Front”, etc. On September 16, 2001, the BBC reported Bush had declared a ‘crusade’ when the president remarked, “This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a long time.” With the ripples of outrage it created in the Muslim world, the apology duly came. However, five months later, the President repeated the word while addressing US troops in which he termed the war as ‘an incredibly important crusade to defend freedom.’ George W Bush, who describes himself as a ‘born again Christian’, has been quoted by Bob Woodward in his book Plan of Attack describing himself as a ‘messenger of God’ ‘doing the Lord’s will.’ Jan states, “Regurgitating the threat to the sanctity of ‘our way of life’ and ‘our values’ is part of the plan to make people feel threatened.” It is important, of course, to use rhetoric to heighten insecurity, so that the rationale to keep the War on Terror going stays pumped up.

PREPOSTEROUS HORROR

Rhetoric has effectively generated fear in the American public mind. The Department of Homeland Security is at pains to prove that ‘the threat to U.S interests from someone, somewhere in the world, has increased.’ The Anonymous writer of Imperial Hubris comments, “We hear experts warning audiences watching CNN that the next al Qaeda attack on our country will involve WMD. The warnings are then complemented by more otherworldly advice to buy duct tape and plastic sheets to wrap their homes and make them airtight, WMD proof fortresses. When faced with vague threats, Washington does what it always does: it scares the hell out of people.”

IDEOLOGIZATION OF THE WAR ON TERROR

The use of rhetoric has helped the ‘ideologization’ of the War on Terror. This has eclipsed the true ground realities and the actual root causes of the conflict, turning attention away from them. Particularly regrettable is the inability to understand terrorism as a desperate reaction by the socially outcast, economically deprived and politically oppressed. Terrorism, in fact, is a tactic used by disaffected individuals and communities, not an ideology. Instead, terrorism is seen as an opposing, challenging, hostile and ‘barbaric’ ‘evil ideology’ opposed to all that the West stands for and believes in. This is extremely misguided and helps divide the world into opposing ideological camps, lending strength to the dangerous ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis. George W. Bush expressed the grandiosity of this ‘clash of ideologies’ in a statement: “We’ve entered a great ideological conflict we did nothing to invite.” Journalist Margie Burns comments on this: “This statement should sound alarm bells for the nation and the world. What does Bush mean by an “ideological conflict”? All previous grandiose Bush pronouncements on global conflict have focused on terrorism and the “war on terror.” Bush is trying to present terrorism as an “ideology,” in an us-or-them global conflict, with Terrorism replacing Communism. Every thinking person knows that terrorism is not an “ideology.” Terrorist acts are a tactic. We know by now exactly who uses them, too: individuals and small groups use guerrilla tactics when other tactics are not available to them, against a much stronger governmental power or foreign power.” The New York Times reported on July 25, 2005, “The Bush administration is… pushing the idea that the long-term struggle is as much an ideological battle as a military mission.”

JINGOISM

The ring of patriotic jingoism defines America’s rhetoric. It hedges in moral judgement within its own delineations, defining values as ‘American’ or ‘un American.’ Arundhati Roy writes in her book War Talk that the term ‘anti-American’ is used in order to discredit and inaccurately define its critics. “Once someone is branded ‘anti-American’ (like anti-Semitic), the chances are they will be judged before they will be heard and the argument will be lost in the welter of hurt national pride. To call someone anti-American, indeed, to be anti-American, is not just racist, it’s a failure of the imagination. An inability to see the world in terms other than those that the establishment has set out for you: If you’re not a Bushie, you’re a Taliban. If you don’t love us, you hate us. If you’re not Good, you’re Evil. If you’re not with us, you’re with the terrorists.” This is the ‘imperial hubris’ the Anonymous writer mentions in his book by the same name–the arrogance and self-centredness in interpreting events and people outside the United States. After the July 7 2005 bombings in London, G8 leaders denounced it as an attack on ‘our way of life’, and declared that they would never let the ‘Islamists change our values.’ The connection that the rhetoric of “Islamist terrorism” makes with Muslims and Arabs has led to dangerous racial profiling and has damaged the image of Islam and Muslims in the Western public mind. Discrimination and prejudice against Muslims in the West is on record high levels.

THE ‘WHY DO THEY HATE US?’ DEBATE

In his 9/11 address, Bush said: “The US was targeted for the attack because we are the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world. And no one will keep that light from shining.” In his historic speech of 20th September 2001, President Bush explained why the United States is hated: “They hate our freedoms–our freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other… the terrorists kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life… Freedom and fear are at war. The advance of freedom depends on us.” This rhetoric of ‘they hate us for our freedom’ became a trumpeted theme in the mainstream media, insulating the American public from any recognition or realization of the elements of self-interest, opportunism and exploitation in American foreign policy that affect so many lives–many of them Muslim. Arundhati Roy states: “People are being asked to make two leaps of faith here. First, to assume that The Enemy is who the US government says it is, even though it has no substantial evidence to support that claim. And second, to assume that The Enemy’s motives are what the US government says they are, and there’s nothing to support that either.” In fact, motives are quite the opposite. The U.S is not hated for what it is, but for what it has done. The smokescreen of rhetoric, however, keeps a dispassionate analysis of the real grievances of America’s ‘enemies’ at bay. Roy said in a speech commending Noam Chomsky: “If people in the United States want a real answer to the question of ‘why do they hate us?’ (as opposed to the ones in the Idiot’s Guide to Anti-Americanism, that is: “Because they’re jealous of us,” “Because they hate freedom,” “Because they’re losers,” “Because we’re good and they’re evil”), I’d say, read Chomsky on U.S. military interventions in Indochina, Latin America, Iraq, Bosnia, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and the Middle East. If ordinary people in the United States read Chomsky, perhaps their questions would be framed a little differently. Perhaps it would be: “Why don’t they hate us more than they do?” or “Isn’t it surprising that September 11 didn’t happen earlier?”

The Anonymous writer [later revealed to be Michael Scheuer, a senior CIA officer -- Ed.] of Imperial Hubris calls the robotic repetition of ‘they hate our freedom’ “errant and potentially fatal nonsense.” He states: “There is no record of a Muslim urging to wage jihad to destroy democracy or credit unions, or universities. What the US does in formulating and implementing policies affecting the Muslim world is infinitely more inflammatory.” The US must recognize this to be able to redress the grievances of the Muslim world that are not without basis. However, such rhetoric deflects attention to the real causes and prolongs America’s Beauty Sleep. Eyes Wide Shut. In the backdrop, the corpses keep piling up.

DEHUMANIZING THE ENEMY

Empathy is absolutely necessary to be able to understand the terrorism phenomenon and begin a curative strategy. It is a natural humanizing element we all are gifted with, enabling us to understand one another as simply sharers in a common essential humanity. Rhetoric checks empathy by presenting the enemy as subhuman, evil, beastly. It ensures that the ‘human connection’ is not established, dehumanizing the enemy. Rhetoric tends to talk about the other side as the abstract ‘enemy’ or as a subhuman, demonic ‘Axis of Evil.’ Rhetoric has worked hard to deflect sympathy from victims of the West’s brutal wars and misadventures since decades. It has divided the world into ‘The West and the Rest’, and presented the West to be on a divinely assigned mission of liberation against subhuman lower-order creatures who must be taught some civilization. In 1937, Winston Churchill said of the Palestinians: “I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.” In 1969, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said, “Palestinians do not exist.” Prime Minister Menachem Begin called Palestinians “two-legged beasts.” Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir called them “‘grasshoppers’ who could be crushed.”

Kyle Fedler says, “When we demonize our enemies we see ourselves as totally righteous and the abstract enemy as totally evil.” (’On the Rhetoric of a War on Terror,’ September 2001). This is what makes the methods and means of the war on terror brutal, without moral restraints, conducted in the self-assuredness of a high moral ground. Again, it is rhetoric that comes to the rescue when human rights are blatantly violated. This is what the euphemism ‘collateral damage’ was invented for–or the 150,000+ dead [This is a low-ball number; Iraq, alone, is listed as having over 1.3 million excess mortalities since March 2003 -- Ed.]] of Iraq and Afghanistan. The problem of America’s high-tech killing machines destroying so much of life other than specific targets is solved through the use of imaginative language.

GREY AREAS

The line between ‘terrorism’ and ‘counter terrorism’ (or ‘the war on terrorism’) becomes indistinguishable here. Kyle Fedler writes: “Invoking the language of war permits the direct and intentional killing of innocent people. So how is this any different from terrorism? If terrorism is the direct and intentional killing of innocent people with the purpose for achieving a greater goal they are not directly linked with, is this not just terrorism?” The underlying logic of terrorist attacks, as well as “retaliatory” wars against governments that “support terrorism,” is the same: both punish citizens for the actions of their governments.

The power of rhetoric which comes with all the authority and glamorous technology of the world’s hyperpower has indeed taken a heavy toll on public opinion. It has in fact, with its skewed up morality, perverted the integrity of the human conscience, head and heart. As a result, prejudices are established as fact, myth as reality. The masses are benumbed to the terrible atrocities in the guise of the ‘War on Terror.’ And questions cannot be asked. As Bush the Senior had said, “What We Say, Goes.”

And U.S. complicity has never been more evident. The words of the President and Secretary of State, it can be argued, at the least have directly contributed to this recent campaign through its silent legitimization of this violence. Indeed, the U.S. abstention from the recent UN Security Council call for an immediate ceasefire is interpreted by many as tacit approval, the silent “wink across the room” serving as the needed go-ahead for Israel to continue this offensive.

The power of language—which includes silence—reveals itself in this situation. And all attempts at minimization with the language of “proportionality” are examples of hiding this complicity. With our own occupation in Iraq, with our pouring of billion of U.S. dollars into the Israeli military complex each year, whatever words of “proportionality” or “restraint” that are coming from the U.S at this time are sadly misplaced.

Instead an assertion is made that the response must be proportional to the “threat,” and that dead bodies and burning cities are not indicators of ethical or moral standards. “Threat,” a category unquantifiable and therefore subject to a calculus dictated by those making the assertion.

Let us keep in mind that the people of Gaza have been living as prisoners in what is essentially the world’s largest open-air prison. The Palestinian people have had no control over movement in and out of Gaza, no control over borders (land, sea, or air), no open access to needed services and viable economic opportunity with a poverty rate reaching 80 percent, and have lived constantly under the threat of Israeli military incursions, shelling, and “targeted assassinations” that leave entire Palestinian families murdered in the streets. As the occupying power, Israel has certain obligations under international law in regards to the Palestinian people. Israel has completely shirked this responsibility and left the burden of responding to the needs of one of the most densely populated areas on earth—the great majority of whom being refugees—to the international community, creating a situation that does not provide the opportunity for a prosperous future but only just prevents Gaza from slipping into humanitarian disaster on a daily basis, let alone during times like these.

In this context, the language of proportionality too easily serves the purpose of hiding these realities and obfuscating overarching power dynamics. It is hard not to conclude that its purpose is to paint this situation as balanced, without a clear power differential, and with the U.S. as neutral, an “honest broker” for peace.

“Proportionality” seems to reveal a critical weakness of the “just war” tradition as it is or is not applied in situations of conflict or the response of the international community to those situations. According to this ethical tradition, war is “just” and “justified” if it meets certain criteria, among them the criterion of proportionality.

In reflecting on the justice of resorting to the use of violent force in the first place, jus ad bellum, the criterion of proportionality is met by concluding that the overall destruction expected from the use of force will be outweighed by the good to be achieved. Concerning the justice of conduct within war itself, jus in bello, proportionality means that the force used must be proportional to the wrong endured, the ends sought, and to the possible good that may come. The more disproportional the number of “collateral” civilian deaths, for example, the more suspect will be the sincerity of a belligerent nation’s claim to justness of a war it initiated, which is why weapons of mass destruction are usually seen as being out of proportion to legitimate military ends.

Now there are several other criteria and considerations when engaging this tradition, but proportionality is an essential piece that, in contexts of severe power imbalance, must be examined seriously, beyond the rhetoric of political means and ends, which only cheapens whatever ethical resources we have to appeal to in the first place. But then again, who among the powers is engaging in ethical reflection right now, besides those who seek to appropriate ethical language as a legitimizing tool (i.e. “proportional to the threat”)?

Yet, the manner in which the language of “proportionality” is employed often carries with it the assumptions of “neutrality” and a “distanced objectivity.” Words that at least in this context, and perhaps it can be argued in most contexts, are at best inadequate and inappropriate but most often downright disingenuous and dangerous. The continued employment of such language seems to reveal the weakness and inadequacy of this “just” tradition as it is typically exploited.

In a land of walls, checkpoints, land confiscation, and colonization—where Israeli military incursion occur on a daily basis, terrorizing an entire society, where Palestinians are randomly dragged away to add to the over 10,000 Palestinian men, women, and children sitting in Israeli jails, and where every response to Israeli aggression is labeled “terrorist” by those who control and employ such ahistorical and decontextualized language and calculate “proportionality” according to their own interests, the language of “proportionality” immediately dehumanizes, denying the value of human life. It too often becomes the language of violence and oppression.

At a time when so many are seeking to live in a world that is defined with a deeper, richer definition of peace, we should at least seek to be consistent with the moral and ethical formation of our language and our own actions.

There’s an ugly plan afoot in the EU to reward Israel for its abominable and criminal conduct by enhancing the already handsome benefits enjoyed by the neighbourhood bully under the EU-Israel Association Agreement.

Most EU citizens have little idea how the EU works or how to hold it to account for blunders like dereliction of duty. That’s no surprise because it is cloaked in incomprehensible complexity and there is no way to hold it accountable. Those in control shamelessly do as they please, it seems.

Take this wretched EU-Israel Association Agreement. Its purpose is to promote (1) peace and security, (2) shared prosperity through, for example, the creation of a free trade zone, and (3) cross-cultural rapprochement. It governs not only EU-Israel relations but Israel’s relations with the EU’s other Mediterranean partners – including the Palestinian National Authority.

Fundamental to the Agreement are undertakings regarding ‘respect for human rights and democratic principles’ set out as a general condition in Article 2, which says:

Relations between the Parties, as well as all the provisions of the Agreement itself, shall be based on respect for human rights and democratic principles, which guides their internal and international policy and constitutes an essential element of this Agreement.

This clause allows steps to be taken to enforce the contractual requirement regarding human rights and to dissuade partners from policies and practices that disrespect those rights. The Agreement also requires respect for self-determination of peoples and fundamental freedoms for all.

It sounds fine, but the EU-Israel Association Agreement actually achieves none of this. In 2002 the EU Parliament voted to suspend the Agreement on the grounds of Israel’s violations of human rights. The resolution called for an arms embargo against Israel and Palestine, and condemned the “military escalation pursued by the Sharon government” and the “oppression of the Palestinian civilian population by the Israeli army.” The EU Commission ignored the will of Parliament, and consequently there has been no improvement in Israel’s behaviour.

Britain’s foreign secretary David Miliband last week dismissed a proposal by the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement, saying: “I think that’s a bit naïve since the agreement, the upgrade, was for the Palestinians as well as for the Israelis.”

I have written to ask Mr Miliband to explain how Palestinians would benefit. They certainly did not do so under the existing arrangement.

The EU, in its treaties, declares a firm commitment to the Charter of the United Nations and international law. On 30 December a statement was issued about the Gaza carnage, saying:

The European Union, conscious of the suffering and anguish of all civilian populations, puts forward the following proposals to resolve the crisis:

• Immediate and permanent ceasefire: there must be an unconditional halt to rocket attacks by Hamas on Israel and an end to Israeli military action.
• The cessation of fighting should allow lasting and normal opening of all border crossings, as provided for in the 2005 Agreement on Movement and Access. The European Union is ready.
• Re-dispatch the EUBAM (Border Assistance Mission) to Rafah to enable its re-opening, in cooperation with Egypt, the Palestinian Authority and Israel. It is also willing to examine the possibility of extending its assistance to other crossing points, provided that the issues relating to security have found a satisfactory response.

The nub of the problem – the continuing illegal occupation – isn’t even mentioned. Nor does the statement actually address core provisions of the Charter, which says that all Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.

Furthermore the International Court of Justice ruling on the Illegality of the Separation Wall warned all states of their obligation not to recognise, aid or assist the illegal situation resulting from Israel’s actions in occupied Palestinian territory and reminded all parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention that they are bound to ensure Israel’s compliance with this Convention. These obligations apply not only to EU member states that are signatories to the Geneva Conventions, but also to EU institutions charged with ensuring that EU-Israel contractual relations conform to Community and international law.

Honourable men would have enforced Article 2, observed all other codes and not let matters slide. They would have put the squeeze on Israel until the regime complied 100 percent with requirements. Israel relies heavily on exports to Europe so the EU could, at a stroke, end the evil occupation, murder and land theft, and resolve the problem in the Holy Land.

What game are you playing, Gentlemen? And what part of Article 2 of the EU-Israel Association Agreement don’t you understand?

Stuart Littllewood

At first glance, Operation Cast Lead appeared to be quite straightforward in its evocation of imagery, at least in comparison to Operation Summer Rains—Israel’s 2006 foray into Gaza, the title of which may have functioned more appropriately on the cover of a romance novel in the checkout lane of a supermarket. According to Wikipedia, however, the significance of Cast Lead was not readily discernible by superficial symbolic analysis; in other words:

   1. the term lead did not refer to harmful munitions made of heavy metals.
   2. the term cast did not mean “wantonly dispersed in densely populated areas.”

As it turned out, Cast Lead was in fact adapted from a Hanukkah poem by Haim Nachman Bialik, national poet of Israel, who poetically lived and died before the nation of Israel was cast across 78% of Palestine. In one of his works, Bialik speaks of a “dreidel cast from solid lead”—a toy that is now being cast across Hamas-controlled portions of remaining Palestinian percentages.

The Israeli Air Force has demonstrated its acute command of literature on such previous occasions as Operation Grapes of Wrath, in which more than a hundred Lebanese civilians were massacred at the United Nations compound in Qana in 1996. The choice of a literary title provided observers with substantial opportunities for metaphorical reflection on the fine art of Israeli warfare; these reflections could have been further enhanced had the grapes of wrath been replaced with alternate excerpts from Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic”— producing, for example, Operation Trampling out the Vintage, or Operation Coming of the Lord—but the Israelis exercised judicious restraint. In the case of Operation Cast Lead, any references to Haim Nachman Bialik’s celebrated poem “In the City of Slaughter”—concerning the Kishinev pogrom of 1903—were likewise prudently avoided.

The Wikipedia entry for the operation in Gaza contributed its own subtle ironies to the Israeli discourse by reiterating that the Palestinians were to blame for the lead casting process. Issues not explained in the entry included:

   1. whether the Israel Defense Forces possessed a ready-made list of literary references, for use whenever the necessity arose.
   2. whether the list was divided into seasons, such as summer and Hanukkah.
   3. whether Hamas had considered naming its counter-operation “Operation Casting of Rockets Made of Sugar, Fertilizer, and other Household Items into the Negev Desert.”

The White House—presently stationed in Crawford, Texas, on a ranch approximately 1/56th the area of the Gaza Strip—refrained from commenting on the academic diligence of the Israeli military establishment, or on the fact that the IAF was now claiming “alpha hits” on scores of Hamas installations such as security headquarters and Palestinian children. Crawford’s own academic depth was contained in such statements by George W. Bush’s spokesman as: “These people are thugs”; Bush’s recovery from other recently perpetrated crimes against humanity was meanwhile aided by the low population density of his Crawford ranch, and the minimal chances of randomly sustaining an alpha hit from foreign footwear.

A subsequent visit to the Wikipedia website failed to verify my suspicions that the term “alpha hit” had also been adapted from the game of dreidel. I did, however, acquire other alphabetically relevant information, which was that the Hebrew letters pictured on the four sides of the dreidel combined to form acronyms for the phrases “A great miracle happened here” or “A great miracle happened there,” depending on whether the dreidel was located within Israel or not. These phrases were:

   1. in reference to the small amount of oil that burned for eight nights during the rededication of the Temple of Jerusalem in the 2nd century B.C.
   2. potential concluding slogans for the current campaign in Gaza, provided cast lead proved more effective than economic squeezes.

Additional opportunities for cultural adaptation came to mind thanks to Wikipedia’s English transcription of the popular “Dreidel Song,” a recurring theme of which seemed to be: “Oh dreidel, dreidel, dreidel, it drops and then I win!” The IAF might expand its shrewd manipulation of arts and letters by installing such a soundtrack in its F-16s.

The game of dreidel ends when one player has taken everything in the pot. In Operation Cast Lead, the Palestinians of Gaza have been excluded from the game as players, but they have not been spared as gambling chips.

Nonetheless, despite Israel’s inhumanity and violence, Levy’s defensiveness of it is quite ostensible.³ Electronic Intifada concurred, criticizing Levy for putting the “political activism [of outsiders] in a conceptual and moral straitjacket while denying the fundamentally international character of Israel’s occupation.”⁴

Levy still adheres to a gentler, less apparent form of Zionism. He writes:

The situation in the south is depressing. Qassam rockets are being fired out of a territory beset by boycott, siege and intolerable conditions at Israeli communities whose situation is no more tolerable, and the Israeli defense establishment admits it has no real response. With the exception of a few loud-mouthed politicians including Kadima head Tzipi Livni who have elections in mind, most level-headed politicians know the truth: There is no military solution. No wide-scale or small operation; no targeted killing or bombing will help, nor is there a military solution for the situation of abducted soldier Gilad Shalit.

So what’s left to do but shrug? Gaza is banished and impoverished, Sderot is threatened and despaired and no one dares try to break the vicious cycle.⁵

Levy complains that Qassam rockets are making life in southern Israeli communities intolerable while acknowledging that the entirety of 1.5 million Gazan are under siege — collective punishment, a contravention of the Fourth Geneva Convention. The long victimized and suffering Gazans (as Levy has chronicled) are striking back.

So what’s left to do!? Plenty, as pro-Palestinian activist Angie Tibbs pointed out in a letter to Levy:

Perhaps if the Israeli government/military removed itself from the Gaza Strip, allowed its people to live in peace, allowed its elected (democratically) government to govern, allowed Gazans the God given right to travel from A to B, to grow their crops, fish their sea, live in a secure environment, there would be no need for any kind of retaliation. Because, of course, that’s what it is, retaliation…

The people of Gaza cannot live free in any environment, and placing the blame on homemade rockets, the only form of weapon the resistance fighters in Gaza have, is totally unacceptable. You, like the government/military of Israel, are trying to equate the death and destruction that continues unabated in Gaza to rockets that land harmlessly in Israeli border towns.

There is the appearance of something untoward in a journalist making a living by writing about the atrocities perpetrated by his state and simultaneously seeking to exculpate it by focusing on the state’s designated enemies.

However, after over four decades of forcing Palestinians to live under a deadly occupation, Levy futilely shrugs and suggests that Israel pursue the already tried and failed route of direct talks – this time with Hamas.

Levy is unflattering to Hamas. He finesses the language to describe Hamas as having “seized power democratically …” rather than “won power democratically.” Yet he allows that Israel and much of the world failed in their “diabolical scheme” to undermine Palestinian democracy. (Levy does not hold the Jewish state solely responsible for its crimes, and he has a point in that the much of the rest of the world is guilty of bystanding and in some cases complicity, but what Levy elides is that if Israel was not inflicting violence on Gaza, the violence would cease). The scheme included a “two-year siege and boycott that included starvation, blackouts and bombardments …” Included? Past tense? Is this journalist following the news? The starvation,⁶ blackouts,⁷ and bombardments⁸ are present continuous. Yet, Levy attempts to conjure a scenario where it appears as if there is some legitimacy with overthrowing Hamas.

Writes Levy, “There’s no chance that Hamas will change its stripes entirely, but direct talks may be more pragmatic than they seem. It has some reasonable leaders who value life and want to improve the wretched situation of their nation.” It is mighty gracious of Levy to allow that there are “some reasonable leaders” in Hamas who value life — the obvious implication being that many leaders in Hamas are unreasonable and do not value life. This demonizes Hamas, the representative of the Palestinians. It harkens to what what he said in an interview to Le Devoir: “There has been a process of dehumanization and demonization of the Palestinians.”¹ Evidently, Levy is a part of this dehumanization and demonization.

Levy’s lens points outward. Some questions for the glasshouse-domiciled Levy: Which Israeli leader is not a war criminal? When will Israeli leaders change their stripes? And how reasonable is that?

Levy recommends, “Israel should offer to lift the siege and boycott in return for a long-term calm.” This lacks courage and vision. Zionist aims are served: the Israeli Jews can live in peace in the stolen country. The Palestinians can live in peace in the bantustans of the Occupied Territories. This might be peace, but what about justice?

Levy urges the breaking of a taboo and meeting with Hamas. However, calling for talks is the imperialist-Zionist canard. It has been done many times. In the 1990s, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres broke the taboo and talked with the PLO leader Yasser Arafat. And today the Palestinians are still dispossessed, occupied, being jailed, tortured, killed, and humiliated.

If Levy is truly interested in justice and human rights, then call unequivocally and immediately for good faith measures: an internationally monitored cease-fire and peace, for Israel to be a single state with equal human rights for all its citizens, acceptance of the right of return, elimination of all racist laws, full reparations, and a sincere apology to the Palestinian people.

After all, peace demands that justice and human rights be respected for all human beings.

1. Claude Lévesque, “Gideon Levy, the voice of Palestinians in Israel,” Le Devoir, 6 March 2006. Available in translation on the peacepalestine website.
2. Jonathan Cook, “Divide and Rule, Israeli-Style,” Dissident Voice, 27 June 2007.
3. Kim Petersen, “Subtle Loyalties to Zionism,” Dissident Voice, 4 July 2006.
4. James Brooks, “On Boycotts, Activism and Moral Standards,” Electronic Intifada, 16 June 2006.
5. Gideon Levy, “Talk with Hamas,” Haaretz, 21 December 2008.
6. Marwan Bishara, “Hurtling towards a showdown in Gaza,” Al Jazeera, 19 December 2008. Starvation or near starvation, Israel is cutting off food supplies — a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
7. Widespread blackouts after Israel blocks food, fuel shipments to Gaza for third day,” Ma’an News, 14 December 2008.
8. “Palestinian killed after rocket fire raises concern over Gaza truce,” AFP, 17 December 2008.

I have taught college courses in public communication for over ten years. This includes, among other things, public speaking, professional speaking, argumentation and debate, persuasion, performance, rhetorical theory and analysis, and public advocacy. The current candidates would not fair well in my classes. They would no doubt earn points for basic oration, body language, delivery, style, and charisma. But their arguments for and against particular public policies are seriously lacking. How exactly does your tax policy work? Who specifically is affected by your economic vision? What are the concrete details of your health care plan? How can you be sure that congress, corporations, and various industries will endorse and actually pass your legislation? These questions ask the candidates to substantiate their statements and to provide verifiable evidence. Both Obama and McCain have rarely done so. Any decent public communication instructor would address these deficiencies and then provides suggestions for improvement. But let’s be honest. These candidates are no longer students. They are powerful political leaders representing tens and even hundreds of millions of constituencies. They are seeking the most powerful office in the country. As such, they must be held to the highest standard in the land, period.

The candidates are not solely to blame for this crisis of debate. Mass media in general and twenty-hour news channels in particular provide perpetual commentary before and after each debate, placing considerable constraints on what the candidates can and cannot say. A missed cue or simple gaffe can ruin a presidential run. Candidates thus feel obligated to navigate these media landmines rather than sincerely and honestly address the issues. Debate moderators also play a role by rarely pressing for hard, definitive answers. That’s partly due to the ninety-minute time length of the debates, which demands and perpetuates sound-bite syndrome. And long, drawn out primary seasons contribute to the repetitiveness-slogans and talking points are timeworn even before the debates arrive.

We, the American people, must also take some responsibility. This begins with establishing proper criteria for assessing the presidential debates. We all see past the glitz and glam of these Hollywood debates and most of us are tired of it. But what do we actually say when we wage our critiques? How do we actually evaluate and judge the candidates’ performances? What criteria do we use to declare a winner and a loser?

Creating criteria and assessing debates is not as easy as it sounds. In the past weeks I have surveyed pre- and post-debate commentaries from all ends of the political spectrum-left, right, and mainstream sources. All have their own agenda, and that’s fine; every person is biased to some degree and absolute objectivity is a myth died long ago. But the debates are often reduced to issues of presidential temperament, delivery, proper eye contact, candidates’ attractiveness and brand value, one-liners to swing the undecideds, winning by not losing, and simply meeting or even surpassing expectations. Such criteria are fine when joking about halftime Super Bowl commercials, beauty pageants, popularity contests, and reality television shows. But these same criteria do not help us choose the best person for the presidency. Pop-culture entertainment and presidential politics involve different rules of assessment. Below are five criteria I believe worthy of consideration.

First, candidates must directly answer the questions that are asked. An inability or unwillingness to do that means they are either unqualified for or uncommitted to the job. A candidate that does not answer the question should be automatically disqualified from the debate and asked to leave the stage. That would put a stop to the elusive non-answers.

Second, candidates must specify the nature as well as the beneficial and detrimental consequences of each policy. What are the pros and cons of each policy? The candidates must also detail the necessary steps for passing each policy. What is the policy, who does it help and harm, and how will is get passed? And they cannot tell us that it helps everyone and harms no one. That’s simply not true and it’s virtually impossible.

Third, candidates must explain how and why their policies differ from one another, and they must be specific and to the point. What is the exact difference and what is the degree of that difference? If certain policies do not differ, then they must clearly state that and explain why they agree on that particular issue.

Fourth, candidates must refrain from attacking one another’s personal character during the debates. Character assessment is definitely important, but voters must decide for themselves who is more or less credible, likeable, intelligent, trustworthy, and moral. Voters will decide if candidates’ backgrounds qualify or disqualify them from the presidency. It is the job of the voters–and not the candidates–to decide who has the best political and moral judgment.

Fifth, and last, candidates must openly and honestly acknowledge their own political biases at the beginning of each debate. They must describe and explain the political lens by which they approach the issues, the presidency, and the purpose of federal governance. They must explain why they are running as Democrat, Republican, Green, Independent, etc.; and they must explain why they consider themselves to be liberal, conservative, or even moderate. They must also explain which sectors of the population will be helped and harmed by their political bias. They cannot claim that everyone will benefit. As of now, every candidate vies for the holy middle ground, as if s/he alone represents the true America. That’s impossible and deceitful. State who you are, clarify your stance, and justify your political worldview while being open and honest. Voters will then choose which political worldview is most suited for addressing the issues of today and the next four years.

Other criteria are both possible and necessary, but these establish a starting point for a sensible and rigorous bar of judgment. We can now confidently determine who won and lost and why. If both candidates happen to pass the test, then great; we can begin discussing why we as individuals side with a particular candidate. If both candidates happen to fail, then so be it. We should not apologize for failing efforts. Acknowledge your candidate’s inadequacy and then pressure the individual to step up and do better. If s/he is unwilling or unable, then it’s time to drop that candidate and choose someone else. But recognize the necessity of honesty. We must stick to the criteria, look in the mirror, and be honest with ourselves and each other. Did my candidate pass the test? If not, then have the courage to say so. Dishonesty on your end enables and even emboldens the dishonesty of the candidates. We want to avoid rather contribute to that problem.

Such issues as delivery, temperament, style, and charisma are absent from the above criteria. That’s because such qualities should be a given at the presidential level. The current fanfare with Barack Obama’s oratorical skills serves as an example. No one can deny that he is a great speaker, but so what? Obama’s eloquence should be the standard, not the exception. Finding powerful, eloquent, and articulate speakers who are politically informed and well-versed in the nuances of public policy should not be difficult in a nation of three-hundred million people. Impassioned, elegant oration is not a bonus; it’s part of the presidential job description.

Establishing these types of criteria is an empowering move-it enables us to demand more from the candidates. Too many of us resign ourselves to some kind of uncontrollable political fate, as if the debates and our democracy must be dismal and deficient. The whole thing is a mess, so why bother, right? No, wrong. We must challenge the candidates to meet rigorous expectations each and every time they speak, argue, defend, explain, and debate. They are seeking our votes. We are electing them to office. We are choosing them, not vice versa. Establish what you feel to be the most proper criteria. Be prepared to explain and defend those criteria to others. Then hold the candidates accountable. That’s a small but powerful strategy for improving the debates, the presidency, and United States democracy.

This allows it to pursue news freely.

Nevertheless, there are moments when the stories on the Real News provoke consternation. This has less to do with factual inaccuracies, as that might well be expected on occasion at a nascent news organization like the Real News. What is a cause for concern are the rare moments when the Real News appears to be indistinguishable from the corporate media.

Preponderant Focus on the Political Duopoly in the US

In Part 1, I noted the dearth in the coverage of non-duopoly candidates in the upcoming US presidential elections. Nothing has changed in the meantime. The US elections are presented as a distinctly two-party phenomenon.

In fact, a recent piece saw guest Eric Alterman make a passionate, specious plea for lesser evilism.¹

Alterman claims Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is “not conservative” but “broadly progressive”; “Politics is the art of the possible. Politics is the art of compromise and co-operation and getting things done”; “I have so little patience with left-wing romanticism with defeat,” and then he chides “ideological purists”: “I’m so sick of saying we’re pure and they won. Enough of that.”

Alterman’s memory seems very short. It was not so long ago that we won. Like 2006. What good did that do? Then, not so long ago, there was a Democratic president, who as a candidate professed to be pro-labor and anti-trickle down economics. His name was Bill Clinton, and he got things done. He compromised himself; and he presided over the signing of NAFTA and the reduction of spending on social services. So much for impurity and victory.

While the Real News differs in content, there is very little, so far, to distinguish the Real News from the corporate news, in terms of electoral coverage.

Voices

Faces, voices, and personalities are critical to the perception of the news. For example, on one Real News video clip about the occupation in Iraq, Paul Jay rightly lamented: “You rarely hear an Iraqi say anything.”²

Given this lament, the clip “Iraq beyond the surge,”³ struck me as quite contradictory. Jay asks Dutch sociologist Joost Hiltermann, “What do Iraqis want?” I found this really strange. It becomes even stranger when one considers the organization Hiltermann is with: the International Crisis Group whose board is composed of western governmental figures associated with western imperialism around the globe, such as Christopher Patten, former governor of Hong Kong; US Ambassador Thomas R Pickering; and Gareth Evans, former foreign minister of Australia.⁴ These are persons connected to the governments of the aggressor states that attacked and occupied Iraq.

In the clip, Hiltermann downplayed any break up of Iraq and focused on his own questions:

…So we are now facing a situation where the question is: what good do American forces still play? [italics added] Um, is it useful for them to stay, ah, and if they stay, in what kind of posture should they assume? Um, are they still, ah, playing a positive role? Have they ever played a positive role? Could they play a positive role, or is it better that they leave. There is also the issue of American domestic interests … There are no easy answers.³

But there is one very easy answer (at least a chunk of the answer): the occupiers must leave and turn Iraq over to Iraqis. Many agree that it is the occupation that creates, causes, and foments the violence. If this is correct (and it most likely is), then the occupation must end. If outside assistance is required, then it must be Iraqis to determine this and to determine who it will assist them.

The overwhelming majority of Iraqis, according to every poll that I am aware of, have always maintained that the occupation forces should leave and the question of whether American occupation forces do good in Iraq is absurd. (Does anyone argue that Israeli occupation forces do good for the Palestinians? Did anyone argue that Nazi occupation forces did good for the French, Danes, Norwegians, etc.?) The Middle East expert Hilterman must be aware of the epidemiological studies on excess mortality in Iraq published in the Lancet that estimate over 600,000 killed. Why then talk of “what good do American forces still play?,” posed as if earlier on in the aggression-occupation that US forces had, indeed, done good?

I asked Geraldine Cahill, communications and volunteer coordinator at the Real News, why the Real News didn’t get an Iraqi, preferably in Iraq, or maybe anti-occupation Iraqis of the Diaspora, to answer that question?

She said that whenever possible that is the ideal that the Real News strives for: a knowledgeable person from the region.

As for my other questions about the Hiltermann interview, Cahill referred me to senior editor Paul Jay.

In a subsequent clip, “US bases in Iraq defend strategic interests,”⁵ Hiltermann acknowledges that, viscerally, Iraqi citizens want occupation forces out, but, mentally, he argues that Iraqis want them to stay. But Hiltermann turns the question toward Iraq’s so-called leaders.

Jay asked about the US paying “serious reparations,” a “Geneva style conference,” and an end to US dominance in Iraq.

Hiltermann replied:

I think the United States needs to, first of all, acknowledge that it has made a terrible mistake. Um, if not by invading Iraq, then, at least, by messing it up so grossly… That would, perhaps, allow it to regain some certain credibility, um, but it is going to be tough. [italics added]

Killing and destroying masked by the euphemism of “messing it up”? This kind of response — acknowledgement of a mistake, not an apology — seems so incredible, to put it mildly, in the face of genocide.

Hiltermann did not even address reparations.

The Importance of Language

Eric Margolis, contributing foreign editor for American Conservative Magazine and Real News analyst, stated that Americans receive “badly distorted view of what’s going on in Iraq” spun by American networks, the White House, and Pentagon.

Margolis said, “The media has adopted wholesale the vocabulary of government” … like “insurgents” and “terrorists.” Margolis declared these people fighting occupation are a “national resistance movement.”

In “Iraq beyond the surge,” Hiltermann talked about a “broad array of violent actors” in Iraq that he described as “sectarian,” “ethnic,” and “tribal.”⁶ This is language that Margolis dispelled.

Hiltermann discussed the Nouri al-Maliki government in Iraq without reference to how it came to be, as though a government established under occupation could be legitimate. He calls it an “elected government.” Notably, Hiltermann also talks about “US forces” not “US occupation forces.”

There are statements like the US is “incapable of restoring law and order.” Such a statement sows the perception that the US is indeed trying to restore law and order, without questioning whether such is true. It does not refer to when law and order were previously in effect in Iraq … presumably under President Saddam Hussein. Therefore, the removal of law and order was by the US aggression.

Other pundits might point out that the US is doing the opposite in Iraq: it is deliberately sowing chaos, violence, death, and fear.

Hiltermann warned: “Iraq is headed toward being a failed state” and “Iraq is headed toward total disaster.” This wording makes it seem like Iraq is the author of its destiny right now — that the US is only in Iraq in some innocuous capacity. The blame for Iraq’s downfall appears to be placed squarely on Iraq.

Many of Hiltermann’s viewpoints would be quite at home in the corporate media.

Cahill relayed editor Jay’s sentiments about my questions over certain content:

He replied by saying that we speak to a number of journalists and a variety of analysts to gather a swathe of viewpoints. They do not necessarily represent the viewpoints of The Real News Network, and so long as they are factual, will be aired on the website. People are allowed to critique the viewpoints, submit feedback and challenge the journalists. They often do.

I submit that the factual accuracy of Hiltermann’s statements are highly dubious.

What is the difference? People can critique viewpoints, submit feedback, and challenge journalists in the corporate media, although they will probably be ignored. While it is correct that a viewpoint does not necessarily represent that of the presenting media, Real News rejects, selects, and presents points of view. Thus, the Real News has invested itself in the process whether in agreement or not. There are articles that appear at Dissident Voice, for instance, (even selected by myself) that I am in disagreement with, but publication exposes readers to opposing perspectives from which they can form their own conclusions. However, given the extensive reach of the corporate media, there is no reason for independent media to likewise disseminate corporate media viewpoints of a propagandistic or factually dubious nature.

The Hiltermann news clips are not just a growing pain. Recently, a Real News clip courtesy of the corporate media Guardian describes the Taliban and al-Qaeda as “the world’s most wanted men.”⁷ They are claimed to be operating in, and from, Pakistan, although “the Pakistan government is doing nothing to stop them.”

The video also introduces a new bogeyman to the world, to step in for Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi: Baitullah Mehsud.

It is the same-old US good guys versus other bad guys: in this case, Muslim bad guys with a new big demon leading them.

The reportage is blatantly tendentious. The Real News arose after the George W. Bush administration had lied the US into aggressing Iraq. Given that aggression was defined as the “supreme international crime” at Nuremberg, why are the Guardian and Real News not focusing their statements on how other nations or the United Nations are doing nothing to stop the US?

Despite some stories being disconcerting, the Real News does provide, for the most part, what so many of us desire: a window on the world untainted by people with a lot of money and power to influence news coverage. Ultimately, it is up to viewers and supporters of the Real News to hold it to its promise to be independent and uncompromising in its coverage.

Read Part 1

1. “Is Obama a conservative or a progressive realist?” Real News, 30 June 2008.
2. “Margolis says TV news hiding truth about Iraq civil war,” Real News, 17 August 2007. Or see video clip accompanying this article.
3. “Iraq beyond the surge,” Real News, 8 November 2007.
4. “Crisis Group’s Board,” International Crisis Group.
5. “US bases in Iraq defend strategic interests,” Real News, 8 November 2007.
6. Hiltermann strongly hints at the violence between Iraqi sects that plays into the corporate media strategy to portray Iraq as being at civil war. Sabah al Nasseri, York University political science professor specializing in the Middle East, made clear that there “can be no civil war under the occupation for the simple reason because the US forces are a direct involved protagonist within this conflict” in Iraq. “Basra: Class struggle, not civil war,” Real News, 1 April 2008.
7. “Afghanistan: The new ‘great game,’” Guardian, 28 June 2008.

That’s the idea, of course, and has been since BBC’s inception. John Reith was its founder and first general manager. Reassuring the powerful, he set the standard adhered to thereafter: “(You) know (you) can trust us not to be really impartial.” BBC never was and never is.

Impartiality has no place on BBC nor does its claim about “honesty, integrity, (and being) free from political influence and commercial pressure.” How can it? Its Director-General, Executive Board Chairman, BBC Trust Chairman and senior managers are government-appointed and charged with a singular task – to function as a “propaganda system for elite interests.” On all vital issues – war and peace, state and corporate corruption, human rights, social justice, or coverage of the Middle East’s longest and most intractable conflict, Westminster and the establishment rest easy. They know BBC is “reliable” – pro-government, pro-business and dismissive of the public trust it disdains. Now more than ever.

This article covers one example among many – BBC’s distorted, one-sided support for Israel and its antipathy toward Palestinians. In this respect, it’s fully in step with its American and European counterparts – Israeli interests matter; Palestinian ones don’t matter; as long as that holds, conflict resolution is impossible. Therein lies the problem. With its reputation, world reach, and influence, BBC’s coverage exacerbates it.

Key BBC Terms In Its Israeli – Palestinian Coverage

In October 2006, Electronic Intifada.net listed BBC’s “key terms” in its conflict coverage – to “find a balance” that, in fact, tilts strongly toward Israel. For example:

• pre-meditated assassinations are called “killings” or occasionally “targeted killings” if Israeli sources say it;
• the separation or apartheid wall is called a “barrier, separation barrier, West Bank barrier, (or simply) this wall;” sometimes “fence” is used as well; no hint of its real purpose or that the World Court ruled it illegal; no mention either that it’s unrelated to security and simply a land-grab scheme and effort to heighten Palestinian isolation;
• East Jerusalem – BBC recognizes West Jerusalem as part of Israel; East Jerusalem is considered occupied with its status “still to be determined in permanent status negotiations between the parties….We recognize no sovereignty over the city;” The phrase “Arab East Jerusalem” is avoided; so is any mention that Israeli settlements encroach on it and aim to annex it entirely; Palestinians want the city for their capital; it belongs to them; Israel won’t allow it; BBC won’t explain it;
• Gaza – Israel nominally disengaged in summer 2005; in fact, it never did; it merely redeployed its forces, and maintains rigid control over the Territory’s land, coast and airspace; it invades and attacks at will and maintains a brutish medieval siege; all movement in and out of Gaza is restricted; so are Gazans’ access to food, water, health care, fuel, electricity and other life essentials; the result is a deep humanitarian crisis; BBC ignores it; instead it merely refers to an “end to Israel’s permanent military presence,” not an end to its occupation, repression, continued incursions, mass killings, targeted assassinations, and systemic use of torture;
• The Green Line – it separates Israel from the West Bank, but BBC reporting blurs it; it doesn’t call it a border because that implies internationally recognized status; instead it fudges by calling it “the generally recognised boundary between Israel and the West Bank;”
• Intifada – more fudging when referring to causes; value judgments are avoided; so is truth; don’t say Ariel Sharon’s September 29, 2000 Haram al-Sharif provocation incited a popular uprising; package his visit with Palestinian frustration over a failed peace process and say it “sparked the (second) intifada (rather than it) led (to it or) started (it);”
• Jewish – distinguish between “Israeli” or “Jewish” to avoid religious or racial connotations; stress political ones instead; ignore how Israelis stress Jewishness by relating to “the promised land,” one “without people for a people without a land,” a Jewish homeland, Israel’s biblical connection, and raising the issue of anti-semitism against harsh Israeli critics; when they’re Jewish call them self-hating;
• Occupied Territories or Occupation – BBC refers to East Jerusalem and the West Bank, not the Golan Heights; after Israel “disengaged,” Gaza is in political limbo; BBC distinguishes between the “occupied territories” and Palestinian Land or Palestinian Territories; calling Gaza and the West Bank “disputed territories” is preferred; in fact, there’s no dispute; they’re both Israeli occupied Palestinian land;
• settlements and outposts – BBC distinguishes between them when, in fact, they vary only in size; BBC avoids calling them illegal; they’re all illegal but adjectives aren’t used unless they’re vital to a story; in all reports, BBC is one-sided; it stresses that Israel disputes international law; anti-Israeli value judgments aren’t made; the rule of law is dismissed; Palestinian rights are ignored; the growing number of Israeli settlers is fudged, downplayed and generally not mentioned;
• Palestine – BBC acknowledges that no independent state exists but the “peace process” aims to create one; unmentioned is that negotiations are fake and their reports try to hide it; so do deceptive words to appease pro-Israel critics; BBC obliges them;
• “relative calm” or “quiet” periods – it refers to quiescent Palestinian resistance, no Israeli deaths, but not ongoing Israeli attacks and killings;
• right of return – BBC ignores international law and UN Resolution 194; it promotes the Israeli position instead; and
• “terrorists” – a loaded term applying only to Palestinians; never Israelis; most often other words are used like “bomber, attacker, gunman, kidnapper, insurgent (or) militant;” Palestinian self-defense is never called resistance, and Israeli incursions aren’t ever called aggression.

Media “Rules of Engagement” in Covering the Middle East

In June 2002, Robin Miller listed “The Media’s Middle East Rules of Engagement.” BBC’s Israeli-Palestinian coverage adheres to them rigidly:

• Rule 1 – “View the Middle East (ME) through Israeli eyes;” Palestinians are terrorists and aggressors; Israelis are victims who retaliate; self-defense is their motive; so is avoiding the truth;
• Rule 2 – “Treat American and Israeli governmental statements as (truthful) hard news;” avoid any information that contradicts them;
• Rule 3 – “Ignore the historical context;” avoid mentioning six decades of dispossession, occupation, and hundreds of preceding years during which Palestine was the Palestinian homeland; also suppress the idea that a Jewish homeland first originated with Zionism’s late 19th century’s founding and didn’t exist prior to that;
• Rule 4 – “Avoid the fundamental legal and moral issues posed by the Israeli occupation;” say nothing about Geneva, UN Resolution 194, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and all other recognized international human rights laws;
• Rule 5 – “Suppress or minimize news unfavorable to the Israelis;” this rule is ironclad and unforgiving; open debate isn’t tolerated; facts are suppressed; aggressors are called victims; self-defense is called terrorism; news is carefully “filtered,” minds manipulated, and truth conspicuously absent; BBC excels at it and lets Israel get away with murder;
• Rule 6 – “Muddy the waters when necessary;” major US media do it; so do human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch; they tread lightly on Israeli-Palestinian issues and slant their views accordingly; so does BBC;
• Rule 7 – “Credit all Israeli claims (as fact), even if wholly unfounded;” if Israelis say it, it’s true; BBC approves;
• Rule 8 – “Doubt all Palestinian assertions, no matter how self-evident;” if Palestinians say it, it’s false or at best an unsubstantiated claim; most often ignore, downplay or fudge it;
• Rule 9 – “Condemn only Palestinian violence;” treat it as a crime against innocent Israeli victims; ignore any reference to self-defense against Israeli aggression and rule of law violations; and
• Rule 10 – “Disparage the international consensus supporting Palestinian rights;” better still – ignore it or condemn it as biased or anti-semitic.

Add one more rule for good measure. Repeat any lie often enough and most people will believe it. It’s foolproof and works every time.

Independent Analysis of BBC’s Israel – Palestine Coverage

In 2005, the BBC commissioned a study to review the impartiality of its Israeli – Palestinian coverage. It consisted of an independent panel, the Communications Research Centre at Loughborough University, and British-Israeli international lawyer Noam Lubell. Their published April 2006 findings weren’t what the broadcaster wished. Highlights from them showed BBC coverage:

• rarely covered daily Palestinian hardships and repression under occupation;
• was incomplete, misleading, and failed to consistently provide a full and fair account of the conflict;
• overlooked important themes; in the study period it most notably ignored Israeli annexation of land in and around East Jerusalem;
• omitted a substantial amount of important news vital to Palestinian concerns;
• failed to convey the disparity in the Israeli and Palestinian experience; specifically that one side is dominant and the other under occupation and forced to endure dependence indignities and hard line repression;
• seldom used the term occupation; mentioned military occupation only once during the study period;
• reported nothing about nearly four decades of occupation and repression;
• misportrayed Israel’s Gaza disengagement as a positive step; failed to clarify it as a ruse and that Gaza remains occupied, invaded and attacked at will;
• failed to report Israeli assertions that relocating Gaza settlers would strengthen Israel’s control of the West Bank and East Jerusalem;
• never clarified that Gaza settlements were illegal; that Gazans face ongoing hardships and stressed instead the “controversy” of withdrawing among Israelis;
• misused or misportrayed the term “terrorism” and only applied it to Palestinians;
• omitted any reference to historical background and failed to put stories in proper context;
• provided inadequate analysis and interpretation of key events and issues;
• failed to explain the meaning of Zionism;
• failed to provide background of the 1967 and 1973 wars;
• consistently misportrayed Hamas; described it as formally committed to Israel’s destruction; ignored Hamas’ acceptance of the Arab peace proposal and its willingness to recognize Israel in return for an end to the occupation;
• mischaracterized the Oslo Accords as positive; ignored its deficiencies and betrayal;
• mentioned the Intifada with no explanation of cause or justification;
• failed to cite international law and UN resolutions; their call for an end to Israel’s occupation; and the fact that Israel ignores international rulings contrary to its interests;
• ignored Palestinians’ legal right to return or restitution if they choose not to;
• ignored humanitarian and human rights laws;
• failed to explain extrajudicial executions are illegal;
• mischaracterized the Separation Wall that the World Court ruled illegal;
• misrepresented the status of Jerusalem;
• gave unequal access to Israeli officials and spokespersons; stations none of its correspondents in Occupied Palestine; has them all inside Israel; results in a huge disparity in reports favoring Israel while disparaging Palestinians;
• misportrayed Israelis as peace-seeking and Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims as aggressors;
• stressed Israeli victimhood, the importance of Israeli deaths and injuries, and relative unimportance of a disproportionate number of Palestinian ones;
• responded to criticism defensively; continued to repeat past errors cited; showed deference to Israeli issues and the pro-Israeli Lobby;
• ignored its own established editorial standards, including on terminology; as a result, consistently showed bias, a lack of clarity and precision and did little to improve comprehension and understanding;
• overall – BBC falls far short of fair and impartial reporting and has done little to redress pointed out deficiencies; one positive note – the analysis found no evidence linking anti-Semitic behavior to BBC reports; it also found none dispelling it.

Glasgow University Media Group Study of Middle East News Coverage – It’s Bad News from Israel and BBC

Researchers Greg Philo and Mike Berry conducted the study between 2000 and 2002, and their above quoted 2004 book title discusses it. Little has changed from then to now, BBC’s reporting highlights it, and it’s “bad news” for kept-in-the-dark viewers of major UK news and current affairs coverage.

Former BBC Middle East correspondent Tim Llewellyn agrees and explained in his unsparing comments about his former employer. He called it “dishonest – in concept, approach and execution….(it) favours the occupying soldiers over the occupied Arabs, depicting the latter, essentially, as alien tribes threatening the survival of Israel, rather than vice versa.” It depicts the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “as a battle of two (equal) forces (with equally) right and wrong responsibility. It is the tyranny of spurious equivalence.” As the UK and world’s leading broadcaster, BBC is justifiably blamed.

Bad News from Israel explains how – by consistently showing pro-Israel bias in virtually all its reporting and at times in the extreme. Beyond the book’s timeline, correspondent Chris Morris’ January 2004 “Lost hope in Mid-East conflict” report is a case in point. It’s about an expectant Palestinian woman confronted at a checkpoint. Prevented from passing, she gives birth and miscarries.

Morris is sympathetic but sides with the soldiers. “You can’t blame (them, he says) for being jumpy at checkpoints… because there are Israeli victims too, children among them, killed by snipers and suicide bombers from the West Bank. What would you have done? Would you have taken the risk? Or would you have played it safe, fearful of a trap? And so it goes on – another week in the Middle East.”

Even worse, the greater issue is ignored – an instance reflecting daily life in Occupied Palestine plus regular killings and abuse. Morris turns a blind eye. He highlights suicide bombings instead: “A Palestinian mother in her early 20s blows herself to bits and takes the lives of four young Israelis, after tricking them into believing she was ill.” He continues, “A Jewish settler is killed on the West Bank, leaving five children without a father, including triplets just three months old.” Reports like his are commonplace on BBC. Israeli lives matter. Palestinian ones don’t. Philo and Berry document the evidence.

Their study covers what media should report, a content analysis of their coverage, and how focus group interviews show how viewers are ill-served and left uninformed. Below are some results that apply to today:

• little or no historical context was provided; origins of the conflict were omitted; in the 2000 timeframe covered, BBC (and ITN) devoted 3500 lines of text to the Intifada, but a scant 17 to context or history;
• reporting consistently was pro-Israel and justified the most extreme actions and lawlessness; at the same time, Palestinian resistance was highlighted and condemned as terrorism;
• in the authors’ words: “There (was) no evidence from our analysis to suggest that Palestinian views were given preferential treatment on the BBC. The opposite (was) in reality the case;”
• BBC justified Israeli violence as “response” or “retaliation;” in contrast, Palestinian resistance was called “horrific,” an “atrocity,” “terrorism,” or even “mass murder;”
• some BBC reports were rife with errors whether intentionally or from ignorance;
• reports focused on Israeli security and right to exist; comparable Palestinian rights got little mention; nor did their impoverishment, deplorable daily existence, or a brutish four-decade military occupation;
• Israeli deaths were highlighted; Palestinian ones played down or ignored; regular Israeli incursions got little mention or weren’t reported;
• as a result, only 4% of focus group respondents knew Palestinians were driven from their homeland; only 10% that Israel occupied Palestine; some believed Palestinians were the occupiers; some viewed the conflict as a border dispute; 80% didn’t know the origin of Palestinian refugees or that they were dispossessed; two-thirds didn’t know Palestinian casualties exceeded Israeli ones; more knowledgeable respondents had access to books and other material that dispel BBC bias and inaccuracies;
• senior BBC journalists interviewed told researchers that they were instructed not to give explanations; to dumb-down the news for easy listening and do it in “20-second attention span” segments; researchers believe BBC has it backwards; this type reporting alienates viewers; accuracy and more context enhances viewership; under heavy Israeli Lobby pressure, BBC and other major media report propaganda; truth is the first casualty, and viewers remain uninformed; today it’s worse than ever.

BBC’s Coverage of Gaza Under Siege

BBC reports little about Gaza under siege and the humanitarian crisis it caused. Instead, accounts like its January 2008 one are common. It’s headlined “Gaza’s rocket threat to Israel” and highlights homemade Qassams “fired by Hamas and other Palestinian militants at Israeli population centres near the Gaza Strip.” They’ve “killed 13 people inside Israel, including three children. In some months, more than 100 launches have been recorded by the Israelis.”

No mention is made of Israeli incursions, their frequency, the use of F-16 air-to-surface missiles, their accuracy and destructive power, high-tech battle tanks in civilian neighborhoods, and other sophisticated weapons freely used, including illegal ones. Nor is there mention of hundreds of Palestinian deaths, injuries, inflicted Israeli destruction, and use of Palestinians as human shields. Instead, the Israeli town of Sderot is highlighted because it’s “the only large Israeli population centre within the original Qassam’s range.” BBC describes them in detail to over-hype their destructive potential. In fact, they’re crude, inaccurate and limited in range. They hardly compare to Israel’s high-tech weapons that when unleashed against a civilian population are devastating.

Later in BBC’s report, it admits “Qassams are very primitive missiles and their main effect on Israelis in the area is psychological torment (and that) Israeli casualties have been relatively light.” In contrast, Israeli attacks on Palestinians kill and injure many hundreds and inflict immense psychological terror against a civilian population. It’s gone on for six decades, shows no signs of ebbing, but BBC won’t explain it.

Nor does it report on Gaza under siege, the collective punishment of its people, the humanitarian crisis it caused, and Israel’s lawless act that BBC should expose and denounce. Instead it features reports like a May 10 one about a “Gaza mortar attack kill(ing an) Israeli.” Israeli air strikes followed, five Hamas members were killed and four others injured. BBC featured an Israeli government spokesperson saying “We hold (Hamas) accountable for today’s attack and the murder of civilians.” No Palestinian response was aired, and BBC merely ended saying that “The Gaza Strip has been controlled by Hamas since last June when they ousted their rivals from the Fatah movement.” No context, no background, no fair and impartial reporting, no truth, and no possible way for viewers to understand.

BBC suggests that Palestinians are responsible for their own condition, that a humanitarian catastrophe is their fault, and that Israel has every right to terrorize and starve them to submission for its own security and self-interest. By BBC’s standards, Israel may rightfully lock down 1.5 million people, collectively punish them, continue a repressive occupation, and refuse to negotiate in good faith, or at all. BBC is dismissive. Palestinian suffering is inconsequential, yet consider its outrage from a single Israeli death. It’s also contemptuous of Hamas, ignored its months-long unilateral ceasefire, and refuses to report its willingness to recognize Israel in return for a Palestinian state inside pre-1967 borders.

BBC views the conflict from an Israeli perspective. It features government officials to explain it, and reports whatever they say as fact. This turns reality on its head, makes lawless actions justifiable, results in double standard journalism, and lets Palestinians suffer the consequences. Why not and who cares. They’re just Arab Muslims in the land of Israel where Jews alone matter and not a hint of even-handed reporting exists. Now more than ever in the conflict’s seventh decade, and BBC’s reporting exacerbates it.

Sometimes various kinds of culture conflicts and clashes will cause a word, or a concept, to move from one language to another. When a word travels in this way, its meaning will frequently also become changed, sometimes even turned inside out. This will cause the word to become assimilated into the other language according to its new meaning.

One example from my own native tongue, Swedish, is the word “krabat”. It came into Swedish use about 350 years ago, as Sweden was embroiled in what Occidental historians have called the Thirty Years War. On the surface, this was a conflict between the two major Christian sects; the Catholics and the Protestants. A further analysis shows a struggle to dominate European economy. The Swedes aligned themselves with the Protestants and became generally feared as soldiers, but there was one enemy, on the Catholic side, whom they did not wish to meet. This was the soldiers of Croatia. The cry of alarm: “Kroaterna kommer!” (“The Croats are coming”) became changed into “Krabaterna kommer” (“The Krabats are coming”)! Long after peace was restored, the word “krabat” remained in the Swedish language, meaning somebody who is very difficult to deal with, sometimes also impossible to trust. As time went by the concept softened. Today, “krabat” commonly means a sturdy, healthy boy infant to be proud of. Its warlike origin is largely forgotten.

The Croats also made their mark in the history of cultural concept exchange during the time of the self-styled French Emperor Napoleon. He employed Croats as auxiliary troops, and these became famous in France also because of the colourful neckscarves which was, and still is, part of the Croatian national costume. Now the word Croat changed into the French “cravat” and came to signify a formal scarf – actually, the source of the neckties worn by most of us today along with our formal Occidental suits.

A far older and more serious shift of meaning is the story of the concept huri’ya, entities of Paradise, whom some say embody classical Arab virtues: hospitality, learnedness, knowledge of body, mind and spirit, and so forth. It is frequently used in present-day English where it lives a very twisted and distorted life as the “whore”, meaning the lowest and most despicable of earthly women – one who makes a living by selling her own carnal body for money. Oriental respect and desirability has become mutated into loathing and debasement. I do not know when this change occurred – an expert on linguistics could tell us – but literature clearly shows it to be of a quite early date. It is likewise clear that we are dealing with a very deliberate change of meaning. It is an example of linguistic warfare. The followers of one religion took a concept from their opponents and turned it entirely around, making it signify the exact opposite compared with its original meaning. This is a very effective weapon when you wish to strip the opponent of all dignity and honour. In doing so, you also disqualify the culture, the history, the virtues and the religion of the opponent, not to speak of the proper way to speak the language commonly used by the opponent.

The distorted picture of the huri’ya concept is also present in my language, Swedish, which borrowed it from the English and made it mean the same thing as in English. So, “huri’ya” became the English “whore”, to end up as the Swedish “hora”. This mechanism is very dangerous and serves to cement misunderstanding and disagreement.

Another sad example of linguistic warfare, very prominent in contemporary use, is the Arab “jihad”. In Western media and discussion, “jihad” means one thing, and one thing only. This is aggressive, armed warfare on religious grounds. Moreover, it signifies that the attackers are Muslims who wish to wreak havoc on Christians because of differences in religion. Today many private Christians are careful in their dealings with Muslims, possibly because prominent Western speakers have used media to make them fear that a “jihad” may descend upon them at any moment. Partly because of this the presence of Muslims in Western societies have become more or less suspect. This was very clear to me personally a few months ago. I live in the Swedish countryside and bought some firewood from a local farmer. As we loaded the wagon we also came to speak about differences in faith. Eventually the farmer said, quite spontaneously and without further thought: “Oh, the Muslims are all in the cities. It’s quite safe out here where we live, you see”. “How do you know I’m not a Muslim?” I asked. He just looked at me and said: “No, you’re not”. To me, the farmer was a victim of linguistic warfare, and at the time I had no words to set him right.

A wise man however, an imam and a good friend of mine, explained “jihad” to me in another way. He said: “You can make jihad a hundred times every day. Imagine for instance that you see an old lady who wants to cross the street but is afraid of the heavy traffic. Wouldn’t you go with the lady, helping her across the street? Jihad is that which pleases God. To help the old lady is good jihad”.

Therefore, it seems to me that the best road towards counteracting this sad linguistic warfare is to try to know the words and the concepts in their original, correct meaning, and to make full use of them in this way.

It has been said about the Prophet (Peace be upon Him), that to know him was like reading the Holy Qur’an. A great Buddhist thinker also said: “There is no use trying to point to the way. You must BE the way”.

I believe that everybody can do this. Some can do more, some can do less, but everybody is able to use language to add their share towards greater understanding.

In that book he proposed that ONLY humans have language and that the claims that other animals have language abilities as well is bogus. “For Pinker, children learn language because their brains are specifically prepared by evolution to do so.” King will take issue with some of Pinker’s ideas but I am a little bit dubious as to her motivations. She implies he is not “even handed” because he has said religious beliefs are “akin to astrology or alchemy,” which, in fact, they are. However, that said, we will see that her review draws some justifiable critical conclusions about Pinker’s work as she presents it.

Pinker thinks the key to understanding human nature is to learn how we put our ideas and feelings into words. King tells us that he uses “conceptual semantics” to do this. Pinker himself says, “Linguists call the inventory of concepts and the schemes that combine them ‘conceptual semantics.’ Conceptual semantics — the language of thought — must be distinct from language itself, or we would have nothing to go on when we debate what our words mean.”

Pinker’s book is full of examples of how we express ourselves in speech that show we have an underlying of reality to which language conforms. King gives one. “Why, driving home from the grocery store, do we refer to a gallon of milk in our car, but never a gallon of blood (even though blood circulates inside our body as we sit there)? Because we conceptualize our bodies as solids rather than as containers.” Expressions such as this lead us to think about space and time, cause and effect, and substance, “through which in turn we may identify the deeper rules of conceptual semantics.”

Pretty thin gruel! If our bodies are conceived as solids why do say we put too much food in our mouths, or have a pain in our stomach, or too much gas in that self same organ? I fear we cannot draw Pinker’s conclusions based on the different idiomatic expressions of different languages and cultures.

Half way through the book, we are told, Pinker reveals the key to his speculations. One of his inspirations is the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, of whom he says:

“Kant’s version of nativism, with abstract organizing frameworks but not actual knowledge built in to the mind, is the version most viable today, and can be found, for example, in Chomskan linguistics, evolutionary psychology, and the approach to cognitive development called domain specificity. One could could so far as to say the Kant foresaw the shape of a solution to the nature-nurture debate: characterize the organization, whatever it is, that makes useful learning possible.”

This is a strange theory for an evolutionist to hold. The human mind has a built in abstract framework a la Kant which is there to organize our experiences into categories (domains) before we even have them. Only humans have this with regard to languages, so the first humans to have a language must have come with this ready made. This is a pre-Darwinian outlook.

According to Darwinian notions language ability would have gradually developed by natural selection and there is no reason “lower” forms in the evolutionary sequence would not exhibit different stages of this ability.

Pinker thinks that the way evolution worked was to form different domains in the human brain each with its own task to fulfill. King says, for Pinker, “The human past constrains our present human nature because it has so closely shaped our brain modules.” Pinker says, for instance, that it is necessary to “pry our mental modules free of the domains they were designed for.”

This is not good science. Our so called modules were not “designed” for anything. Our responses evolved as the result of environmental adaptations. There is no reason to think that this process halted sometime in the paleolithic and is no longer functioning.

King quotes Pinker as saying that “left to our own devices, we are apt to backslide to our instinctive conceptual ways.” The solution, he says is, by education “to make up for the short comings in our instinctive ways of thinking about the physical and social world.” This outlook is basically that of Confucianism as put forth by Xunzi well over two thousand years ago and in our time by Freud. We are apt to let the Id take over if we are not educated to be social by Ivy League Super Ego types.

Marx asked who educates the educators. King is fairly critical of Pinker and thinks his views could lead to a “ranked hierarchy” of humanity antithetical to democratic values. She says he back pedals a bit from his basic theory when he grants that some of the properties he finds in the domains may not be, in his words, “necessarily direct reflections of the genetic patterning of our brains: some may emerge from brains and bodies interacting in human ecologies over the course of human history.”

King thinks this much more likely than Pinker allows. Marxists would think it is the most important factor and agree, I think, with King when she concludes that our real “human nature” is much more creative and contingent than the pre-programmed computer brains (her analogy) of Pinker’s pre-Darwinian Kantian humans.

There is no doubt that profanity is enjoying a friggin renaissance these days. It’s a prime feature of The Daily Show with John Stewart (where its bleeped out), Real Time with Bill Maher (where its not), and above all Penn and Teller’s Bullshit (where Penn called the scriptures the “damned Bible”). South Park is renowned for its vulgarity. Sex and the City may have tried, but Deadwood must have set the small screen record for use of the term “fuck.” Foul mouths are not just a cable thing. I’ve heard the word screw used as a term for sexual intercourse on the network primetime dramas Cashmere Mafia, and on Desperate Housewives in the 9:00-10:00 slot on a Sunday evening. Sitcoms kids say penis. Also allowed these days on broadcast primetime are bitch, son of a bitch, bastard, crap, feces, ass, anal, poop and pee. The Ken Burns PBS documentary on WW II broadcast the correct wordage for SNAFU — it is not “situation normal, all fouled up.” When CBS aired the documentary 9/11 on the anniversary of the event in 2002 and again in 2006, the network deliberately did not bleep out the stream of fucks and shits that emerged from the mouths of the firemen as they faced the worst catastrophe in their lives. The last point brings out a telling point. By no means is ready profanity a feature limited to the liberal elites like Joe Bagaent. Obscenity bleeps grace the conversation of the working class blokes featured on the cable channel programs like Ice Road Truckers, American Chopper, Deadly Catch and Axmen. For all the talk of the right wing Christianizing of the US military, it remains a bastion of profanity, to the extent that American troops have often antagonized Iraqis with their hard-core language. These days smutty talk is as American as apple pie.

Which has O’Reilly and company tearing their hair out. Back in 2004 — when after their seemingly splendid election victory the conservative elite met in Washington DC to discuss how to at long last kill off the damn counterculture and win the culture back for all that is good and American — Linda Chavez complained about how, while waiting at a red light, she was assaulted by someone else’s vehicular boom box blasting out “an incredibly vile rap song, I couldn’t avoid hearing simulated sexual intercourse.” Linda went on to demand that a way be found to put a stop to such cultural depravity. The chief organization fighting foul mouths is the Parent’s Television Council, established by Catholic L. Brent Bozell. When CBS refused to announce that it would defuck 9/11 the PTA went ballistic with a campaign to get the network suits to change their mind. Didn’t work.

The right has had some success in their cultural campaign. The FCC has long banned George Carlin’s seven dirty words and other naughty items from the broadcast networks. But even in the opening stages of the Bush II administration the exclusion seemed to be slipping, with sexual profanities spontaneously uttered in a nonsexual context tacitly being allowed. But folks started to complain, and the 2004 Super Bowl/Janet Jackson clothing glitch inspired a FCC crackdown, with the government censors throwing newly authorized megafines at the TV and radio networks and their affiliates for their broadcast transgressions. Howard Stern was driven off broadcast radio into a multi-million satellite deal. The networks have not, however, rolled over in supine submission. This is not the 1950s when primetime married couples were shown sleeping in twin beds (except, for some reason, on the Donna Reed Show, and that couple was hot). It is the early 2000s when the networks are engaged in a no holds barred ratings struggle for their very survival.

Here’s the thing. O’Reilly railed against Jane saying a slutty sex word over on NBC. That shot is as easy as it is cheap. The arch-Christian Bill should remember the Bible inspired passage about those living in glass houses chucking stones at others. Bill (Fox News) O’Reilly works for News Corporation, which is owned by fellow Christian Rupert Murdoch. Here is where we come down to brass tacks. As far as I know, the man of unwavering principle has not been directing his holier than thou societal ire at his own boss. Murdoch’s $60 billion News Corp also includes Fox Films and FOX Broadcasting, neither of which even tries to be culturally chaste. The once upstart and now dominant FOX network gained notoriety — and the big ratings — by pushing the broadcast sleaze factor. Of the networks FOX is the one that the PTC is most up in arms about. Among the broadcaster’s salacious primetime fare was the reality program Married By America. One 2003 episode featured digitally obscured nudity and whip cream covered strippers — i. e. your typical bachelor party. The FCC thought it was worth $1.2 million in fines from the network and its affiliates. The penalty was recently reduced to a mere $91 K, a few minutes worth of advertising time. Did a chastened Murdoch apologize and cough up the money to help atone for his sins?

Please, please do not make me laugh.

News Corp. and FOX have fought the FCC from the get go and refuse to pay anything. Why? For the same reason that O’Reilly says he opposes profanity. Principle. The corporation calls the FCC actions “patently unconstitutional.” News Corp. is also refusing to go along with the FCC fines for the utterance by Sher and Nicole Rickies of “fuck” and “shit” respectively during their appearances on the Billboard Music Awards on FOX in 2002 and 2003. The Supreme Court has agreed to take up that case this coming fall. It is not just FOX fighting the censors, so are the other networks. That is one reason why CBS broadcast 9/11 undeleted in 2006. They wanted to establish the principle that in some cases explicit vulgarity is part of the story. There are other practical problems as well. Such as when the FCC said it was all right to broadcast Saving Private Ryan unbleeped because of the historical context of the work.

It is grand fun getting after the sanctimonious, self proclaimed man of principle O’Reilly for his habit of beating up on those who dare define the culture downwards — except when it comes to his boss whose media fortune was built in part on sleaze all the way back to his tabloid days, and when even the news network he works for is prone to the salacious tabloid journalism documented at Foxnewsporn.com. But for all the amusement there is a larger point to be made.

The traditionalist right claims that they want to remake the culture by returning it to the more genteel times when public discourse was not nearly so crude. Never mind that those days were when church-going folk were torturing and lynching blacks in obscene public spectacles. In any case, the anti-vulgarity project provides the right with an ideal wedge issue, one that never ends because the task is pretty much hopeless. Popular profanity is here to stay for two main reasons.

First, the pertinent corporations are pro-profanity. It is an extension of the argument I made in “Buckley’s Big Mistake.” It is in the interest of the media to promote profanity. It is all part of the Darwinian competition for greater audience share, especially among the much coveted youth market. Once upon a time the big networks could get away with being verbally chaste because there was no competition. Now they are locked in a bitter struggle against cable and satellite for viewership, and they are not winning. One of the big advantages enjoyed by cable/satellite is that it is private commerce, so the producers can supply their clients with anything they want, all the way to the hardest core porn. This freedom is giving cable/satellite a big ratings leg up over broadcasters, especially among the youth cohort the media craves most of all. On broadcast radio the fucks are being digitally deleted out of the first rock hit to incorporate fuck into the lyrics, The Who’s “Who Are You?.” That makes the social conservatives happy, but it does not do much for the broadcasters who are losing audience to satellite and especially the web where the hard hitting word is left in its proper places. As for television, as long as pay-to-view media can say whatever it wants to, the networks have no choice but to do all they can to keep up in this piece of the capitalist game of survival of the fittest. Which brings us to the second reason that the right has no realistic prospect of actually winning their war on crudity. The public likes it.

Murdoch knows his audience. There’s lots of money to be made in the profane. It’s the foundation of his wealth. Pop culture always tends toward the vulgar, the only way to suppress it is to beat it down with a big stick and even that does only so much. A very large portion of the American population, perhaps a majority, enjoys being able to cuss now and then. They want to be able to hear their pundits, rappers, rockers, bloggers and comedians let the expletives fly. Its fun. It’s liberating. Sometimes a good fuck or shit is just what the situation calls for. What lots of folks do not want is that return to the delicate days or yore when propriety ruled. One of the standing jokes of FOX television’s fantastically irreligious The Simpsons is that the born again Ned Flanders and his godly boys are terrified of any hint of crude language (to the degree that gosh and darn must be excised from Hardy Boy novels), quite unlike the cool bad boy Bart. Let’s face it. O’Reilly, Chavez, Bill Bennett, George Will, Shawn Hannity, John Gibson, Glenn Beck, Chuck Colson, Phyllis Schlafly and the like are a dull and prissy lot of square stiffs. They cannot compete with the hip sensibilities of the modern culture.

Now here’s a dirty little secret. A lot of conservatives like their profanity too. Whatever Ann Coulter may be, she’s not unhip. In her Godless: The Church of Liberalism, she attacked evolutionary science with the statement “do whatever you feel like doing — screw your secretary, kill Grandma, abort your defective child — Darwin says it will benefit humanity” (emphasis added). The 2005 cover Time article on Ann claims that “she’s not one of those conservatives who won’t say “f___” two or three times over dinner.” Remember during the 2000 campaign when Bush Jr. told Cheney that a New York Times reporter was a “major league asshole?” Rather than chastising George on the use of an inappropriate word the future veep heartily agreed. Hardly surprising, since Dick later threw fuck at a Democratic member of Congress on the Senate floor (the Washington Post story that covered the event printed the whole word, which is still posted on their website; the paper has not maintained this tradition). When a nice elderly Republican voter asked John McCain how best to defeat the “bitch” Hillary most conservatives seemed to treat it with the amusement the candidate did. Rather than righteously condemning their heroes’ and their supporters’ verbal transgressions in order to save the culture from going potty mouth, traditionalists widely accepted the verbal taunts as understandable and feisty reactions to liberal perfidy that show how manly conservative men and women can be when a few choices words are called for.

That the right has already lost this piece of the culture war is confirmed by how many conservatives are willing if not eager to abandon the alleged principles in order to appear on The Daily Show and Real Time in order to tap into their large, youthful audience that cheer the well placed curse. Murdoch specifically and the corporate media in general have too much invested in the profane culture to abandon it. If Rupert gave orders to his Fox entertainment empire to clean up its act he would lose audience share in the competition against the other broadcast and especially the pay-to-view networks. He and the other network CEOs and suits won’t do it because they know that the public in the main prefers to keep their freedom to swear. Even more than rock and roll — which, of course, is slang for screwing — profanity is here to stay.