He who knows himself and others
Here will also see,
That the East and West, like brothers,
Parted ne’er shall be.
— Goethe¹

In no other major civilization do self-regard, self-congratulation and denigration of the ‘Other’ run as deep, nor have these tendencies infected as many aspects of their thinking, laws, and policy, as they have in Western Europe and its overseas extensions.² These tendencies reached their apogee during the nineteenth century, retreated briefly after World War II, but have been staging a come back since the end of the Cold War.

For several decades now, critics have studied these Western tendencies under the rubric of Eurocentrism, a complex of ideas, attitudes, and policies, which treat Europe – when it is convenient – as a geographical, racial and cultural unity, but places Western Europe and its overseas extensions at the center of world history since 1000 CE.³

Unlike the garden variety of ethnocentrism, Eurocentrism emerged as an ideological project – shaped by Europe’s intellectual elites – in the service of Europe’s rising expansionist, starting in the sixteenth century. It makes sweeping claims of European superiority in all spheres of civilization. In this worldview, only Europeans have created history over the past three thousand years, beginning with the ancient Greeks. In various accounts, this centrality is ascribed to race, culture, religion and geography.

The central organizing principle of Eurocentrism is the division of the world into unequal moieties: us and them, self and the Other. All those qualities that Western thinkers believe are emblems or sources of superiority are securely placed in the ‘us’ category; and their opposites are pinned on ‘them.’ The arrogance of this dichotomy is breathtaking.

Once these dichotomies are in place, it becomes quite easy to ‘explain’ Europe’s putative centrality in history. One set of superior characteristics – innate, unchanging, unique – account for the Western lead in all avenues of human endeavor, whether economic, technological, military, scientific or cultural. It is a tautological narrative of history par excellence.

In order to ‘explain’ the history of European superiority, the Eurocentrics first had to manufacture the history of this superiority. They endowed ‘Europe’ with historical depth by appropriating Greece and Rome; this was accomplished by defining Europe as a geographical, racial and cultural unity. In addition, they denied the eastern origins of Greek civilization, and, for the same reason, they passed over the connections of early Christianity to Syria and North Africa. In order to obscure Western Europe’s extensive debt to the Islamicate, they devalued the birth of new cultural formations in western Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, flowing from contacts with the Arabs in Spain, Sicily and the Levant.⁴ Instead, this history was moved forward several centuries to place it in northern Italy, whose cultural flowering – defined as a rebirth – was connected to the ‘direct’ recovery of Greek philosophy, sciences and literature.

The Eurocentrics construct a European history that begins in Greece, migrates westward to Rome, and again to points in Western Europe. In tracing the origins of the Renaissance to Greece, the Eurocentrics show little embarrassment about the fifteen centuries during which the Greek sciences and philosophy – mostly forgotten in ‘Europe’ – were being cultivated in the Middle East.

While they were fabricating a history of the rise of the West, the Eurocentrics were also engaged in denying that the rest of the world had any history. Yes, civilization began in the East but, after these early beginnings, the Asiatics have been immovably stuck in the past, forcing history to move westward in order to make progress. Europe’s most radical thinker of the nineteenth century, Karl Marx, too bought into this myth about static Asiatic societies whose despotism deprived them of the engine of ‘dialectical’ change.

Over the last few decades, this Eurocentric history has increasingly come under challenge from the ‘peoples without history,’ dissenting scholars in the West, and, most importantly, from new facts on the ground – the rise of national liberation movements, the dismantling of Western colonial empires, the socialist revolutions in China and Vietnam, the Iranian revolution, and, increasingly, the rise of several leading centers of economic dynamism in east and south Asia. Despite this challenge, Eurocentrism still controls the commanding heights in the think tanks, media, political discourse and popular prejudices of nearly all Western societies. The weight and momentum of Eurocentric tendencies, powered by the best Western minds over centuries, cannot be overthrown within a few decades.

Cartographic Violence

Eurocentric distortions have not spared cartography, the ’science’ of map-making.

Europe is relatively small in relation to the great landmasses to the east and south, Asia and Africa. The Eurocentrics might have chosen to argue that Europe has maintained its centrality despite its smaller size, proof of its qualitative lead over the much larger landmasses of Asia and Africa. They chose otherwise. They could not pass up the opportunities that maps presented for appropriating the symbols of superiority in the realm of cartography.

The powerful belong at the top. Eurocentrism demanded that cartography place Europe at the top of the world. This was easily accomplished by orienting the globe so that the North appeared at the top of the globe, or, in the case of maps, at the top of the page. It is always a source of some confusion for my students when I hang the map of the world upside down so that the North goes at the bottom. It is a bit unsettling to learn that there is no logic – nothing natural – about the North-at-the-top globes and maps.

World maps were not everywhere drawn with the North-at-the top orientation. The Muslims in their heyday – when their empires stretched from Spain to Khurasan and India – were making world maps, which placed the South at the top, even though this placed Africa above the central Islimicate lands stretching from the Nile to the Oxus. In their case, perhaps, orientation of the maps did not matter as much, since they always came out at the center.

In addition, Europeans gave currency to world maps that used Mercator’s cylindrical projection. Was this choice accidental? Admittedly, the Mercator map was useful for mariners, since a line connecting two points on this map showed the true direction. But are we to believe that sea captains had an interest in – and the power as well – to impose maps useful to them on the rest of society? More credibly, the Mercator maps were chosen because they greatly exaggerated the size of Europe, making it as large as, or larger than, Africa.

Incredibly, some Mercator maps published in the United States engage in cartographic violence. In order to center the United States on their maps, the publishers are quite happy to tear Asia right down the middle, pushing its two halves to the left and right edges of the map. It matters little that this sundering of Asia greatly diminishes the cartographic value of this truncated map of the world. This quite nicely illustrates the first casualty of Eurocentrism – its disregard for reality, and its willingness to engage in epistemological violence in order to place Europe at the center of the world.

Inverting the Paradigm

Growing up, I knew that ignorance was the chief support behind prejudice. Prejudices, whether religious or ethnic, diminished with education and scholarship. And that is how it should be, I thought. Prejudice is sustained by ignorance. Superior intellects, combined with wide learning, should have little difficulty in clearing the web of lies spun by the powerful. At the time, I little comprehended that superior intellects could also be bought and seduced by temptations of power, money and various forms of tribalism, especially if their culture had not prepared them to resist these blandishments.

It took a few years of familiarity with the Western world to overcome my naïveté about the relationship between tolerance and intellect. My encounters with Western classics and the Western media slowly confirmed me in my worry that groupthink in Western societies ran deeper than in Islamicate societies.

My growing familiarity with the writings of Western Orientalists and, later, the greatest European thinkers of the West – Montesquieu, Kant, Hegel, the Mills, Marx, Weber – inverted the paradigm I had acquired in youth. The prejudices of Western societies had their source at the top – in the best Western intellects – not in popular prejudice. They were supported by reasoning, by learned historical narratives, by monumental efforts at myth-making. Indeed, the leading thinkers fed and supported the prejudice of the populace.

I can still recall my disappointment when I bought Will and Ariel Durant’s compendious eleven-volume set, The Story of Civilization, to discover that they had devoted only one of their eleven volumes to non-European civilizations. Tellingly, this volume carried the title Our Oriental Heritage. In the Durants’ Story, the Orientals make a brief early appearance on the stage of history, in the infancy of human civilization, but having launched the West on its brilliant civilizational trajectory, they graciously make an exit from the stage of world history. This was not an oddity, I later learned. It was nearly the norm, even with modern writers.

Another book I read a few years later, Kenneth Clark’s Civilization, nothwithstanding its title, is exclusively about the art, architecture, philosophy and sciences in Western Europe. Clark succeeds in talking about such things without scarcely a mention of how they might be connected to India, China, the Islamicate, Africa, and the Americas.

Despite my familiarity with Eurocentric biases in Western thought, I still cannot suppress my disappointment at new instances of racism in Western Europe’s best and brightest thinkers. Immanuel Kant divides humans into four ‘races,’ set apart from each other by differences in “natural disposition.” “The negroes of Africa,” he writes, “have by nature no feeling above the trifling.” In support, he recalls David Hume’s challenge to show him a single ‘Negro’ with talents. On hearing of a ‘Negro’ carpenter who berated whites for complaining when their wives abused their liberties, Immanuel Kant remarked that there might be some truth in that observation. Then, spitefully, he added, “…in short, this fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid.” To Kant the hierarchy of races is clear. “Humanity,” he asserts,” is at its greatest perfection in the race of the whites. The yellow Indians are far below them and at the lowest point are a part of the American peoples.”⁵

Few of Europe’s most eminent thinkers, especially during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, could escape the siren songs of Eurocentrism. Some Western thinkers even today cannot confront this ugliness. French philosopher and psychoanalyst, Octave Mannoni, boldly claims, “European civilization and its best representatives are not…responsible for colonial racialism; that is the work of petty officials, small traders, and colonials who have toiled much without great success.”⁶ Spare the elites: blame the lumperproletariat!

A leading light of nineteenth century Britain, James Mill, philosopher and historian, wrote a massive five-volume history of India, it appears, with the sole object of demonstrating how deficient the Indians are in governance, the sciences, philosophy, technology and the arts. In short, the Indians were barbaric and quite incapable of managing their own affairs except under enlightened British tutelage. His son, John Stuart Mill, remarked, “The greater part of the world has, properly speaking, no history, because the despotism of custom is complete. This is the case over the whole East (emphasis added).”⁷

How different was the approach of another scientist and historian, Al-Biruni, an Afghan from the eleventh century, who – unlike James Mill – traveled through India for thirteen years, learned Sanskrit, translated Sanskrit works on mathematics, studied Indian society first hand, and invited Indian scholars to Ghazni, in preparation for his two-volume treatise on Indian civilization. His stated intention in his researches on India was to provide his Muslim audience with authentic accounts of its geography, religions, sciences, culture, arts and manners – and, thereby, elevate the quality of their discourse about the Indian peoples. He concluded his treatise with these remarks: “We think now that what we have related in this book will be sufficient for anyone who wants to converse with the Hindus, and to discuss with them questions of religion, science, or literature, on the very basis of their own civilization (emphasis added).”⁸

Modernity: How Western?

In the eighteenth century, when a small number of European thinkers were vigorously making the case for the supremacy of reason in human affairs, they knew – and were often happy to acknowledge – that they were following in the footsteps of Confucius who had preceded them by two millennia.

By the end of the century, however, a stronger and more confident Europe had forgotten its debt to the Chinese or any source outside of Europe. Insistently, they began to claim that reason, science and democracy were exclusive to European. It was a strange claim from thinkers who claimed that knowledge should be based on observation and reason – it should be objective.

In truth, it is hard to imagine how any society, including the most primitive, could have adapted to their ecology without following – at least intuitively – the scientific method. In practical matters, knowledge unsupported by experience would have proved fatal for societies that were exposed more frequently than ours to life-threatening conditions. Moreover, the Arab scientists were not only practicing the scientific method in their studies on optics, chemistry and astronomy, but in the early eleventh century, Ibn al-Haytham, known to the West as Alhazen, had offered a clear theoretical formulation of the scientific method. Roger Bacon, the putative founder of the scientific method had read parts of al-Haytham’s major work, Kitab al-Manazir, in a Latin translation, and summarized it in his own book, Perspectiva.

If democracy is equated with the counting of heads, even the United States – the self-declared bastion of democracy – was counting considerably fewer than half the heads until 1920, when women gained the right to vote. Blacks would not be counted until 1965. On the whole, the counting of heads has come to Europe after centuries of economic progress; it was not the foundation of their progress. Monarchic absolutism was stronger in nearly all of early modern Europe than it was in the Islamicate, whose rulers had only limited control over legislation and, in addition, faced institutionalized opposition from the class of legal scholars.⁹ The nomadic tribes in Africa and Asia had their council of elders, were led by a meritocracy, and, while their egalitarianism often excluded women, it generally went farther than in the stratified societies of Europe. The Indians had local self-government in their panchayats. The Pashtoons had their parliament in the loya jirga. The early Arabs could withhold baya – an oath of loyalty – from an unacceptable new ruler.

If democracy is defined by its substance, by tolerance – respect for differences of religion, color, ethnicity and phsyiognomy – most Enlightenment thinkers limited its application only to members of the white race. Tolerance has not been a particularly visible European virtue. In modern times, but especially since the Age of Enligtenment, Christian intolerance was replaced by a racial intolerance that translated quickly into schemes of genocide or support for slavery in the Americas, Africa and Oceania.

The Ottomans, with their system of millets – which granted a great deal of autonomy to their non-Muslim religious communities – afforded far greater protections to all segments of their subjects. In imposing one set of laws pertaining to the affairs of the family – often of Christian inspiration – modern Western states cannot equal the tolerance of the Islamicate which allowed its non-Muslim communities to order their family affairs according to their own religious laws. Universally condemned by Western writers, the tax imposed by Muslim states on its non-Muslim population was often considered a privilege by the latter since it exempted them from military service. When Western powers forced the Ottomans to grant ‘equality’ to its Christian population, they rioted against this measure in several Ottoman cities.

The rejection of priestly intermediation, starting in the fifteenth century, is commonly regarded as the first blow for modernity: allegedly, it freed the European to read the Bible in the vernacular and deal directly with his God. Islam had accomplished this, in a more radical fashion, in the early seventh century; and who is to say that Europeans were unaware of this Islamic precedent, or that there was no Islamic inspiration behind the Protestant movement.¹⁰ Oddly, however, the rupture with Rome also freed Christianity to be nationalized, to be appropriated by the newly emerging states in Western Europe, who proceeded to establish a national church and doctrine, which then sanctioned religious wars, persecution and, no less, colonization and slavery of non-Europeans. In other words, the freedom of conscience in the early modern West was generally more circumscribed than in the Islamicate, where no Church existed to enforced religious dogma, and Muslims were free to live their lives according to the legal traditions of their choice.

The inspiration for the central idea of orthodox economics – its vigorous opposition to state interventions – came primarily from the Chinese. In his time, Francois Quesnay, the leading light of the French pioneers of this policy – the Physiocrates – was known as the ‘European Confucius.’ The watch-word that summed up Physiocratic political economy, laissez faire, was a direct translation from the Chinese phrase wu wei.¹¹ Adam Smith, the putative Anglo-Saxon founder of classical economics, was a disciple of Quesnay. Few orthodox economists know that the language they speak – though not its intent – was invented by the ancient Chinese.

Since machines defined modernity – for a growing numbers of Europeans starting in the eighteenth century – it may be worth recalling that many of the machines that led the Europeans into modernity – water mills, windmills, the compass, lateen sail, astrolabe, the armillary sphere, the inner mechanisms of the clock, seed drills, mechanized mowers and threshers, iron moldboard plow, printing press, pumps, the rudder, cannons and guns, and many others – had their origins outside Western Europe, in China or the Islamicate.¹² If they originated in Greece, they were refined and improved for many centuries in the Islamicate before they were passed on to western Europe.

One of the arch proponents of Western imperialism, Rudyard Kipling, entrenched in his deeply parochial thinking, could not imagine that the East and West would ever meet. Pity, the news had not reached him that they had been meeting – with the West receiving most of the benefits of these encounters – since ancient times.

1. Edgar A. Bowring, Poems of Goethe (John W. Parker & Son, 1853): 272.
2. E. C. Eze, Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (Blackwell, 1997); M. Shahid Alam, “Articulating Group Differences: A Variety of Autocentrisms,” Science and Society (Summer 2003): 206-18.
3. For a review of this literature, see Andre Gunder Frank, “East and West,” in: Arno Tausch and Peter Herrmann, eds., The West, Europe and the Muslim World ( Novinka, 2006).
4. As a noun, ‘Islamicate’ seeks to avoid the confusion that arises from using ‘Islam’ when speaking of the world of Muslims, as in Europe and Islam. As an adjective, Islamicate replaces Islamic; the former refers to activities or actions connected to Muslims, differentiating this from the latter which should be used only when referring to activities which flow from the normative principles of Islam.
5. Eze, Race and Enlightenment: 47, 55, 63.
6. Octave Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: Psychology of Colonization (University of Michigan Press, 1990): 24.
7. John Stuart Mill, Liberty (NuVision, 1859): 60.
8. Alberuni, Alberuni’s India, translated by Edward C. Sachau, and abridge and edited by Ainslie T. Embree (The Norton Library, 1971): 246.
9. Noah Feldman, The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State (Princeton University Press, 2008): 27-35.
10. Charles Lindholm, The Islamic Middle East: An Historical Anthropology (Blackwell, 1996): 13.
11. Hobson, The Eastern Origins: 195-6.
12. Hobson, The Eastern Origins: ch. 9.

Angola 3 News: Please tell us about your recent visit to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola this past month.

Nancy A. Heitzeg: I was at Angola with a University-level off-campus class I was teaching on Racism in the Criminal Justice System. Students and I were in New Orleans for a week where we met with Sister Helen Prejean and did some work for the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana. I had been to Angola once before and both tours were comparable.

I should say that it is surprisingly simple to get a tour at Angola – just call the Museum, fill out a form and just turn up. No background checks, no IDs and no trips through metal detectors—which, of course, I have experienced at other prisons even when I was an invited speaker. You can and we did even drive our own vehicle through the grounds on the tour with a tour guide who rides along. Of course matters would be much different if one was at Angola to visit an inmate.

A3N: What happened during the tour?

NAH: The tour is quite extensive—we were there for 6 hours—and consisted of the following stops/activities:

• Guard/employee Village: A small “town”—built by inmates of course—house about 200 employees that live and work there with their families. Kids are bused in and out of the prison gates to outside schools. The town sits in the shadow of the Warden’s new mansion atop a high hilltop—built again by inmate labor.

• The Dog Kennels: Angola is very proud of their dog breeding and training operation, which includes Bloodhounds, German Shepherds, Dobermans, Rottweilers, and wolves. They are attempting to breed a more “vicious” attack dog by crossing Shepherds with the metaphoric “black wolf” they have. It is Mengelian really. Dogs are trained to track and attack unruly and escaping inmates. Some are trained to sniff drugs and contraband—some sold to law enforcement.

• Point Look-Out: The inmate cemetery for those whose bodies are not claimed and removed by relatives after death. Angola now claims a “dignified burial” for inmates by actually giving them a coffin! A coffin made, of course, by other inmates—and a horse drawn hearse procession. The coffin-making work drew recent attention when Billy Graham’s wife Ruth was buried in one. Point Look-Out has recently been renamed—ironically—for the slain guard Brent Miller, which does not seem to bode well for Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, of the Angola 3, who were convicted of Miller’s 1972 death (note: Miller’s widow, Leontine Verrett, now questions their guilt and has called for a new investigation into the case).

• The Horse Barn: Angola loves its horses. They have quarter horses, Percherons, some thoroughbreds and mules. Again mad breeding experiments—crossing Percherons with mules and thoroughbreds—these, of course, are for sale at auction, often to law enforcement agencies.

• The “Red Hat”: The most chillingly evil place I have ever been. The Red Hat is a Louisiana “Historical Landmark”—it is a cement cellblock with maybe forty 8 x 8 cells. It is cold as ice regardless of the weather outside and still smells of death and suffering even though it is open to ventilation. The Red Hat was built in the 1930s and was used for disciplinary purposes and public execution. The original electric chair with its old generator and battery is there. This is the chair that failed to kill Willie Lee Francis the first time in 1947, so yes, they had to “execute” him twice. Anywhere from 6-13 inmates were thrown naked into a single cell for punishment. This facility was used until 1973! Tour guides tell the story of Charlie Frazier who murdered two guards in the cane fields and escaped. After apprehension and upon his extradition from Texas, he was put in the last cell on the left and the door and window were welded closed. He lived that way for 7 years until he became ill and died. This is supposed to be a great story of punishment and justice served.

• The New Death House: Tours do not go in, but the new larger death house is further inside the property. There were complaints that it was too close to the gate and outer perimeter. There was an escape from the old death house in the late 1990s where 3 inmates made it out and off the prison property.

• The Execution Chamber: Tours go right in and stand by the lethal injection table. Louisiana used the electric chair until 1991—there is still a ventilator which was used to clear the smell of burned flesh. The witness rooms are small. Louisiana does not allow an inmate’s family to witness an execution and Warden Cain edits and reads the inmate’s last words. Angola owns all of you, even this.

• Inmate “Dormitory”: Tours walk right into and through a “typical” 90 bed dormitory as if the inmates there were invisible. A bed and a trunk for possessions is what you get. Due to state budget crunches, Angola may go to double-bunks in these dorms.

• Lunch: For $3, tours can eat what the entire prison eats. The day I was there it was a grease soaked piece of fish, rice in bacon grease, a biscuit, 2 greasy cookies and some sugar flavored drink. Needless to say, we looked at the trays and went without.

• Visit with the editor of The Angolite: This takes place in the Visitor Center where inmates are bused to meet their guests and where parole hearings and other legal proceedings take place. Since the release of Wilbur Rideau, Kerry Myers has been the editor and the inmate who speaks to tours. He is a white middle-class man who is serving life without parole for the 2nd Degree Murder of his wife. Myers told 2 different versions of his crime when I visited so I looked up his case which is actually infamous—the subject of a book and TV movie. Unlike most inmates who spend at least 3 months and in many cases 10 years toiling in the fields planting by hand, Myers was offered a 20 cents an hour job at The Angolite just 45 days into his incarceration there. Race and class privilege rule even here.

• Radio Station: The “Incarceration Station” broadcasts live to all seven prison complexes at Angola. Inmate DJs play mostly gospel but it also serves as a means for communicating to all facilities during emergencies.

• Museum/Gift Shop: Here are many lots of displays of Angola’s history—weapons, a section on the Red Hat, the “heeling” incident, and “Gruesome Gertie,” which is the last electric chair, with photos of all executed inmates since 1981—the most recent in January 2010. There is a rodeo display, a section in Angola as portrayed in films such as Dead Man Walking and Monster’s Ball, a history of escape attempts and more. Angola’s reputation as “the bloodiest prison in America” is portrayed as an artifact of the past. We are led to believe that Angola is now a peaceful, humane institution where religion has ushered in a new era of calm, but the inmate who works as a janitor and likes to talk will tell you different. Warden Cain may run a less overtly brutal regime than previous wardens, but much repression is now just more hidden from public view. Warden Cain is quite adept at public relations. Of course you can buy Cain’s book at the gift shop and lots of junk with his name all over it, including small bales of cotton.

A3N: How much do you think things have changed since Angola was infamously labeled “the bloodiest prison in America?”

NAH: The tours are apparently part of Warden Burl Cain’s efforts to make Angola seem more humane, safe and open, in an effort to undo the image of Angola as “the bloodiest prison in America.” On the surface, I suppose what visitors see on the tour could reinforce that notion because there is regular interaction with inmate trustees, trips into inmate “dormitories” and never any sense of danger or risk. Of course, there is a great emphasis on the role of religion. For example, there is the new Graham Foundation Chapel, KLSP Incarceration Station that plays mostly gospel and the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary program. All of this emphasizes conservative evangelical Christianity over other faith traditions. Religion is clearly seen and used at Angola as a source of social control. Warden Cain has said that “the only true rehabilitation is moral.”

But many questions remain about what is unseen or unspoken unless you directly ask. Inmates still try to escape and as many as 1200 inmates—about 20% of the total population of over 5100—are in administrative segregation/lock-down at the notorious Camp J. These inmates are granted their one hour of “exercise” in an incredibly small dog kennel-like cage and are forced to remain handcuffed during their brief time out (this is apparently the response to inmates “flashing” female guards in the tower). An array of deadly weapons is still confiscated weekly, and there is reportedly on-going use of dogs and other force to control the population. Sexual assault is also reportedly still an issue and the obituary column in The Angolite often refers to deaths of relatively young inmates in Camp J without noting cause of death, as it does in other obituaries.

If allowed to, inmates also offer a critique of The World Famous Angola Rodeo, where inmates participate for cash prizes at great risk. There have been several inmate deaths at the rodeo as well as extreme injuries and on-going chronic conditions. Inmates are allowed to sell crafts at the rodeo but the Warden/prison takes a 20% cut. The rodeo makes approximately $1 million each weekend in October as the new arena (built by inmates in short order under Cain’s directive) seats 10,000. This is just one of several money-making endeavors at Angola that depends on neo-slave inmate labor starting at 2 cents per hour—the minimum wage had been raised to 4 cents per hour but was recently returned to 2 cents, according to the tour guide. The highest available wage for a few rare jobs is 20 cents per hour.

Despite the supposedly benign tour, both students and I were horrified. There is a cavalier attitude, a blasé acceptance of capital punishment, mass incarceration and of course little critique of the class and race dynamics of the inmate population—80% of whom are black and nearly all of whom were poor, under-educated and dependent on a public defender at trial. There is passive acceptance and even sometimes celebration of Louisiana’s harsh sentences—it has the highest incarceration rate in the US—and of the fact that 90% of the inmates will die there and 80% will receive no visitors after 5 years.

Angola is reminiscent of Toni Morrison’s description of the plantation “Sweet Home” in her novel Beloved—a physically beautiful and natural space that is the site of great hidden suffering and degradation. It is a place where men are made to be docile “yes sir” and “yes ma’m” boys—where only the compliant and subservient are slightly rewarded, but are still disappeared, invisible and inconsequential to those inside and outside the gates. Yes, you can survive and maybe work a tolerable job there after decades of submission–but at what cost? And, what of the rest who resist?

Those who want to learn more should watch the films –The Farm and The Farm: 10 Years Down. A word of caution though: while much is revealed, they do, in my estimation, especially in the second film, over-estimate an inmate’s chances of leaving Angola and “success” of the moralistic program imposed by Warden Cain. The stories of George Crawford and Vincent Simmons are much more typical than those of Ashanti Witherspoon and Bishop Tannehill.

A3N: Many people call Angola Prison a “modern day slave plantation.” Do you think this is a fair label?

NAH: Absolutely. Angola was and is still is very much a plantation. At 18,000 acres, it is the largest prison in the US—the only prison with its own zip code. Mostly black men are still maintaining the same agricultural activity—planting, hoeing, picking cotton and other crops by hand—that slaves did originally. And they are doing so as captives who are compensated for their back-breaking labor with mere pennies per hour. While Warden Cain may not be Simon Legree, he is still a plantation master—albeit one who uses Christianity as a means of controlling the neo-slave labor under his watch. The very same practices and social control mechanism that existed under slavery persist—just under a new name.

My interest in Angola is as both a paradigm of the Southern transformation of plantations into prisons and as a prototype for what we now call the prison industrial complex. Many old plantations in the South became prisons after the Civil War. Angela Y. Davis traces the initial rise of the penitentiary system to the abolition of slavery, writing: “in the immediate aftermath of slavery, the southern states hastened to develop a criminal justice system that could legally restrict the possibilities of freedom for the newly released slaves.”

Slave Codes became Black Codes and criminalized a range of activities if the perpetrator was black. The newly acquired 15th Amendment right to vote was curtailed by tailoring of felony disenfranchisement laws to include crimes that were supposedly more frequently committed by blacks. And, the liberatory promise of the 13th Amendment – “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist in the United States” – contained a dangerous loophole: “except as a punishment for crime”. This allowed for the conversion of the old plantations to penitentiaries, and this, with the introduction of the convict lease system, permitted the South to continue to economically benefit from the unpaid labor of blacks.

The patterns established in the old south have proliferated and expanded throughout the US, as African Americans are disproportionately policed, prosecuted, convicted, disenfranchised and imprisoned in the prison industrial complex. There has been a corresponding shift from de jure racism codified explicitly into the law and to a de facto racism where people of color, especially African Americans, are subject to unequal protection of the laws, excessive surveillance, extreme segregation and neo-slave labor via incarceration—all in the name of “crime control”. It is the current manifestation of the legal legacy of the racialized transformations of plantations into prisons, of Slave Codes into Black Codes, of lynching into state-sponsored executions. The “imputation of crime to color” that Frederick Douglass warned of 125 years ago continues to the present.

The response from the people of Pakistan was predictable and overwhelming and I salute their spontaneous actions.

From Peshawar to Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore and beyond they marched in their thousands demanding the return of Aafia.

Even some of the US media expressed discomfort over the verdict returned by the jurors … there was a general feeling that something was not right.

Everyone had something to say, everyone that is except the usually verbose US Ambassador Anne Patterson who has spent the last two years briefing against Dr Aafia and her supporters.

This is the same woman who claimed I was a fantasist when I gave a press conference with Tehreek e Insaf leader Imran Khan back in July 2008 revealing the plight of a female prisoner in Bagram called the Grey Lady.

She said I was talking nonsense and stated categorically that the prisoner I referred to as “650” did not exist.

By the end of the month she changed her story and said there had been a female prisoner but that she was most definitely not Dr Aafia Siddiqui.

By that time Aafia had been gunned down at virtually point blank range in an Afghan prison cell jammed full of more than a dozen US soldiers, FBI agents and Afghan police.

Her Excellency briefed the media that the prisoner had wrested an M4 gun from one soldier and fired off two rounds and had to be subdued. The fact these bullets failed to hit a single person in the cell and simply disappeared did not resonate with the diplomat.

In a letter dripping in untruths on August 16 2008 she decried the “erroneous and irresponsible media reports regarding the arrest of Ms
Aafia Siddiqui”. She went on to say: “Unfortunately,
there are some who have an interest in simply distorting the facts in an effort to manipulate and inflame public opinion. The truth is never served by sensationalism…”

When Jamaat Islami invited me on a national tour of Pakistan to address people about the continued abuse of Dr Aafia and the truth about her incarceration in Bagram, the US Ambassador continued to issue rebuttals.

She assured us all that Dr Aafia was being treated humanely had been given consular access as set out in international law … hmm. Well I have a challenge for Ms Patterson today. I challenge her to repeat every single word she said back then and swear it is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

As Dr Aafia Siddiqui’s trial got underway, the US Ambassador and some of her stooges from the intelligence world laid on a lavish party at the US Embassy in Islamabad for some hand-picked journalists where I’ve no doubt in between the dancing, drinks and music they were carefully briefed about the so-called facts of the case.

Interesting that some of the potentially incriminating pictures taken at the private party managed to find the Ambassador was probably hoping to minimize the impact the trial would have on the streets of Pakistan proving that, for the years she has been holed up and barricaded behind concrete bunkers and barbed wire, she has learned nothing about this great country of Pakistan or its people.

One astute Pakistani columnist wrote about her: “The respected lady seems to have forgotten the words of her own country’s 16th president Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865): “You
can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some
of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time”.

And the people of Pakistan proved they are nobody’s fool and responded to the guilty verdict in New York in an appropriate way.

When injustice is the law it is the duty of everyone to rise up and challenge that injustice in any way possible.

The response – so far – has been restrained and measured but it is just the start. A sentence has yet to be delivered by Judge Richard Berman in May.

Of course there has been a great deal of finger pointing and blame towards the jury in New York who found Dr Aafia guilty of attempted murder.

Observers asked how they could ignore the science and the irrefutable facts … there was absolutely no evidence linking Dr Aafia to the gun, no bullets, no residue from firing it.

But I really don’t think we can blame the jurors for the verdict – you see the jury simply could not handle the truth. Had they taken the logical route and gone for the science and the hard, cold, clinical facts it would have meant two things. It would have meant around eight US soldiers took the oath and lied in court to save their own skins and careers or it would have meant that Dr Aafia Siddiqui was telling the truth.

And, as I said before, the jury couldn’t handle the truth. Because that would have meant that the defendant really had been kidnapped, abused, tortured and held in dark, secret prisons by the US before being shot and put on a rendition flight to New York. It would have meant that her three children – two of them US citizens – would also have been kidnapped, abused and tortured by the US.

They say ignorance is bliss and this jury so desperately wanted not to believe that the US could have had a hand in the kidnapping of a five-month -old baby boy, a five-year-old girl and her seven-year-old brother.

They couldn’t handle the truth … it is as simple as that.

Well I, and many others across the world like me, can’t handle any more lies. America’s reputation is lying in the lowest gutters in Pakistan at the moment and it can’t sink any lower.

The trust has gone, there is only a burning hatred and resentment towards a superpower which sends unmanned drones into villages to slaughter innocents.

It is fair to say that America’s goodwill and credibility is all but washed up with most honest, decent citizens of Pakistan.

And I think even Her Excellency Anne Patterson recognizes that fact which is why she is now keeping her mouth shut.

If she has any integrity and any self respect left she should stand before the Pakistan people and ask for their forgiveness for the drone murders, the extra judicial killings, the black operations, the kidnapping, torture and rendition of its citizens, the water-boarding, the bribery, the corruption and, not least of all, the injustice handed out to Dr Aafia Siddiqui and her family.

She should then pick up the phone to the US President and tell him to release Aafia and return Pakistan’s most loved, respected and famous daughter and reunite her with the two children who are still missing.

Then she should re-read her letter of August 16, 2008 and write another … one of resignation.

“Gaza in Plain Language.”

Written by Joe Mowrey.

Narrated and Edited by Anthony Lawson.

Waging a decades-long psychological war against the American people, corporatist thugs embedded within the National Security State assure us that secrecy, deceit and imperial adventures that steal other peoples’ resources are the one true path to national prosperity and universal happiness.

But what happens when those charged with protecting us from attack, actually aid and abet those who would kill us, and then handsomely profit from our slaughter in the process?

During a January 27 hearing of the House Committee on Homeland Security, Under Secretary of State for Management, Patrick F. Kennedy, testified that the visa of accused bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, wasn’t revoked at the specific request of secret state agencies.

Kennedy, a Bushist State Department holdover, was the former Director on National Intelligence for Management and headed the transition team that set up the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in 2005 under former Ambassador to Iraq, John D. Negroponte, a veteran of U.S. covert operations since the Vietnam war.

Given the avalanche of media interest, fueled by Fox News and the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal, whether or not the suspect should have been read his Miranda rights, the only coverage of the hearings that reported Kennedy’s explosive testimony, was a brief article in the Detroit News.

Claiming that “revocation action would’ve disclosed what they were doing,” Kennedy said that allowing the alleged terrorist to keep his visa would have “helped” federal investigators take down the entire network “rather than simply knocking out one solider in that effort.”

A “soldier” (indicted criminal) who would have murdered 300 air passengers if the detonator concealed in his underpants hadn’t serendipitously failed to explode the device.

As Alex Lantier wrote February 3 on the World Socialist Web Site, the latest in a series of significant revelations “has been buried by the media.” The socialist critic avers: “As of this writing, nearly a week after the hearing, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times have published no articles on the subject. Nor have the broadcast or cable media reported on it.”

Lantier charges that “despite–or perhaps more accurately, because of–the fact that this information exposes the official government story of the near-disaster to be a lie” the corporate media is fully complicit in the cover-up.

Weeks after the incident, it is now clear that intelligence agencies did far more than simply “watch” a potential terrorist. That they gave Abdulmutallab a leg up, bypassing airline security systems put in place after 9/11 that would have prevented him from boarding that plane, is also crystal clear.

The question is: was a reckless calculation made that gambled the lives of 300 air passengers for ruthless political purposes? If so, was it designed to destabilize the Obama government, thereby binding it ever-closer to a permanent, unelected, security apparatus that feathers its nest by serving the only constituency that matters–giant energy firms, defense-related corporations and those who finance them?

Is this scenario being played out in Washington where Republican right-wingers like Senators Susan Collins (ME), Tom Coburn (OK), John McCain (AZ), John Ensign (NV) and Lindsey Graham (SC), but also neocon Democrats such as Joseph Lieberman (ID-CT), demand that the accused be turned over to the military for “special handling,” thereby ratcheting-up pressure for increased domestic repression?

Just as pertinently, is this what White House insider Richard Wolffe meant when he said on MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann January 4 that the “president is leaning very much towards thinking this was a systemic failure by individuals who maybe had an alternative agenda.” (emphasis added)

For weeks now, the Obama administration and the media have played the same broken record: despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, a multitude of security agencies, ranging from the CIA, the FBI, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), a satrapy of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security, “failed to connect the dots.”

But as I have documented in previous reports, most recently on January 22, citing multiple domestic and foreign intelligence warnings, including a walk-in interview at the U.S. Embassy in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, by the suspect’s own father, a former top official in the Nigerian government, consular officials and CIA officers passed the warning up the food chain–where it sat.

Abdulmutallab on the CIA and NCTC’s Radar

The revelation that various agencies of America’s shadow government made a deliberate decision that allowed Abdulmutallab to board Flight 253 is more extensive than previously disclosed.

Newsweek revealed February 2 that “a single intelligence community database operated by the CIA, known by the code name ‘Hercules’,” held all the “‘bits and pieces’ of intelligence that White House officials believe could have led U.S. authorities to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab before last December 25.”

However, even though the agencies had assembled information on the suspect in a single computer system where it was readily accessible to analysts, anonymous “intelligence officials” told journalist Mark Hosenball that “all source” analysts at CIA and NCTC “which both had access to ‘Hercules,’ were unable to assemble the intelligence scraps in time to prevent Abdulmutallab from boarding his Christmas Day flight from Amsterdam to Detroit with a bomb hidden in his underpants.”

The unnamed officials told Hosenball that the failure to stop the suspect “validates assertions by White House and congressional investigators that the alleged lapses in the handling of intelligence related to Abdulmutallab did not stem from a failure of sometimes turf-conscious spy agencies to share information with each other.”

“Instead,” Newsweek reports, “they point to the intelligence analysis carried out by the CIA and NCTC.”

As I previously reported, citing a January 18 investigation by The New York Times, the National Security Agency “learned from a communications intercept” that a man named “‘Umar Farouk’–the first two names of the jetliner suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab–had volunteered for a coming operation.” Additional NSA intercepts in December “mentioned the date of Dec. 25, and suggested that they were ‘looking for ways to get somebody out’ or ‘for ways to move people to the West,’ one senior administration official said.”

Running for cover, an intelligence official told Newsweek: “The volume of any database doesn’t matter much. That, by itself, doesn’t get you anywhere.” An interesting spin, when one considers the multibillion dollar expansion by NSA, as investigative journalist James Bamford reported last November.

The official continues, “Nor does the mere fact that the NCTC and the CIA have shared access to material. The key is knowing what to look for, how to bring together different bits and scraps of information that–on the surface and in an ocean of data–don’t appear to be connected.” Conversely, knowing which “bits and scraps” to ignore from a parapolitical perspective, may have played an equally critical role in a presumed analytical “lapse.”

“This is hard stuff,” the anonymous source pontificates. “It’s not a case of punching in a couple of search terms, sitting back, and waiting for enlightenment. Once you know the answer, it seems easy. But in real life, you don’t get the answer ahead of time.”

Really?

To the contrary, as with the September 11, 2001 hijack team, the Flight 253 affair seems to indicate that the decision to allow Abdulmutallab to board the plane was a political, not a law enforcement decision that led analysts not to “connect” more than a few of the “dots.”

As we now know, prior to 9/11, the Pentagon’s Able Danger unit had amassed terabytes of data on al-Qaeda sleeper cells in the United States. According to published reports, the unit had obtained detailed information on ringleader, the drug-addled Mohammed Atta, and other members of the suicide squad. Yet just scant months before the atrocity, the unit was shuttered and the data destroyed.

Corporate media and the 9/11 Commission have advanced two contradictory propositions on Able Danger’s demise: the Pentagon unit hadn’t gathered intelligence on Atta and claims to contrary were overblown or they illegally obtained information on ordinary Americans and were shut down for inadvertent spying.

However as researcher Paul Thompson revealed in The Terror Timeline, Able Danger had identified Americans, only they were the wrong Americans. According to Thompson, the unit pegged “future National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former Defense Secretary William Perry, and other prominent Americans as potential security risks” over their illicit dealings with foreign governments.

How’s that for an inconvenient truth!

As with earlier warnings of impending terrorist strikes, political efficacy trumped the safety and security of the American people. This is underscored by January 20 testimony by NCTC Director, Bushist embed Michael E. Leiter, before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

CongressDaily revealed that Leiter told the senators, “I will tell you, that when people come to the country and they are on the watch list, it is because we have generally made the choice that we want them here in the country for some reason or another.”

Journalist Chris Strohm disclosed that intelligence officials “acknowledged the government knowingly allows foreigners whose names are on terrorist watch lists to enter the country in order to track their movement and activities,” a fact now confirmed by Patrick F. Kennedy’s January 27 testimony before the House Committee.

Similar to the Detroit News report on Kennedy’s admission, to date, not a single media outlet picked-up the trail and investigated CongressDaily’s chilling disclosure.

Burying the Evidence, “Moving On”

Corporate media are chock-a-block with reports of efforts by right-wing Republicans and some Democrats to brand the Obama administration as “soft on terrorism.”

As readers are well aware, Antifascist Calling doesn’t carry water for the Obama administration; a government that has rightly been characterized as a slick makeover of the previous regime. However it must be acknowledged, unlike Bushist torture freaks, in Abdulmutallab’s case constitutional norms were followed and a criminal suspect lawfully charged for an egregious act.

In “new normal” America however, not disappearing a suspect into a gulag, subject to tender ministrations by “enhanced interrogation” specialists (torturers) is viewed as a bad thing in our debased political culture.

Meanwhile media stenographers scrupulously ignore, with a single-mindedness one has come to expect from totalitarian regimes, considerable evidence that elements of the intelligence-security apparatus could be charged as accessories before and after the fact with Abdulmutallab’s alleged offense.

In his prepared statement to the House Committee, Kennedy asserted that “following his father’s November 19 visit to the Embassy, we sent a cable to the Washington intelligence and law enforcement community through proper channels (the Visas Viper system) that ‘Information at post suggests [that Farouk] may be involved in Yemeni-based extremists.’ At the same time, the Consular Section entered Abdulmutallab into the Consular Lookout and Support System database known as CLASS.”

When it was discovered that officials in Abuja had misspelled the suspect’s name “information about previous visas issued to him and the fact that he currently held a valid U.S. visa was not included in the cable.”

Despite the misspelling however, “the CLASS entry resulted in a lookout using the correct spelling that was shared automatically with the primary lookout system used by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and accessible to other agencies.”

In other words, even though the initial Embassy cable misspelled Abdulmutallab’s name, the “lookout” notification sent out to intelligence agencies, specifically DHS, should have warranted further action. And it also appears that initially it did.

As both the Los Angeles Times and CongressDaily reported, Customs and Border Protection agents obtained the suspect’s name from the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment or TIDE database, maintained by the NCTC and planned to question Abdulmutallab when Flight 253 landed in Detroit on arrival from Amsterdam.

However, as CongressDaily subsequently revealed, CBP agents “had information about alleged terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab three days before his departure” and not during the flight as the Los Angeles Times report initially suggested.

As we now know, information fed to NCTC’s database contained specific warnings from the State Department–as did the CIA’s “Hercules” system as Newsweek reported, and “that White House officials believe could have led U.S. authorities to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab before last December 25,” according to the newsmagazine’s anonymous sources.

Why did the State Department fail to revoke the accused terrorist’s visa?

When questioned by Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS), Kennedy told the panel, “We will revoke the visa of any individual who is a threat to the United States, but we do take one preliminary step.”

Kennedy explained, “We ask our law enforcement and intelligence community partners, ‘Do you have eyes on this person and do you want us to let this person proceed under your surveillance so that you may potentially break a larger plot?’”

The Undersecretary added: “And one of the members [of the intelligence community]–and we’d be glad to give you that [information] … in private [closed session]–said, ‘Please, do not revoke this visa. We have eyes on this person. We are following this person who has the visa for the purpose of trying to roll up an entire network, not just stop one person.’”

In other words, despite multiple sourced reports from American and overseas security agencies that Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) was planning to launch an attack, probably on Christmas Day, deploying an asset identified by NSA intercepts as a “Nigerian” named “Umar Farouk,” high-level intelligence officials, claiming to have “eyes” on the alleged AQAP operative, a suspected suicide bomber to boot, allowed him to board an airliner packed with nearly 300 passengers and crew.

In a prepared statement to the Committee, NCTC Director Leiter said, “Let’s start with this clear assertion: Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab should not have stepped on that plane. The counterterrorism system failed and we told the President we are determined to do better.”

However, neither House Committee members, nor the corporate media which suppressed the story entirely, challenged Leiter’s statement of a week earlier when he testified before a Senate panel that intelligence agencies allow watch listed terrorists to enter the country “because we have generally made the choice that we want them here in the country for some reason or another.”

If Leiter’s testimony was taken under oath, he should be brought up on charges of perjury since he next asserted that “Intelligence Community analysts who were working hard on immediate threats to Americans in Yemen did not understand the fragments of intelligence on what turned out later to be Mr. Abdulmutallab, so they did not push him onto the terrorist watchlist.”

This claim, as with practically all the “facts” released to the American people by the White House, Congress or by the secret state agencies themselves, is a rank mendacity.

As Newsweek’s unnamed sources claim, CIA and NCTC analysts did have access to an “intelligence community database,” “Hercules,” and that it held all the available data on Abdulmutallab and “validates assertions by the White House and congressional investigators” that the failure to stop the bomber were not due to bungled efforts “to connect the dots.”

As I reported last month, during a December 22 meeting at the White House, President Obama was briefed by top officials from the CIA, FBI, and Department of Homeland Security “who ticked off a list of possible plots against the United States and how their agencies were working to disrupt them,” as The New York Times disclosed January 18.

Last month, Newsweek reported that “intelligence analysts had ‘highlighted’ an evolving ’strategic threat’,” and that “’some of the improvised explosive device tactics AQAP might use against U.S. interests were highlighted’ in other ‘finished intelligence products’.”

“Finished intelligence products” on an evolving plot to destroy an airliner are hardly “fragments,” as Leiter deceitfully testified to the House Committee. Cheekily, NCTC’s head honcho falsely claimed that his agency, the recipient of billions of dollars in taxpayer largesse, “did not correlate the specific information that would have been required to help keep Abdulmutallab off that Northwest Airlines flight.”

Citing the need to “improve” intelligence capabilities by accelerating “information technology enhancements, to include knowledge discovery, database integration, cross-database searches, and the ability to correlate biographic information with terrorism-related intelligence,” Leiter implies that billions more in handouts to security contractors are needed to “solve” the problem.

This from the Director of an agency that under his watch wasted more than $500 million on its flawed Railhead project to “upgrade” the TIDE database, an initiative “crippled by technical failures and contractor mismanagement,” as the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) and congressional investigators revealed back in 2008.

Contractor hanky-panky aside, the problem is not one of technical “upgrades” to an agency that seems more concerned with facilitating the entrance of terrorists into the country “for some reason or another” than stopping them.

Rather, it is imperative that the American people demand that Congress and the Executive Branch, which in theory, controls the gaggle of alphabet-soup satrapies in cahoots with the most rotten and predatory sectors of the U.S. ruling class, clean house and bring to book, the rightist elements aligned with the petroleum-intelligence nexus who continue to deploy terror gangs such as al-Qaeda as strategic assets.

That they do so regardless of the cost, to the American people and to the victims of illegal U.S. wars and occupations, is a sign that the system, verging on bankruptcy will soon veer even further out of any effective democratic control.

How else can one interpret Director of National Intelligence, Dennis C. Blair’s chilling assertion to the Senate Committee on Intelligence that he was “highly certain” that al-Qaeda “or one of its affiliates” will attempt a large-scale attack on American soil within the next six months,” as The New York Times reported.

“We judge that al Qaeda maintains its intent to attack the homeland, preferably with a large-scale operation that would cause mass casualties, harm the U.S. economy or both,” Blair wrote in his annual threat assessment to the Senate Intelligence Committee.

As investigative journalist Russ Baker wrote in his essential book, Family of Secrets, “Authoritarianism thrives in a climate of fear, and the [Bush] administration invoked fear continually. But when it came to security, there was the usual exemption for large corporate entities [and] the tattoo of terror was relentless, especially during the political high season.”

Not much has changed since Barack Obama became president. Many of the same dodgy players who ramped-up production lines at the fear factory for the Bush/Cheney team are still in place, doing what they do best: hitting the corporate “sweet spot” for their clients in the Military-Industrial-Security-Complex.

In the weeks since the attempted destruction of Flight 253, one thing is certain: the White House, Congress, the intelligence agencies and their handmaidens, the corporate media, are participating in a massive cover-up.

And as we enter the “political high season,” what might come next is anyone’s guess.

At her scheduled May 6 sentencing, she “faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison on each of the attempted murder and armed assault charges; life in prison on the firearms charge; and eight years in prison on each of the remaining assault charges. SIDDIQUI faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 30 years in prison on the firearms charge.”

On February 3, New York Times writer CJ Hughes was headlined “Pakistani Scientist Found Guilty of Shootings,” convicting her on all seven counts, including attempted murder — “capping a trial that drew notice for its terrorist implications as well as its theatrics,” but omitting convincing evidence of Siddiqui’s innocence. Instead, Hughes said she was arrested with “instructions (in her purse) on making explosives and a list of New York landmarks, including the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge and the Empire State Building.” Her defense team acknowledged their existence, but Siddiqui denied packing them or knowing of their origin. She later suggested she copied them from a magazine, planned no terrorist acts, nor did her indictment claim them.

Hughes also said she “raised suspicions when she and her three children vanished in Pakistan in 2003.” She didn’t vanish. Her mother said she “left the family home in Gulshan-e-lqbal in a taxi on March 30, 2003 to catch a flight for Rawalpindi, but never reached the airport.” Pakistani intelligence agents abducted her, turned her over to US authorities, after which her long ordeal of secret imprisonment, interrogations, and years of brutalizing torture began, even though she wasn’t charged.

Her son Mohammed was later released on condition he say nothing. Her other two children, Maryam and Suleman, disappeared and may have been killed.

In May 2004, Pakistan’s Interior Minister confirmed she was turned over to US authorities in 2003 after no link between her and Al Qaeda was established. In 2006, Amnesty International called her one of many of the “disappeared” in America’s “war on terror.” In 2007, a Ghost Prisoner Human Rights Watch report suggested she was held in secret CIA detention.

In February 2008, the Asian Human Rights Commission said she was brought to Karachi and severely tortured to secure her compliance as a government witness against Khalid Shiekh Mohammed, the alleged 9/11 mastermind, related to Siddiqui through marriage to his nephew. He reportedly “gave her up” after capture on March 1, 2003, after which she and her children disappeared.

The charges were bogus and outrageous. Yet, on September 2, 2008, the Justice Department (DOJ) indicted her “on charges related to her attempted murder and assault of United States nationals and officers and employees.” According to Michael Garcia, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York (in his same day press release):

On July 18, 2008, “a team of United States servicemen and law enforcement officers, and others assisting them, attempted to interview Aafia Siddiqui in Ghazni, Aghanistan, where she had been detained by local police the day before… unbeknownst to the United States interview team, unsecured, behind a curtain — Siddiqui obtained one of the United States Army’s M-4 rifles and attempted to fire it, and did fire it, at another United States Army officer and other members of the United States interview team… Siddiqui then assaualted one of the United States Army interpreters, as he attempted to obtain the M-4 rifle from her. Siddiqui subsequently assaulted one of the FBI agents and one of the United States Army officers, as they attempted to subdue her.”

Left unexplained was how this frail, weak, 110-pound woman, confronted by three US Army officers, two FBI agents, and two Army interpreters, inexplicably managed to assault three of them, get one of their rifles, open fire at close range, hit no one, and only she was severely wounded.

According to her attorney, Elaine Whitfield Sharp: “How did this happen? And how did she get shot? I think you can answer that, can’t you (and question the outrageous charges against her)?”

During proceedings, another defense lawyer, Linda Moreno, said no forensic evidence proved the rifle Siddiqui allegedly used had been fired since no bullets, shell casings, or bullet debris were recovered and no bullet holes detected.

Garcia didn’t explain, nor about her abduction, torture and repeated raping at Bagram prison, Afghanistan where, as Prisoner 650, she was called the “Gray Lady of Bagram” because her screams were heard for years. Nor did he discuss her physical and emotional destruction. She was a pawn in America’s “war on terror,” used, abused, now convicted, and facing life in prison when sentenced, a victim of gross injustice.

Some Background

A Pakistani national, Siddiqui is deeply religious, attended MIT and Brandeis University where she earned a doctorate in neurocognitive science, married a Boston physician, raised money for charities, did volunteer work, distributed Korans to inmates in area prisons, and did nothing out of the ordinary. Yet the UK Times Online called her “Al-Qaeda woman.” For ABC News, she was “Mata Hari,” and the Justice Department targeted her as a terrorist, a woman guilty only of being Muslim in America at the wrong time.

When seized, the FBI said she was a potential “treasure trove” of information on terrorist suspects, sympathizers, or sleepers in America and overseas. CIA officer John Kiriakou called her “the most significant capture in five years,” and an unnamed counterterrorism official said she’s “a very dangerous person, no doubt about it.” FBI Director Robert Mueller said she’s “an Al Qaeda operative and facilitator.” He and the others lied.

Those who knew her recalled she was very small, quiet, polite, and shy, barely noticeable in a gathering. However, she’d say what was needed when necessary. Her fellow students described her as soft-spoken, studious, religious, but not extremist or fundamentalist. She taught Muslim children on Sundays, and was dedicated to helping oppressed Muslims worldwide. She spoke publicly, sent emails, gave slideshow presentations, and raised donations as part of her faith, activism, and sincerity. Yet she was targeted as “a high security risk” despite no evidence then or now to prove it.

Siddiqui is innocent of all charges, yet the DOJ claimed she was involved in biochemical warfare. In fact, she devised a computer program, enlisted adult volunteers to watch various objects move randomly across the screen, then reproduce what they recalled. The idea was to learn how well they retained information after viewing it on a computer. It had nothing to do with terrorism, biochemical warfare, or blowing up New York targets, charges never appearing in her indictment.

Siddiqui’s Trial and Conviction

Against her lawyers’ advice, she spoke publicly for the first time, despite the risk and her frail condition. She explained her academic work, her post-doctorate teaching, her interests that included studying the capabilities of dyslexic and other impaired children, then recounted her ordeal.

After being abducted, she agonized over the fate of her children. In US custody, the relevant incident leading to her indictment went as follows:

– at one point, she was tied down;
– then untied;
– left behind a curtain;
– peaked through it; and
– an American soldier shot her in the stomach;
– another in her side;
– then violently threw her to the floor unconscious.

She vaguely remembered being on a stretcher, placed in a helicopter, and getting a blood transfusion. She emphatically denied seizing and firing a weapon.

Under cross-examination, she said she was given the bag with incriminating documents, didn’t know its contents or whether handwriting on them was hers. She explained her repeated torture at Bagram, the effects of the strong medications given her, and at one point said, “If you were in a secret prison, or your children were tortured,” after which she was forcibly removed from court and the proceedings continued without her.

According to media reports, these revelations were “outbursts.” On January 25, New York Times writer CJ Hughes reported numerous “disruptions… plagu(ing) the trial. Monday (January 25) was hardly an exception. The defendant was ejected from (court) — not once, but twice (for) loudly proclaiming her innocence.” On January 19, she “had several outbursts in previous court appearances, raising questions about her competency to stand trial.”

On February 4, AP writer Tom Hays said “True to form, Aafia Siddiqui did not go quietly,” called her comments “combative,” then claimed the prosecution presented “compelling testimony.”

On February 5, the Islamophobic frontpagemag.com headlined “How a ‘Nice American Girl’ Became a Jihadist,” saying “veiled Muslim women can be very aggressive, murderously so.”

On February 3, the New York Daily News headlined, “Lady Al Qaeda Aafia Siddiqui convicted of attempted murder.” Writer Alison Gendar accepted DOJ’s charges as fact and added some of her own, saying:

“She grabbed a rifle at an ‘Afghan police station’ (she was at Bagram) and started shooting at the Americans sent to grill her. She was shot by the soldier whose weapon she swiped. (In 2008, she was) caught in ‘Afghanistan’ with ‘2 pounds of poisonous chemicals.’ (During the trial), she disrupted the proceedings several times with ’strange outbursts.’ ”

An August 22, 2008 Fox News report said “emails obtained by FOXNews.com show messages sent by Siddiqui (during her time at MIT) soliciting money for Al-Kifah Refugee Center — a known Al Queda charitable front tied to Usama bin Laden and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.”

After a three week trial and two days of deliberation, a federal jury of eight women and four men convicted her on all charges, including attempted murder, armed assault, discharging a firearm during a violent crime, and assaulting US officers and employees. As a result, she potentially faces life in prison at her May 6 sentencing. It’s not confirmed, but her lawyers may appeal given the bogus charges, long detention, and brutalizing torture, leaving her a shell of her former self, so physically and emotionally shattered she was in no condition to stand trial.

After the verdict, aljazeera.net headlined “US verdict sparks Pakistan protests,” saying thousands in several cities rallied in her defense. Her relatives spoke publicly condemning the decision, her sister Fauzia saying “we’re proud to be related to her. America’s justice system, the establishment, the war on terror, the fraud of the war on terror, all of those things have shown their own ugly faces.”

Her mother, Ismat, said, “I did not expect anything better from an American court. We were ready for the shock and will continue our struggle to get her released.” Pakistan’s foreign ministry spokesman, Abdul Basit, said the government would try “to get her back to Pakistan and we would do everything possible and we’ll apply all possible tools in this regard.”

Al Jazeera’s Islamabad correspondent, Kamal Hyder, explained the public disappointment “for failing to find a diplomatic way out and getting (her) back home, because they feel she was innocent.” She was missing for five years like “many hundreds of (others who’ve) disappeared from Pakistan — still not accounted for — and now that Dr. Aafia’s case has come up, that’s likely to be a rallying point for the anti-American sentiment.”

The UK-based Cageprisoners spokesman, Asim Qureshi, said, “The case of Aafia Siddiqui carries great significance in terms of the ability of the Obama administration to administer justice. Already we have seen a blanket refusal to look at the facts of her detention prior to 2008. This verdict will only confirm what many already believe, that it is impossible for Muslim terrorism suspects to receive a fair trial in the US.”

Defense lawyer Elaine Whitfield Sharp called the verdict unjust, in her opinion “based on fear… not fact,” and the result is the continued ordeal of an innocent woman facing a potential life sentence.

Carefully orchestrated, the trial proceeded like numerous others, targeting innocent victims because of their faith, ethnicity, prominence, benevolent charity, activism, or other reasons for political advantage, ending with convictions and punitive incarcerations against innocent defendants, guilty of being Muslims in America at the wrong time when we’re all just as vulnerable.

In a manipulated climate of fear, the same process repeats, using bogus charges, secret evidence, enlisted witnesses to cooperate, the defense prohibited from introducing exculpatory evidence, and proceedings carefully scripted to intimidate juries to convict.

Justice is again denied, Siddiqui another victim, a human tragedy, portrayed by the dominant media as a jihadist, and getting public sentiment to agree because disturbing truths are carefully suppressed.

In fact the Chilcot inquiry is in itself a pretty disturbing concept. As George Monbiot pointed out a few days ago in the Guardian CIF, in the world of British ‘official inquiries’, it is the government that appoints its members and sets its terms of reference. “It’s the equivalent of a criminal suspect being allowed to choose what the charges should be, who should judge his case and who should sit on the jury”. As if this is not enough, none of the inquiry members is an attorney. None of its members is qualified in the art of questioning. Consequently, the inquiry doesn’t have any legal ability, capacity or teeth. It is a farce. It is there to release some public steam. It is there to convey a false image of openness. I believe that the most pathetic statement was pronounced last week by Tony Blair, “People didn’t think that al-Qaeda and Iran would play the role that they did”, announced the unchallenged genocidal man in front of inquiry. Basically we are now blaming the so-called ‘enemy’ for not performing according to ‘our plans’. I guess that even an illiterate burglar would refrain from using such an argument in the court. Blair obviously got away with it.

But there is one positive side to it all, as sad as this Chilcot Inquiry seems to be, its team members are also revelatory. The panel is there to suggest who the government is inclined to appoint when it needs a whitewash.

On 22 November 2009, as the Chilcot inquiry was preparing to convene, former British ambassador Sir Oliver Miles expressed concerns over the fact that two out of the five members of the inquiry’s committee (40%), Martin Gilbert and Lawrence Freedman, were “strong supporters of Tony Blair and/or the Iraq war”. He also mentioned that both Gilbert and Freedman were Jewish, and that Gilbert is a devout Zionist”. Richard Ingrams wondered a week later in The Independent whether the Zionist links to the Iraq invasion would be brushed aside.

At the time Britain was taken to the Iraq war, the chief fund-raiser of its leading party was the devout Zionist Lord Levy who managed to collate a list of wealthy Zionists around him. The Inquiry should investigate closely the case of the Zionist Parliamentary lobby group namely the Labour Friends of Israel.

In the days leading up to the war, it was mentioned in the Guardian that the forged information about Iraqi WMD originated in an Israeli intelligence agency. It was later revealed that any references to Israel in Britain’s Iraq Weapons Dossier were hushed up. It is crucial that the Inquiry establishes whether this was indeed the case. If it was, it supports the contention that Britain was led into a war by serving a foreign country with foreign interests.

But as it seems, the unique amalgam of the inquiry panel, the lack of an attorney and the presence of two pro Blair, pro war enthusiasts, one of them a Zionist by admission, is there to stop the Inquiry from hitting the truth.

On 28 January 2010, BBC Radio 4’s Today program reported that Sir Martin Gilbert, had expressed “deep unease” at articles by Sir Oliver Miles and Richard Ingrams. Sir Gilbert gave an interview to the ‘Israeli Nationalist Radio’ a radio station run by Jewish settlers operating from an illegal settlement in the Occupied Territories.

In the interview with the settlers, Sir Gilbert offered false information about some obvious historical facts. He said for instance that ‘as far as he could see’, in 2003 Israel “regarded Iran (rather than Iraq) as its biggest threat”.

Every person who comments on the Iraq war is fully aware that Iran has become a leading regional super-power due to the military collapse of Iraq. It was the defeat of the Iraqi army and regime (2003) that promoted Iran to the premier enemy of the Jewish state. Two possible interpretations may be available to explain Sir Gilbert’s comment. He is either intellectually lame or disingenuous. Alternatively, one may argue that Sir Gilbert is far from being stupid or a liar, he is just another Zionist spin master. As we all know, the Labour party operates as a magnet for characters with spin-doctor qualities. Whether Gilbert is a spin doctor, a hypocrite, or a dimwit is not for me to decide. One thing is clear beyond doubt, the man must be removed from the Chilcot Inquiry immediately. We cannot allow a person who may be a charlatan or a spin doctor, who certainly communicates with settler radio stations, to judge on our behalf what the true events were that led to the Iraq war, which he himself supported. Furthermore, we should also make sure that Sir Gilbert is removed from the national curriculum. I won’t allow my children to study WWII or Churchill from a textbook written by a Zionist war enthusiast who may also be either disingenuous or dull. If I ever see my kids looking into Gilbert’s texts, I will insist that they read it in a critical manner, so they know what the difference is between what Zionists want to tell us about our past, and what the past is.

But Sir Gilbert is just one symptom of a far deeper and concerning phenomenon. In recent years, Israel and its lobbies have managed to gain extensive control over British political life. Just a few months back UK Channel 4’s Dispatches revealed that a “pro-Israel lobby group is bankrolling the Tories. 50% of MPs in the shadow cabinet are Conservative Friends of Israel members”. One may wonder whether we still need an election in this country. At the end of the day, the vast majority of British political elite is practically bought by the Israeli lobby.

As we all know, for Zionist power to prevail a Sabbath Goy¹ is needed. A Goy that would support the Neocon wars, a Goy that would Vote “very strongly for the Iraq war“, a Goy that would vote “very strongly against an investigation into the Iraq war”, a Goy that would fight anti Semitism, a Goy that would be corrupted enough to spin and lie for the Zionist cause. Naturally such a person would be a shady character. He would also fail to resign once exposed.

In a Youtube video you can watch Labour Friend of Israel MP Denis Macshane rushing to save Sir Gilbert.

As expected, Macshane repeats Gilbert’s embarrassing trick; he either pretends to be stupid or spins the Zionist mantra. “Religion,” he quotes Thomas Jefferson, “should play no part in appointment to pubic office”. Macshane who wrote a book about anti-Semitism, must know that it is not Gilbert’s faith or even ethnicity that concerns a growing number of Brits. It is the Jewish national ideology, i.e. Zionism, that alarms Sir Oliver Miles and the rest of us. It is this ideology that Sir Gilbert, a Zionist by admission, succumbs to and that should be enough to stop him from partaking in a British official inquiry into a Zionist war. In legal terms this is commonly referred to as a conflict of interests.

The clumsiness of Gordon Brown’s cabinet appointing such a farce of an official inquiry is mind blowing. It may also reveal the fact that the British political system is failing all the way through. It wasn’t just Blair and his acolytes. It continued with Brown and won’t stop with the coming Tory Government that as mentioned above, is largely bought by the same lobby.

Thinking about Karl Popper’s The Open Society And Its Enemies we are probably entitled to conclude that we are very far from being an ‘open society’. However at least we know who our enemies are. We may admit that the reason Israel and its supporters enjoyed a carte blanche for a few decades in academia and politics, probably had a lot to do with Western guilt. However, as Israeli crimes are exposed and Neocon intervention is realized, the patience towards Israel, its Zionist lobbies, and its Sabbath Goys is running out. Britain, you better wake up before it is too late.

1. Sabbath Goy — Originally, a non-Jew who does work on Sabbath that a Jew cannot do. In modern times, it is a non-Jew who toadies to the every wish and whim of the Jews, especially in politics, or a non-Jew who is heavily supportive of Israel.

Each day brings more revelations of efforts of the NY Fed and Goldman Sachs to hide the details of the criminal conspiracy of the AIG bailout. … This is a real crisis on the scale of Watergate. Corruption at its finest.

But unlike the perpetrators of the Watergate scandal, who wound up looking at jail time, Geithner evidently has a golden parachute waiting at Goldman Sachs, not coincidentally the largest recipient of the AIG bailout. At least that is the rumor sparked by an article by Caroline Baum on Bloomberg News, titled “Goldman Parachute Awaits Geithner to Ease Fall.” Hank Paulson, Geithner’s predecessor, was CEO of Goldman Sachs before coming to the Treasury. Geithner, who has come up through the ranks of government, could be walking through the revolving door in the other direction.

Geithner has been under the House microscope for the decision of the New York Fed, made while he headed it, to buy out about $30 billion in credit default swaps (over-the-counter derivative insurance contracts) that AIG sold on toxic debt securities. The chief recipients of this payout were Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Societe Generale and Deutsche Bank. Goldman got $13 billion, roughly equivalent to its bonus pool for the first 9 months of 2009. Critics are calling the New York Fed’s decision a back-door bailout for the banks, which received 100 cents on the dollar for contracts that would have been worth far less had AIG been put through bankruptcy proceedings in the ordinary way. In a Bloomberg article provocatively titled “Secret Banking Cabal Emerges from AIG Shadows,” David Reilly wrote:

[T]he New York Fed is a quasi-governmental institution that isn’t subject to citizen intrusions such as freedom of information requests, unlike the Federal Reserve. This impenetrability comes in handy since the bank is the preferred vehicle for many of the Fed’s bailout programs. It’s as though the New York Fed was a black-ops outfit for the nation’s central bank.

The beneficiaries of the New York Fed’s largesse got paid in full although they had agreed to take much less. In a November 2009 article titled “It’s Time to Fire Tim Geithner,” Dylan Ratigan wrote:

[L]ast November … New York Federal Reserve Governor Tim Geithner decided to deliver 100 cents on the dollar, in secret no less, to pay off the counter parties to the world’s largest (and still un-investigated) insurance fraud — AIG. This full payoff with taxpayer dollars was carried out by Geithner after AIG’s bank customers, such as Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and Societe Generale, had already previously agreed to taking as little as 40 cents on the dollar. Even after the GM autoworkers, bondholders and vendors all received a government-enforced haircut on their contracts, he still had the audacity to claim the “sanctity of contracts” in the dealings with these companies like AIG.

Geithner testified that the Fed’s hands were tied and that the bank could not “selectively default on contractual obligations without courting collapse.” But if it was all on the up and up, why all the secrecy? The contention that the Fed had no choice is also belied by a recent holding in the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, in which New York Bankruptcy Judge James Peck set aside the same type of investment contracts that Secretaries Paulson and Geithner repeatedly swore under oath had to be paid in full in the case of AIG. The judge declared that clauses in those contracts subordinating other claims to the holders’ claims were null and void in bankruptcy.

“And notice,” comments bank analyst Chris Whalen, “that the world has not ended when the holders of [derivative] contracts are treated like everyone else.” He calls the AIG bailout “a hideous political contrivance that ranks with the great acts of political corruption and thievery in the history of the United States.”

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, said Joseph Goebbels, people will eventually come to believe it. The bailout of Wall Street initiated in September 2008 was premised on the dire prediction that if major counterparties in the massive edifice of derivative contracts were allowed to fall, the whole interlocking house of cards would collapse and take the economy with it. A hijacked Congress dutifully protected the derivatives game with taxpayer money while the real economy proceeded to collapse, the financial sector choosing to put their money into this protected form of speculative betting rather than into the more mundane and risky business of making loans to struggling businesses and homeowners. In the end, $170 billion of federal funds went to AIG and the banks feeding at its trough. Meanwhile, a survey of state finances by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities think tank found that state governments face a collective $168 billion budget shortfall for fiscal 2010. If the money used to bail out AIG and the banks had been used to bail out the states instead, the states would not be facing insolvency today.

There is no law against gambling, but there is a law against fraud. In Watergate, a special prosecutor was appointed to bring criminal charges; but times seem to have changed.

In America you can say anything you want — as long as it doesn’t have any effect.

– Paul Goodman

Progressive activists and writers continually bemoan the fact that the news they generate and the opinions they express are consistently ignored by the mainstream media, and thus kept from the masses of the American people. This disregard of progressive thought is tantamount to a definition of the mainstream media. It doesn’t have to be a conspiracy; it’s a matter of who owns the mainstream media and the type of journalists they hire — men and women who would like to keep their jobs; so it’s more insidious than a conspiracy, it’s what’s built into the system, it’s how the system works. The disregard of the progressive world is of course not total; at times some of that world makes too good copy to ignore, and, on rare occasions, progressive ideas, when they threaten to become very popular, have to be countered.

So it was with Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Here’s Barry Gewen an editor at the New York Times Book Review, June 5, 2005 writing of Zinn’s book and others like it:

There was a unifying vision, but it was simplistic. Since the victims and losers were good, it followed that the winners were bad. From the point of view of downtrodden blacks, America was racist; from the point of view of oppressed workers, it was exploitative; from the point of view of conquered Hispanics and Indians, it was imperialistic. There was much to condemn in American history, little or nothing to praise. … Whereas the Europeans who arrived in the New World were genocidal predators, the Indians who were already there believed in sharing and hospitality (never mind the profound cultural differences that existed among them), and raped Africa was a continent overflowing with kindness and communalism (never mind the profound cultural differences that existed there).

One has to wonder whether Mr. Gewen thought that all the victims of the Holocaust were saintly and without profound cultural differences.

Prominent American historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. once said of Zinn: “I know he regards me as a dangerous reactionary. And I don’t take him very seriously. He’s a polemicist, not a historian.”

In the obituaries that followed Zinn’s death, this particular defamation was picked up around the world, from the New York Times, Washington Post, and the leading American wire services to the New Zealand Herald and Korea Times.

Regarding reactionaries and polemicists, it is worth noting that Mr. Schlesinger, as a top advisor to President John F. Kennedy, played a key role in the overthrow of Cheddi Jagan, the democratically-elected progressive prime minister of British Guiana (now Guyana). In 1990, at a conference in New York City, Schlesinger publicly apologized to Jagan, saying: “I felt badly about my role thirty years ago. I think a great injustice was done to Cheddi Jagan.”¹ This is to Schlesinger’s credit, although the fact that Jagan was present at the conference may have awakened his conscience after 30 years. Like virtually all the American historians of the period who were granted attention and respect by the mainstream media, Schlesinger was a cold warrior. Those like Zinn who questioned the basic suppositions of the Cold War abroad, and capitalism at home, were regarded as polemicists.

One of my favorite Howard Zinn quotes: “The chief problem in historical honesty is not outright lying. It is omission or de-emphasis of important data. The definition of ‘important’, of course, depends on one’s values.”² A People’s History and his other writings can be seen as an attempt to make up for the omissions and under-emphases of America’s dark side in American history books and media.

Haiti, Aristide, and ideology

It’s a good thing the Haitian government did virtually nothing to help its people following the earthquake; otherwise it would have been condemned as “socialist” by Fox News, Sarah Palin, the teabaggers, and other right-thinking Americans. The last/only Haitian leader strongly committed to putting the welfare of the Haitian people before that of the domestic and international financial mafia was President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Being of a socialist persuasion, Aristide was, naturally, kept from power by the United States — twice; first by Bill Clinton, then by George W. Bush, the two men appointed by President Obama to head the earthquake relief effort. Naturally.

Aristide, a reformist priest, was elected to the presidency, then ousted in a military coup eight months later in 1991 by men on the CIA payroll. Ironically, the ousted president wound up in exile in the United States. In 1994 the Clinton White House found itself in the awkward position of having to pretend — because of all their rhetoric about “democracy” — that they supported the democratically elected Aristide’s return to power. After delaying his return for more than two years, Washington finally had its military restore Aristide to office, but only after obliging the priest to guarantee that after his term ended he would not remain in office to make up the time lost because of the coup; that he would not seek to help the poor at the expense of the rich, literally; and that he would stick closely to free-market economics. This meant that Haiti would continue to be the assembly plant of the Western Hemisphere, with its workers receiving starvation wages, literally. If Aristide had thoughts about breaking the agreement forced upon him, he had only to look out his window — US troops were stationed in Haiti for the remainder of his term.³

On February 28, 2004, during the Bush administration, American military and diplomatic personnel arrived at the home of Aristide, who had been elected to the presidency once again in 2002, to inform him that his private American security agents must either leave immediately to return to the United States or fight and die; that the remaining 25 of the American security agents hired by the Haitian government, who were to arrive the next day, had been blocked by the United States from coming; that foreign and Haitian rebels were nearby, heavily armed, determined and ready to kill thousands of people in a bloodbath. Aristide was then pressured into signing a “letter of resignation” before being kidnaped and flown to exile in Africa by the United States.⁴ The leaders and politicians of the world who pontificate endlessly about “democracy” and “self-determination” had virtually nothing to say about this breathtaking act of international thuggery. Indeed, France and Canada were active allies of the United States in pressing Aristide to leave.⁵

And then US Secretary of State Colin Powell, in the sincerest voice he could muster, told the world that Aristide “was not kidnapped. We did not force him onto the airplane. He went onto the airplane willingly. And that’s the truth.”⁶ Powell sounded as sincere as he had sounded a year earlier when he gave the UN his now-famous detailed inventory of the chemical, biological and nuclear weapons that Saddam Hussein was preparing to use.

Howard Zinn is quoted above saying “The chief problem in historical honesty is not outright lying. It is omission or de-emphasis of important data.” However, that doesn’t mean the American mainstream media don’t create or perpetuate myths. Here’s the New York Times two months ago: “Mr. Aristide, who was overthrown during a 2004 rebellion …”⁷ Now what image does the word “rebellion” conjure up in your mind? The Haitian people rising up to throw off the shackles put on them by a dictatorship? Or something staged by the United States?

Aristide has stated that he was able to determine at that crucial moment that the “rebels” were white and foreign.⁸ But even if they had been natives, why did Colin Powell not explain why the United States disbanded Aristide’s personal security forces? Why did he not explain why the United States was not protecting Aristide from the rebels, which the US could have done with the greatest of ease, without so much as firing a single shot? Nor did he explain why Aristide would “willingly” give up his presidency.

The massive US military deployment to Haiti in the wake of the earthquake has been criticized in various quarters as more of an occupation than a relief mission, with the airport in the capital city now an American military base, and with American forces blocking various aid missions from entering the country in order, apparently, to serve Washington’s own logistical agenda. But the large military presence can also serve to facilitate two items on Washington’s political agenda — preventing Haitians from trying to emigrate by sea to the United States and keeping a lid on the numerous supporters of Aristide lest they threaten to take power once again.

That which can not be spoken

“The purpose of terrorism is to provoke an overreaction,” writes Fareed Zakaria, a leading American foreign-policy pundit, editor of Newsweek magazine’s international edition, and Washington Post columnist, referring to the “underwear bomber”, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, and his failed attempt to blow up a US airliner on Christmas day. “Its real aim is not to kill the hundreds of people directly targeted but to sow fear in the rest of the population. Terrorism is an unusual military tactic in that it depends on the response of the onlookers. If we are not terrorized, then the attack didn’t work. Alas, this one worked very well.”⁹

Is that not odd? That an individual would try to take the lives of hundreds of people, including his own, primarily to “provoke an overreaction”, or to “sow fear”? Was there not any kind of deep-seated grievance or resentment with anything or anyone American being expressed? No perceived wrong he wished to make right? Nothing he sought to obtain revenge for? Why is the United States the most common target of terrorists? Such questions were not even hinted at in Zakaria’s article.

At a White House press briefing concerning the same failed terrorist attack, conducted by Assistant to the President for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security John Brennan, veteran reporter Helen Thomas raised a question:

Thomas: What is really lacking always for us is you don’t give the motivation of why they want to do us harm. … What is the motivation? We never hear what you find out on why.

Brennan: Al Qaeda is an organization that is dedicated to murder and wanton slaughter of innocents. … [They] attract individuals like Mr. Abdulmutallab and use them for these types of attacks. He was motivated by a sense of religious sort of drive. Unfortunately, al Qaeda has perverted Islam, and has corrupted the concept of Islam, so that [they're] able to attract these individuals. But al Qaeda has the agenda of destruction and death.

Thomas: And you’re saying it’s because of religion?

Brennan: I’m saying it’s because of an al Qaeda organization that uses the banner of religion in a very perverse and corrupt way.

Thomas: Why?

Brennan: I think … this is a long issue, but al Qaeda is just determined to carry out attacks here against the homeland.

Thomas: But you haven’t explained why.¹⁰

American officials rarely even make the attempt to explain why. And American journalists rarely press them to explain why; certainly not like Helen Thomas does.

And just what is it that has such difficulty crossing the lips of these officials? It is the idea that anti-American terrorists become anti-American terrorists to retaliate for what the United States has done to countries or people close to them or what Israel has done to them with unequivocal American support.

Osama bin Laden, in an audiotape, also commented about Abdulmutallab: “The message we wanted you to receive through him is that America shall not dream about security until we witness it in Palestine.”¹¹

We have as well the recent case of Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a Jordanian doctor-turned-suicide bomber, who killed seven CIA employees at a base in Afghanistan December 30. His widow later declared: “I am proud of him. … My husband did this against the U.S. invasion.” Balawi himself had written on the Internet: “I have never wished to be in Gaza, but now I wish to be a … car bomb that takes the lives of the biggest number of Jews to hell.”¹²

It should be noted that the CIA base attacked by Balawi was heavily involved in the selection of targets for the Agency’s remote-controlled aircraft along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, a program that killed more than 300 people in the previous year.¹³

There are numerous examples of terrorists citing American policies as the prime motivation behind their acts,¹⁴ so many that American officials, when discussing the newest terrorist attack, have to tread carefully to avoid mentioning the role of US foreign policy; and journalists typically fail to bring this point home to their reader’s consciousness.

It works the same all over the world. In the period of the 1950s to the 1980s in Latin America, in response to a long string of hateful Washington policies, there were countless acts of terrorism against US diplomatic and military targets as well as the offices of US corporations.

The US bombing, invasion, occupation and torture in Iraq and Afghanistan, the bombing of Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, and the continuing Israeli-US genocide against the Palestinians have created an army of new anti-American terrorists. We’ll be hearing from them for a terribly long time. And we’ll be hearing American officials twist themselves into intellectual and moral knots as they try to avoid confronting these facts.

In his “State of the Union” address on January 27, President Obama said: “But if anyone from either party has a better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors, and stop insurance company abuses, let me know.” Well, ending America’s many wars would free up enough money to do anything a rational, humane society would want to do. Eliminating the military budget would pay for free medical care for everyone. Free university education for everyone. Creating a government public works project that could provide millions of decently-paid jobs, like repairing the decrepit infrastructure and healing the environment to the best of our ability. You can add your own favorite projects. All covered, just by ending the damn wars. Imagine that.

1. The Nation, June 4, 1990, p.763-4.
2. Failure to Quit: Reflections of an Optimistic Historian (1993), p.30.
3. “Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?” killinghope.org.
4. Statement of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, March 5, 2004, from exile in the Central African Republic, Pacific News Service (San Francisco); David Swanson, “What Bush Did to Haiti”, January 18, 2010; William Blum, Rogue State, p.219-20).
5. Miami Herald, March 1, 2004.
6. CNN, March 1, 2004.
7. New York Times, November 27, 2009.
8. Aristide statement, op. cit.
9. Newsweek, January 18, 2010, online January 9.
10. White House press briefing, January 7, 2010.
11. ABC News, January 25, 2010.
12. Associated Press, January 7, 2010.
13. Washington Post, January 1, 2010.
14. Rogue State, chapter 1, “Why do terrorists keep picking on the United States?”; this chapter ends in 2005; some later examples can be provided by the author.

As long as in this territory west of the Jordan river there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic. If this bloc of millions of ­Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.¹

Israeli media Haaretz responded:

His [Barack's] stark language and the South African analogy might have been unthinkable for a senior Israeli figure only a few years ago and is a rare admission of the gravity of the deadlocked peace process.¹

Barak did not, however, relinquish Israel’s claim to the rest of the Occupied Territories of Palestine, he just mused on what was to be done about the non-Jewish people.

The question not asked was: What about Jimmy Carter? Or Desmond Tutu? How can an Israeli defense minister talk about an apartheid state and anyone else not?

Former US president Jimmy Carter was raked over Zionist coals for using the term apartheid, which appeared in the title of his book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid.

Carter wrote of an apartheid worse than in South Africa:

When Israel does occupy this territory deep within the West Bank, and connects the 200-or-so settlements with each other, with a road, and then prohibits the Palestinians from using that road, or in many cases even crossing the road, this perpetrates even worse instances of apartness, or apartheid, than we witnessed even in South Africa.²

Of course, Carter was smeared as an anti-Semite. In the end, following the Lobby’s mobbing of Carter, he apologized to American Jews for “stigmatizing Israel.”³

Before Carter, South African archbishop Desmond Tutu, who lived under apartheid, spoke of apartheid practices in Israel against the Palestinians. He, too, was accused of anti-Semitism.

Tutu was unapologetic.

People are scared in this country, to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful — very powerful. Well, so what?

The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists.

Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust.⁴

Added Tutu:

Have our Jewish sisters and brothers forgotten their humiliation? Have they forgotten the collective punishment, the home demolitions, in their own history so soon?⁴

Will Barak be chastened, accused of “self-hatred,” and forced to apologize for his “stigmatization” of Israeli Jews? This is not so important.

More important is that the stigmatization of people who oppose the oppression of Palestinians must cease, and above all, the apartheid⁵ and oppression of Palestinians must cease.

1. Rory McCarthy, “Barak: make peace with Palestinians or face apartheid,” Guardian, 3 February 2010.
2. Excerpt cited by Haaretz Service, “Jimmy Carter: Israel’s ‘apartheid’ policies worse than South Africa’s,” Haaretz, 11 December 2006.
3. Haaretz Service, “Jimmy Carter to U.S. Jews: Forgive me for stigmatizing Israel,” Haaretz, 22 December 2009.
4. “Tutu condemns Israeli ‘apartheid’,” BBC News, 29 April 2002.
5. Read Gary Zatzman, “The Notion of the ‘Jewish State’ as an ‘Apartheid Regime’ is a Liberal-Zionist One,” Dissident Voice, 21 November 2005.

Its latest December 2009 one is examined below, discussing “a disturbing (government-sponsored) trend that has (gained) currency in Israel over the past year — both in public discourse and sometimes in practice — to make human rights conditional: on fulfilling some obligation, having financial means, or belonging (or not belonging) to certain groups.”

For example, free expression is targeted, and Israeli Arabs threatened, denied equality, education, employment, and their citizenship without “declaring loyalty” to Israel — in other words, on condition they abandon their national identity, culture, language, and historic heritage that’s the equivalent of asking Jews to renounce Judaism.

Financial means involves regarding social rights, including healthcare and education, as commodities, accessible to those who can pay. And for Occupied Palestinians, Gaza was devastated by war, remains under siege, and sustains near daily assaults, killings, and targeted assassinations.

In the West Bank, security forces enforce land seizures, home demolitions, displacement, segregation, isolation, closures, movement and travel restrictions, the Separation Wall’s construction, daily home invasions, arrests, attacks on peaceful protestors, imprisonments, and torture of detainees under a rigid “matrix of control” involving checkpoints, bypass roads, roadblocks, curfews, electric fences, and various other harassments to cow all Palestinians into submission or make them give up and leave.

Since 1948, Israel denied its Arab citizens fundamental human and civil rights and increasingly fewer of them to many Jews. In the Territories, it’s far worse under military occupation and Israeli laws affording no protections to Palestinians. Nor has the Supreme Court upheld the law that should be sacrosanct in a legitimate democracy. When it’s compromised, no one is immune from abuse and neglect as greater numbers in Israel are learning, including Jews.

Threatening Free Expression

Losing it threatens all other freedoms. It’s a basic legal right even Israel’s Supreme Court recognizes, but not absolutely having repeatedly ruled that curtailing it is justified in extreme public danger situations or if national security may be undermined.

However, the “true test of freedom of expression lies in allowing the airing of views that are extreme, controversial, or infuriating.” It’s the state’s obligation to protect them, especially in times of crisis, including war. But during Operation Cast Lead, Israel failed the test.

Protest demonstrations were attacked, dispersed, and silenced. Participants were arrested, then intimidated by dubious charges. Against Israeli Arabs, excessive force and preemptive detentions were used, then bogus indictments made based on charges of “participating in unlawful gatherings.”

Legally, authorities overstepped so egregiously that harsher measures may follow, and against Palestinians they’re commonplace, including targeted killings and torture.

Israel also restricted the foreign media, prohibiting on the scene access to report accurately on the conflict. For their part, the Israeli media largely supported the government. Overall, war coverage restrictions caused Israel’s journalistic freedom rating to drop sharply as measured by international human rights organizations. Dissent was minimally tolerated, and repressing it continued post-war. “Not only were critics silenced, they were accused and vilified, and their critiques unaddressed.”

During 2009, anti-democratic Knesset bills also limited free expression, including the Nakba Law threatening individuals with imprisonment for mourning on Israel’s Independence Day. Organizations risked loss of their public funding for doing it.

The Incitement Law threatens prison for anyone denying Israel’s existence as a Jewish, democratic state, and the proposed Loyalty to Israel Law rescinds Israeli citizenship for anyone unwilling to pledge loyalty to the state.

These mostly target Arab Israelis and get strong government backing. Also introduced was a bill almost completely banning demonstrations adjacent to the homes of public officials and service providers, or others responsible for public welfare. After passing its first Knesset reading, the Internal Affairs Committee asked for revisions.

Harassing Human Rights Organizations and Activists

In 1998, the UN General Assembly adopted the “Declaration on the Right and Responsibility of Individuals, Groups and Organs of Society to Promote and Protect Universally Recognized Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.” It obligates all state parties to respect them and protect organizations and activists from violence, threats, retaliatory action and any discrimination connected to their work.

Israel is a signatory, but systematically violates the letter and spirit it expresses. Over the past two years and earlier, anti-democratic and free expression constraints have increased. Targeted senior political figures sought to undermined the legitimacy of their critics lawlessly.

For example, when the discharged combat veterans organization, Breaking the Silence, published a pamphlet critical of Operation Cast Lead, government response was harsh. Instead of investigating eyewitness war crimes testimonies, officials vilified the group to undermine its credibility, and the Foreign Ministry asked the Netherlands, Britain, and Spain to half their funding.

After the July Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) report about physicians’ involvement in torture, Israeli Medical Association (IMA) chairman Dr. Yoram Blachar asked its members to sever ties with PHR-Israel.

The Prevention of Inflation Law passed its first Knesset reading in May 2008 – “in brazen violation of the basic precepts of providing protection and care to asylum seekers.” One of its provisions includes long prison terms for convicted “infiltrators” and human rights activists helping them.

Harassing Human Rights Activists in the Occupied Territories

Harassment and other measures there are far worse than in Israel, including violence committed by security forces and settlers. IDF actions include:

• declaring West Bank areas closed military zones to deny activists access to them;
• arresting, detaining, indicting, convicting, and imprisoning activists as a deterrent; and
• dispersing demonstrations with excessive force, using rubber-coated metal bullets, at times live rounds, stun grenades, tear gas, and other repressive measures against peaceful protesters.

Discriminating Against Israeli Arabs

The Israeli government appointed the Or Commission to investigate early violence at the beginning of the second Intifada in which police killed 12 Israeli Arabs and one Palestinian. It recommended that the state “act to erase the stain of discrimination against Arab citizens in all its various forms and expression,” but thereafter they worsened in even more severe forms.

Israeli Arabs enjoy no rights in a state affording them only to Jews. Worse still, they’re portrayed as enemies, and in the past year, proposed racist laws threaten their free expression, political participation, language, culture, historic heritage, and all their rights unless they swear loyalty to the Jewish state and Zionist vision.

The Proposed Nakba Law

Public outrage over its original version got it revised to exclude imprisonment, but included is a clause withdrawing public funding from any state-supported body holding activities commemorating the Nakba in any way. It’s now removed from Arab school curricula, and banning it denies Arab Israelis their collective identity, memory, and free expression right to their opinions, especially one this important.

Removal of Arab Place Names from Road Signs

In July, Minister of Transportation Yisrael Katz ordered Arab road signs replaced with Arabic transliterations of Hebrew names, but doing so violates the Supreme Court’s recognition of Arabic as an official language in Israel.

Conditioning Rights on Military Service

In August, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said the Ministry’s diplomatic training will be conditional on completing military or national service henceforth. As a result, the Israeli Railways fired 40 Arab train junction crossing guards when a condition was added to the vacancy announcement requiring all employees to have performed IDF service.

Conditional Citizenship

If passed, the proposed Loyalty to Israel Law will make Israeli citizenship conditional on signing a loyalty oath to “the Jewish, Zionist, and democratic State of Israel, its symbols and values.” It will also obligate all citizens to perform military or other national service, and will authorize the Interior Minister to revoke the citizenship of anyone refusing to sign. In late May, the Ministerial Committee for Legislative Affairs rejected the bill.

Globally, citizenship is a basic right, but not in Israel where it’s conditional, especially for Arabs. For example, in May, Interior Minister Eli Yishai ordered the citizenship of four Arabs revoked because they were suspected of harming state security. Doing so tells Israeli Arabs that their citizenship is conditional, not guaranteed, and can be revoked for any reason if state authorities wish.

Violating the Right to Housing

At issue again is making it conditional on swearing loyalty to Israel to keep Arabs out of Jewish communities. In addition, a June agreement between the state and Jewish National Fund (JNF) authorizes the transfer of some privately (central region) owned land to the state in exchange for undeveloped Negev and Galilee substitute areas. The idea again is discrimination, treating Jews one way and Arabs another by seizing their land for Jews only development.

Violating Free Expression and Political Involvement

It primarily affects Arabs, one example being in towns and villages where they protested against the Gaza war. They were met with harassment, violence, and mass arrests, unlike the guidelines for Jews. Also, preemptive arrests were made, targeting Arab activists and public figures on suspicion they might protest the war.

These are police state tactics, reflected in all ways Israeli Arabs and Palestinians are treated. They portray a troubling picture portending worse ahead to deny non-Jews equal rights and strike hard when they peacefully protest. And yet the Orr Commission stressed that:

It is imperative that we act to uproot manifestations of prejudice against the Arab sector that were demonstrated even by the most respected senior police officers. The police must impress upon its officers the idea that the Arab public as a whole is not their enemy, and must not be treated as such.

They are, worse than in October 2000, proving Israeli Arabs aren’t respected or safe under Jewish rule, let alone given equal rights.

Racist Views

By considering Arabs enemies and unwanted, mistreating, excluding, and discriminating against them is sanctioned, and Jews support it. According to the Israel Democracy Institute’s 2009 Democracy Index:

• 53% of Jews support Arab emigration from Israel;
• 54% of Jews and Arabs agree that only citizens loyal to the state deserve civil rights;
• 38% of Jews believe Jews deserve more rights than others; and
• only 33% of native Jews and 23% of new immigrants want Arab parties in the government, even though their members are Israeli citizens.

Overall, the survey authors say the data indicate broad support for revoking Arab political rights, ones only to be afforded Jews as more evidence that a democratic Israel is more illusion than fact.

Bedouin Rights

Tens of thousands live in so-called unrecognized villages, some pre-dating Israel’s founding. Yet Israel won’t recognize them, excludes them from regional and municipal planning, denies them basic services, calls Bedouin settlements illegal, and forcibly expels their residents from land they own.

Those remaining are given two choices — live under appalling conditions or voluntarily move to one of seven recognized townships or rural villages, live in poverty and unemployment, and relinquish all rights to their land, heritage, and traditional lifestyle.

Yet in December 2008, the Commission for the Resolution of Arab Settlement in the Negev, chaired by retired Supreme Court Justice Eliezer Goldberg (the Goldberg Commission), issued some unprecedented statements. It called Israel’s policies against Bedouin citizens inappropriate, saying they’re recognized residents, not “trespassers,” and the state should legalize their status and allow them to build on their land.

Nonetheless, the report didn’t unequivocally say how, and presented impediments that could indefinitely delay or even halt village recognition. Also, it didn’t clearly recommend guidelines to assure basic services and essential infrastructure to spur economic development. As a result, Bedouin rights are still denied, and they continue being uprooted from their land.

Criminal Justice Rights

In 2006, a Supreme Court ruling bolstered the right to legal representation by affording persons suspected of a serious crime the right to have all interrogations videotaped, in cases involving a possible sentence of 15 or more years. Otherwise, forced confessions can be extracted through torture or other harsh means.

Nonetheless, due process is ignored if individuals are suspected of a security offense. In these cases, they may be detained and interrogated for several days in isolation, with no access to counsel, their family, or a judge. After arrest, oversight can last up to 96 hours. Afterwards, meeting with a lawyer can be delayed another three weeks and video documentation isn’t required, so the most abusive practices can be employed out of sight and unreported, yet confessions gotten this way can convict.

In Occupied Palestine, it’s far worse for any offense. Suspects can be held for eight days before being brought before a military judge, not a civil one. In addition, draconian regulations prevent contact with a lawyer, and authorities aren’t obligated to document interrogations.

According to the 2002 Incarceration of Unlawful Combatants Law, suspects can be held up to 14 days with no judicial oversight and prevented from attorney contact for up to three weeks during which he or she can, and most often is, brutalized under the most horrific conditions. B’Tselem reported that 85% of Palestinian detainees are tortured, a longstanding practice, unconstrained and unreported.

Hatred and Racism

In mid-2008, the Oz unit replaced the Immigration Police and began intensifying residency law enforcement against asylum-seekers and migrant workers invited to work as nurses, in agriculture, and for construction. Now they’re accused of causing unemployment and dehumanized by being called “burglars, junkies, and street people.”

As a result, human rights activists and others expressed outrage, and so didn’t some cabinet and Knesset members. In July, it forced Prime Minister Netanyahu to announce a three month expulsion suspension to provide time to devise a more equitable policy, so far not done for either refugees, migrant workers or asylum seekers.

In addition, in the past year, they’ve been targeted, called “foreigners,” racially slurred, made to feel unwelcome, and sometimes harmed by violence and killings. Subsets of Israeli society are also affected, including Arabs, ethnic Ethiopians, Russians, gays and lesbians, and even ultra-Orthodox Jews.

Rights of the Elderly

They’re one of Israel’s fastest growing groups, the result of a falling birth rate and increased life expectancy. Yet the collapse of the Pensioners Party in the last parliamentary election reduced their status to an excluded and deprived population. As a result, many suffer from ageism, exclusion, discrimination and poverty. In fact, elder Israeli poverty ranks among the highest in western countries.

Pensions are no longer linked to the average wage, but to the Consumer Price Index, so their future value will likely drop. In addition, long-term care issues are deteriorating because to qualify, elders and their adult children must pass a means test. Chronic care facilities are getting less funding, and growing numbers of institutions can’t maintain minimal medical standards, or must reduce staff and the care they afford.

In employment, the 2004 Retirement Age Law lets employers ousts workers who reach retirement age, regardless of their skills, desire, or need to stay employed. Unlike other western countries, Israel fires on the basis of age.

The 1988 Equal Opportunity in Employment Law, prohibiting discrimination age bias, is now weak and not enforced. In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that for persons past their retirement age, the state can deny them jobs in preference to younger workers – saying this doesn’t constitute age discrimination.

Even persons as young as 50 are affected as employers illegally get away with discriminating against them on the basis of age.

Chronic care insurance is another issue. The 1995 National Insurance Law assured it, but economic pressures weakened it and social benefits overall as Israel succumbed to the same neoliberal pressures afflicting all western countries, some more than others, but all heading in the same direction. The result is society’s most vulnerable are greatly impacted, including seniors. In Israel, elders are increasingly viewed as dependent, weak, less wanted, and burdensome. The result is less care and more impoverishment when they most need help.

The Right to Education

Private schools have long existed in Israel, but now they’re proliferating at the expense of public ones. The term “private” refers to ones not under state auspice or regional councils, including those in the Amal or ORT network, kibbutz schools, Arab schools run by the Church, and Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) schools.

Now private secular ones have appeared with specific educational agendas or philosophies, and others noted for their small class size, high-quality teachers, or particular distinction making them desirable to some Israelis.

Private or not, they’re all part of the “recognized but unofficial” education system and get 75% of the funding given official state schools. In May 2007, an amendment to the State Education Law passed requiring regional councils to provide comparable funding.

“The entire subject of ‘recognized but unofficial’ schools is a complex one that raises profound questions about the right of parents to make decisions about their children’s education, equality in education, the legitimacy of State intervention (in deciding content) and the character of a given school (by setting conditions for public funding), and more.”

Violating the Right to Equality in Education

Admissions policies restrict entry to recognized but unofficial schools to relatively few students. Criteria include entrance exams, admission committee decisions, and more. Discrimination thus exists, favoring some over others despite Ministry of Education directives prohibiting them.

Because these schools are heavily subsidized, the entire public must have access without discrimination, but they don’t. High tuition charges create another barrier, leaving out most Israeli children because of affordability.

Public schools are also affected. For example, parents prefer schools offering targeted curricula – such as the Nature School and School for the Arts, both in Tel Aviv. Despite the prohibition, both require entrance exams and charge high tuitions.

Although some specialized schools offer financial aid to needy families, few, in fact, are helped, even for “specialized track” public schools that also charge additional tuition and require a personal interview to determine child eligibility for a special program. The result is a two-track system – one for well-off families, the other for those with limited means, unable to provide their children with the best.

Decline of Public Schools

They’ve declined as recognized but unofficial schools have grown in popularity. As a result, compared to OECD countries, class sizes are larger, teacher salaries lower, and student achievement mediocre. It’s no surprise that 61% of parents polled prefer private to public education. They’re publicly funded, have better teachers, and attract children from more affluent families.

In contrast, public education is deteriorating, and the more it does, the greater the incentive for parents to prefer private ones – if they can afford them.

Recently, Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar said he’ll introduce legislation to broaden the ministry’s discretionary powers “to weigh whether or not to grant recognition to an institution based on educational and financial considerations,” including if doing so would adversely affect public schools. It’s a positive step, but much more is needed, so far not gotten to reverse a discriminatory trend showing no signs of being stopped.

The Right to Housing

The August 2004 Israel Lands Administration (ILA) decision #1015 created admissions committees to agricultural communities and small communal settlements. They consider applications from candidates wanting land to settle there, and recommend whether or not to permit them, using dubious criteria based on “social compatibility” standards, heavily discriminating against minority or other unwanted groups.

“These are up-scale, rural, or private home developments built on what was once kibbutz and moshav fields, not the property of the State and offering a high standard of living at an affordable price,” based on a discriminatory selection process.

Sectoral Marketing and Acquisition Groups

Discrimination also affects apartments letting private developers market them to specific groups of their choosing, thus screening in “quality neighbors” as a selling point to attract others like them. It results in closed communities leading to social gaps as wealthier neighborhoods get the best public services, while others deteriorate.

The Right to Social Security

In 2009, the global economic crisis impacted Israel hard, especially jobs with a sharp rise in unemployment, and those without them discovered that since 2000, social safety net protections have deteriorated.

In addition, unemployment insurance has eroded to one of the lowest among western countries, and eligibility became more stringent. As a result, those qualifying have decreased by about 50%. In 2007, less than one-fourth of Israel’s unemployed were entitled to monthly stipends. Those without them struggle for any means of support, making them vulnerable to exploitation.

“The drastic cut to income-support and unemployment insurance has been one element in Israel’s high ranking in the (OECD’s) Inequality Index.”

The Wisconsin Plan

In summer 2005, it began as an experimental pilot project administered by private companies with the goal of reintegrating income-support recipients into the workforce. However, its primary focus was to reduce the number of people on income-support roles, so widespread criticism resulted.

Private companies have a conflict of interest for being compensated by the number they remove. They also don’t invest sufficiently in services to encourage employment, such as retraining, on-site childcare, and programs to complete academic degrees.

Rather than help the unemployed, they try to “re-educate” them with sanctions to force them to cope in the current adverse job market “through means that weaken their ability to stand up for their rights.” Participants thus feel degraded and helpless, with no government measures to stop this.

The Right to Health Care

The 1994 National Health Insurance Law was enacted to provide all Israelis with universal healthcare coverage. That was then. This is now under budget cutting pressure and privatization, leaving workers and the most vulnerable isolated and helpless.

The public health system most rely on has deteriorated greatly in quality, forcing recipients to pay more and get less. The result is two parallel unequal, systems — high quality for the well-off and less of it for all others, with gaps between them measured by statistical health indicators across regions, socioeconomic levels, and ethnic groups.

Several features in particular stand out, showing how Israeli health care shifted from a right to a commodity based on the ability to pay, as well as a new proposal to establish another healthcare fund as a profit-making enterprise.

Dental care isn’t covered at all, forcing many families to forego it. However, in May 2009, the Health Ministry announced that it would assume funding of basic preventive dental care for every school child, thus assuring it regardless of financial means, and funding it from the allocation for new medicines. It’s a small step in the right direction, but the broader one looks bleak.

Co-payments

The 1998 Economic Arrangements Law let the national health funds increase co-payment amounts for medical services and drugs as well as additional fees. Ever since, they’ve been rising, and according to the Central Bureau of Statistics, 32% of 2008 national health expenditures was funded by direct payments, including dental care.

The result is greater numbers of Israelis foregoing care because they can’t afford it. The Israeli Medical Association believes co-pays should be abolished for some services, mainly preventive care, and proposes other ways “to achieve the appropriate balance between ensuring medical care for all and efficiency in the system.”

Supplementary Insurance

They fill gaps uncovered in the standard health basket for those who can afford it. About 24% of the population doesn’t have it. Of these, 52% declined because of cost. In addition, 32% of those in poor health have none, including the elderly impacted by higher premiums with age. Not only does supplementary insurance not provide solutions for everyone, it’s actually “widening the gap between lower and middle classes, and expediting the process that is turning health care from a right into a commodity.”

Two trends have thus emerged:

– an ongoing decline in services and drugs provided by the state, and the increase in what individuals receive based on their ability to pay; and

– the promotion of supplementary insurance to well-off people, leaving the rest disempowered and left out.

Instead of fixing the system, policy makes it worse by catering to the needs of people who can afford them, not the rest.

The Fifth Health Fund

It’s another symptom of commoditization, contradicting the National Health Insurance Law defining national health funds as public bodies and declaring new funds must be non-profit. However, spending cut priorities pressured national health funds to privatize, and got the idea included in the 2009-2010 Economic Arrangements Law, so far not voted on in the Knesset, but may be to enhance competition and efficiency. Instead of solving public healthcare problems, it will further undermine social solidarity and deepen the existing inequality, the very direction Israel is heading.

Rights in the Occupied Territories

Israel’s preemptive, indiscriminate, Operation Cast Lead attack against Gazan civilians took a devastating toll, compounding the existing humanitarian crisis with the Territory under siege. Of course, medical services were greatly impacted, including willful attacks against hospitals, other health facilities, ambulances, and providers. In addition, Gaza’s entire infrastructure was savaged, affecting electricity, water and sewage facilities already severely compromised.

Israel committed wanton crimes of war and against humanity continuing to this day, causing incalculable human suffering further impacted by closure and isolation. Post-conflict, Israel obstructed and vilified independent investigations, then denied serious charges in their aftermath, including by their own combat veterans based on their personal experiences they went public on to reveal.

A year later, nothing is resolved. Gaza remains under siege. Sub-minimal amounts of basic goods are allowed in, including construction materials, essential equipment, raw materials, and spare part necessary to function and rebuild. Tens of thousands have no shelter, relying on temporary facilities, crowded quarters with relatives, or tents that aren’t suitable in Gaza’s winter. Israel violates every obligation imaginable to protect civilians under international humanitarian law, and attacking them indiscriminately is a grievous war crime.

West Bank Discrimination and Segregation

Around a half million West Bank settlers have created a “regime of separation and institutionalized discrimination, voiding the principle of ‘equality before the law’ of all (meaning). Within the same territorial boundaries and under the same regime, two populations live side-by-side, (separated and unequal), with entirely (different) infrastructure and bound by two (judicial) systems” that are entirely dissimilar.

Jews have full rights, Palestinians none under oppressive military occupation. Inequality is pervasive in all respects, with Palestinians forced into shrinking cantons surrounded and isolated by settlements, expanding by expropriating their land and making conditions for them untenable, “in absolute contravention of the principles of international law” assuring the rights of protected people under occupation.

Separate Roads

In October 2009, the Supreme Court ruled that closing the main road connecting Beit Awa and Dura in the western Hebron Hills, affecting tens of thousands of Palestinians, was disproportionate. But it failed to address the greater issue: that separate roads for Jews only are illegitimate, illegal, and must cease.

Citing disproportionality only, the Court avoided the core issue of segregation and discrimination favoring Jews over Arabs, leaving the impression of its support.

Separate roads are only one example of how Israel restricts West Bank free movement for about 2.5 million Palestinians, keeps another 1.5 million under siege in Gaza, and gets away with it.

Criminal Injustice: Separate and Unequal Systems

West Bank settlers are governed by civil law, protecting the rights of the accused, “anchored in Israeli legislation and legal precedents.” In contrast, Palestinians live under military law that’s far more repressive in military courts under IDF officers, affording no judicial fairness.

One example is different periods of detention for Jews and Arabs. Under military rule, it’s harsh, excessive, and inconsistent with the obligation to respects basic rights under international law, including for suspects not charged. Instead, administrative detentions are ordered during which interrogations include torture and other abusive treatment.

Some differences for Jews and Arabs include:

• preliminary detainment until judicial review — 24 hours for Jews most often; eight days for Palestinians;
• maximum detainment for interrogation, prior to remand request – 15 days for Jews; 20 for security crimes; 30 days for Palestinians;
• total detainment for investigative purposes — 30 days for Jews; 35 for security crimes, and only the Supreme Court can authorize extensions; 98 days for Palestinians with additional three month extensions; and
• arrest until the end of legal proceedings and before a verdict — 9 months for Jews with only Supreme Court ordered extensions; two years for Palestinians, with renewable six month extensions.

Moreover, youths are treated no differently, with those as young as 16 considered adults. For Jews, it’s 18.

For Palestinians, prison sentences are the norm. They may be long or indefinite whatever the charged offense, with or without cause, and are often based on secret evidence unavailable to counsel. Convicted or administratively detained minors are then incarcerated with adults.

Access to Resources

West Bank Palestinians endure water shortages, an irregular supply, and poor quality, especially in summer and arid years. As a result, health is adversely impacted as are farmers needing water for agriculture and their livestock.

According to the WHO, the minimal daily human water needs (for home, municipal and industrial use) is 100 liters per person. Palestinians get about 66 liters despite enough West Bank water for everyone. The problem is who get it and for what, with Jews afforded disproportionate amounts at the expense of Palestinian needs.

One-third of Palestinian communities, comprising 10% of its West Bank population, aren’t connected to the water system, so must collect rainwater in cisterns near their homes for all their needs. Even so, the Civil Administration often destroys them, even in particularly arid areas, forcing residents to rely on well groundwater, supplemented by expensive water from private suppliers. For many families, it’s too great a burden because of widespread poverty.

Even communities connected to the main water system receive limited and irregular supplies, well below their needs, and in summer conditions may be acute with water available only once every few days and only for a few hours. Again, other sources must compensate.

Right to Personal Security: Discrimination in Law Enforcement

Israeli security forces protect Jews well, employing diverse measures for their safety. For Palestinians, it’s another matter, including not preventing settler violence that harm their livelihoods, property and lives. Incidents include violent assaults, harassment, trespassing, land theft, and property destruction, yet security forces do nothing to stop them, nor are settlers prosecuted for their crimes.

At times, attacks are known about in advance, yet hardly ever stopped. As a rule, IDF soldiers and commanders don’t enforce the law against Jews. Their only obligation is to protect them and intervene when Palestinians defend themselves.

Police, in fact, typically don’t use their authority against Jewish criminal suspects. Nor do they consider Palestinian complaints seriously or investigate properly when they’re lodged. Cases most often are closed due to “unknown perpetrators” or insufficient evidence to prosecute.

Undermining Democratic Foundations: Legislative Initiatives

In recent years, numerous laws and amendments have been improper, including ones affecting civil liberties like free expression and the right to protest peacefully. Examples include:

– the Biometric Database Law: in 2009, a bill advanced to create a biometric database to store fingerprints and facial features of all Israeli citizens and residents – a measure no other democratic country has and one that will give government officials police state power, to use abusively, especially against Israeli Arabs;

– The Economic Arrangements Law: it’s a legal travesty giving the executive branch power to make radical changes in Israel’s socioeconomic policies, with no checks and balances, in violation of basic human, civil and social rights; even worse, since enactment, new provisions have been added without debate or proper consideration; critics call it a “legislative monster” with good reason;

– Expanding the Wisconsin Plan nationally without public debate: as a pilot project in four Israeli regions, it reduces the number of people getting income support, and forces them into low-paying jobs instead of better ones they once held; and

– Land Reform – Land Grab: the proposal involves privatizing land, the composition of the council to administer it, and procedures for planning and building — all having social, environmental, and financial impact; even so, the reform “was bulldozed through the Knesset in a problematic legislative process.”

Contempt of Court: Ignoring Supreme Court Rulings

Proposed laws are undermining the Court by allowing the circumventing of its decisions, violating human rights in the process. For example, a proposed amendment will prevent Palestinians from submitting compensation claims against the state for IDF-committed injury to their person or property during non-wartime activity. In December 2006, the High Court rejected a similar amendment.

Of concern also is the trend over the past two years of governments disregarding High Court of Justice and Administrative Court rulings. Doing so is police state tyranny, not democratic rule now fading even for Jews.

For example:

– “binding arrangements” of migrant workers to their original employers – earlier, the High Court ruled them illegal and instructed the state to make new employment arrangements within six months for workers employed in nursing, agriculture and industry; it wasn’t done so “binding arrangemens” are unchanged;

– national priority areas – in February 2006, an expanded seven justice Supreme Court panel ruled that assigning this status to certain regions for the allocation of educational resources was illegal and discriminatory against Israeli Arabs and ordered change in 12 months; as of November 2009, it hasn’t been implemented;

– dismantling sections of the Separation Wall – several times, the High Court ordered its route changed because it illegally and disproportionately violated the basic rights of Palestinian residents; most often the state treated Court rulings as “recommendations only,” ignoring them;

– fortification of Sderot schools – in May 2007, the Court ordered it for Sderot and western Negev communities near Gaza; delays and extensions followed;

– East Jerusalem classroom shortages – several times the Court ordered the Ministry of Education and Jerusalem Municipality to build hundreds of additional classrooms for Palestinian children; so far, compliance has been minimal, and no serious effort has been made to alleviate a critical shortage; and

– Interior Ministry disregard for the Administrative Court rulings – these courts are the main venue for adjudicating entry and immigration to Israel; yet the Interior Ministry doesn’t abide by its rulings or change its policies when ordered.

Final Comments

Israel is in crisis mode — in all respects for Israeli Arabs and occupied Palestinians, and increasingly for Jews having their human, civil, and social rights compromised and eroded.

Israeli democracy is flawed and illusory. Its denied entirely to non-Jews, afforded solely to privileged ones, governing how America does for the rich at the expense most others. It mocks the rule of law, and is heading the country for police state-imposed dystopia if the present trend continues. That should concern Jews and Arabs alike to want it stopped, and ally in common cause to do it.

Imagine a different kind of Israel, free and democratic, treating all its people equitably. Imagine the same kind of America, not the broken society now in place. Imagine if enough people in both countries stopped imagining and became activist. That’s how change always comes, from the grassroots by committed people not quitting until they get it. What worked before can work again, and it better before conditions become so bad it won’t matter.

And that’s the problem, according to Jeff Gates, author of the highly-regarded Democracy at Risk: Rescuing Main Street from Wall Street, a sequel to The Ownership Solution: Toward a Shared Capitalism for the 21st Century. The latter book was described by one reviewer as “the best book on economics for a generation,”¹ and praised by Ralph Nader as “a Capitalist Manifesto, a blueprint for spreading the benefits of capitalism more equitably.”

Gates, a former counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance (1980-87), identifies the source of the current economic crisis as a “shared mindset” into which we have been induced to put our faith, to the grave detriment of the majority but to the immense benefit of a very few.

While the events of September 2008 on Wall Street may have come as a shock to many – not least those who suddenly found themselves out of work or on the streets – they were “perfectly predictable” to a close-knit group of “financial sophisticates,” Jeff Gates maintains.

But is there any evidence that this was a deliberate fraud?

“Systems analysts offer an acronym (“POSIWID”) to identify systemic flaws: the purpose of a system is what it does,” Gates says.

“In financial systems, results are downstream of the ‘Chicago model’ – a shared mindset from which today’s results flow. Over the past half-century, this market-fundamentalist perspective evolved into the ‘Washington’ consensus to emerge as the guiding principle of the World Trade Organization (WTO) now taking this model to global scale.”

What exactly does he mean by the “Chicago model”?

“At the core of this worldview lies a premise whose purpose is easily stated: ‘maximize financial returns and – trust us – all else will be fine.’ Faith in that perspective ensured today’s results,” Gates explains.

“As this ‘Chicago’ frame of mind gained the force of law through the ‘law and economics’ movement, the result became a globalized operating system best described as ‘money-on-autopilot.’ There lies the blame for this collapse – in that narrow ‘consensus’ perspective.”

The “law and economics” movement referred to by Gates also traces its origins to the University of Chicago. As key opponents of financial regulation, this movement was heavily funded by the same Olin Foundation that also supported neoconservatism through its funding of neocon think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute.

This “Chicago” state of mind, Gates argues, had far-reaching consequences that could have been easily foreseen by its advocates.

“The results of this purpose-driven ‘operating system’ were guaranteed to concentrate wealth and income and thereby undermine both democracies and markets. By equating personal freedom with financial freedom, we were induced to freely embrace the very forces that now jeopardize freedom,” Gates says.

“Nowhere in this operating system is there any provision for the values essential to the long-term health of communities: fiscal foresight, civil cohesion and environmental sustainability. Money is the only value granted a voice.”

Jeff Gates’ latest book, Guilt By Association: How Deception and Self-Deceit Took America to War, traces the corruption that plagues American politics to a network who “share an ideological bias sympathetic to Israel.” It should be read by concerned citizens everywhere, but especially in the United States, where the “Chicago” mindset has been most deeply embedded in its economic and foreign policy-making.

Endorsed by former U.S. Ambassador Edward Peck and Illinois Congressman Paul Findley (1961–1983),² Guilt By Association identifies those who have promoted aggressive economic and foreign policies that have been “ruinous” not only to America’s reputation but also to “moderate and secular Jews.” The latter, Gates points out, are often unfairly portrayed as “guilty by association” with the behaviour of these “elites and extremists.”

Who are these “elites and extremists,” and how do they make America appear “guilty by association”?

“When waging unconventional warfare, Defense Secretary Robert Gates points to the perilous role of ‘the people in between.’ Thus, for instance, while pro-Israelis induced the U.S. to wage war in Iraq with false and flawed intelligence, ‘the people in between’ created, promoted and reported intelligence ‘fixed’ around that pre-determined goal,” Gates explains.

“In the financial domain, ‘the people in between’ are securities bundlers, rating agencies and, most fundamentally, those who induce “the mark” (the public) to put their faith in the financial premise that enables this ongoing fraud.

“All flows downstream from a ‘consensus’ perspective – regardless whether the deception is a shared belief in Iraqi weapons of mass destruction or a consensus faith in the infallibility of unfettered financial markets. The modus operandi is identical – the displacement of facts with beliefs.”

Perhaps not coincidentally, the intellectual roots of neoconservatism can also be traced to Chicago, where University of Chicago Professor Albert Wohlstetter’s cadre of students included Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. Wohlstetter himself had been a protégé of another University of Chicago Professor, Leo Strauss. Considered to be the “intellectual godfather” of the neocons, Strauss significantly advocated a “philosophy of deception.”³

Through their failure to identify the source of the problem, government responses to the ongoing economic crisis will only make matters worse, maintains Gates.

“Lawmakers seek to solve a systemic problem well downstream of its source. By piling on more interest-bearing debt without addressing the underlying problem, they are unleashing long-term financial forces destined to make a bad situation worse – at a staggering cost,” he says.

“We can anticipate stagnation and inflation while ‘the people in between’ continue to amass more assets (at distressed prices) and collect more interest on more taxpayer-secured debt. The pace is poised to quicken in this policy-enabled redistribution of wealth – from the bottom to the top.”

1. Denis MacShane, “The new tasks of Soros,” Independent, 12 December, 1998.
2. See reviews of Guilt By Association at the Criminal State website.
3. Jim Lobe, “Leo Strauss’ Philosophy of Deception,” Alternet, 19 May, 2003.

People are not happy and satisfied with the way things are, and young people especially don’t have much hope for a better and more promising future. I was constantly asked this question: “How is it in the USA — is it any better? Is it different?” And my reply was “Different? Yes. Better? I am not sure,” because I felt the same gloomy and depressing atmosphere here in the USA, and I knew people in this country are also uncertain about their future and dissatisfied and unhappy about a lot of things.

At times, I felt trapped. I was hearing almost the same stories from people miles away in another continent, people not being happy with their jobs, their relationships, struggling to make ends meet, the economic hardship that they have to endure, corrupt politicians, and so on. I especially felt sad for the young ones. Iran’s population is more than 70 million and 75% of them are under the age of 30. The younger generation in Iran is highly educated and most of them have university degrees. I think obtaining a higher education for many of them has become a way of life! It gives them the opportunity to be independent, to have less boundaries, less limitations in their lives … and to have a glimpse of hope that someday they might see the light at the end of the dark tunnel!

I promised my new young Iranian friends (men and women) that I would try to stay truthful to what I heard from them and to get their message across as best as I can. Their message as one of them simply put it to me is this: “We want to live and enjoy life and have a promising future … a lot of us don’t want to get involved in the world of politics; the world of politics is a dirty world and has nothing to do with a real change and does not leave much room for idealistic ideas!”

While I was in Iran, I lived in a women’s dormitory (filled mostly with university students from different cities of Iran) which was near Revolution Street, the street that most of the recent demonstrations passed by. Because of where I was housed, I had the opportunity to hear and watch from the balcony of the dormitory the demonstrations that took place while I was there. During my two months of stay in Iran, I got the opportunity to talk to people who participated, as well as some who were heavily involved in organizing for these demonstrations. They were students, teachers, doctors, small businessmen, and even factory workers. I came out of these conversations with the understanding that there is a degree of political maturity among Iranian people, and they are very courageous people with a great sense of pride. But there is no unified plan of action for people to get out in the streets, or for what the message of the demonstrations should be.

People get out in streets for different reasons to express publicly their dissatisfaction and make demands for change! And some are even willing to face the harsh and cruel consequences of their actions. By contrast, here in the United States, people for the most part have a tendency to hope for change rather than actively participate in changing things! And furthermore, people in this country believe in the current political and economic system. In their expression of dissatisfaction with social, political and economic problems, Americans never attack the governing system itself, whereas the Iranian people do!

In Iran, most of the people that I talked to openly expressed their anger and dissatisfaction about the current economic situation in Iran, about high inflation, about lack of jobs, lack of business opportunities, about the disastrous outcomes of economic, trade and scientific sanctions enforced on Iran by the US and European countries.¹

My Iranian friends were surprised to hear that except for one or two organizations most progressive groups in this country have done NOTHING so far to stop these sanctions, and they were wondering if the people of this country have already forgotten the catastrophic result of the US sanctions on the Iraqi people during 1990s.

Furthermore, Iranian people are very frustrated by the degree of corruption among their government officials, and they feel like they are being robbed of the money that should go toward providing more social services and creating more jobs for them. Many Iranians believe that there is a cold war going on between different factions of the Iranian government, and they believe these factions are at the service of countries such as US, Britain, China, Russia.

The degree of economic dissatisfaction is very high but so is social and cultural dissatisfaction. Iranians think they are also being robbed of their cultural heritage; in protest a lot of young Iranians, especially young women, are learning how to play traditional musical instruments, learning Persian calligraphy, and studying Persian literature. There is a great concern among anthropologists that our historical monuments and places are not really being taken care of. There is a cultural war going on in Iran. Being a proud nation with more than 2500 years of history, Iranians are determined to keep their cultural heritage alive. This sense of nationalism especially is very strong among young people .

While I was in Iran I promised myself that when I returned to the USA, and was asked questions about how things are in Iran, my response would be that things are very complicated and there are many layers to any given political, social, cultural and economical issue, and there are no black and white answers to any question that we might have. But here I am back in the USA and in a conversation that I had with a dear political activist a couple weeks ago, the first question that I was asked was “while I was in Iran, did I see any street demonstrations, and in my opinion, are these demonstrations being led by the people or are they being organized by foreign agents?” I was very much turned off by this question, and it took me back to the meaningless conversations that I had with people before I left for Iran. To ask questions such as the one above is an attempt to simplify a political and social situation that by no means is as simple as yes-or-no answer. But here in the USA we are trained to think and operate that way!

There are a lot of nuances involved in shaping any political or social situation in any country and Iran is no different. I think people in general and the ones who want to be in the business of changing the world in particular should better educate themselves about the social and political movements of this country and other countries to understand better how any political, social change happens in any given country. The social and political consciousness of people in any given country has HISTORY and if we are serious about changing things we better know this history! Otherwise we are wasting our time and the time of others!

The Islamic Republic of Iran became the governing body of Iran after the Shah was overthrown in response to the genuine dissatisfaction of Iranian people with the way things were. This dissatisfaction was less evident among the middle class and upper class people of Iran than it was among the working class people and poor sections of the country. When the Islamic Republic of Iran became the governing body of Iran and so called Islamic rules were enforced upon people, radical changes started to take place in all aspects of Iranians’ life, and the country went through social and cultural changes as well as political changes.

But 30 years later, one can clearly observe (and not just in big cities but also in small towns) that these rules and restrictions on the Iranian people on how to live, dress, or conduct one’s day-to-day business are not being followed by many! In the past 30 years, average Iranians gradually have changed their situation and have broken some of these rules and restrictions whenever and however it was possible for them to do so — ultimately forcing the government officials to leave them alone in some aspects of their personal lives if not all. But when it comes to change, the resistance does not always come from the ruling powers. Sometimes the resistance to change comes from different groups of people within the society and as result creates tension among them. I felt this tension at times during my two months in Iran. That is why I feel like at this point, Iran is a country of opposite forces (socially, politically, culturally) co-existing side by side and pushing and pulling the country in different directions. But how long can these opposite forces continue living side by side? I am not sure.

What happened right after the June 2009 presidential election on the streets of Iran was a representative of a desire among some Iranian people, especially the younger generation, for some radical changes in the political and social system of their country. What is being attacked in recent demonstrations goes beyond attacking individuals who currently represent the system. They are attacking the system itself. That is why in recent demonstrations you will hear people say: Death to the Dictator, Death to the supreme leader of Islamic Republic of Iran, and We say no to the West; we say no to the East; we want an Independent Republic of Iran. When I heard it myself in the last demonstration that took place in Iran, I could not help myself from shouting it as loud as I could from the balcony of our dormitory as demonstrators were passing by and being violently attacked by Revolutionary Guards and Basij military forces.

Some of the people who I talked to think the current government should be replaced by a secular type of government. I found it very surprising that even among young practitioners of Islam, there is this strong belief in separation of religion from politics now. Some are suggesting the type of government that exists in Moslem countries such as Turkey or the type of governments that exists in countries such as Sweden or Norway. Some people are very clear as to what sort of government should replace the current government of Iran and some are not. What is clear is that they want a democratic system that will be at the service of the people.

In the past 30 years, Iranian people in their attempt to create a more democratic and just society have made some progress through their civic organizations and their own personal resistance to rules and civil disobedience activities. Iranian people know that in their struggle for change not only they have to deal with resistance from their own government officials, but also they have to deal with manipulation of their struggle by agents of foreign countries and political groups in Iran or outside of Iran. Of course, knowing that through different means of operation, superpowers always want to interfere with the affairs of Third World countries and manipulate their struggle for independence, freedom and democracy in way that it will serve their interests does not undermine the genuine struggle of people of these countries.

The bottom line is that the ruling power whether in the USA or Iran has no regard for the will and needs of the people
… otherwise we would live in societies where people were happier with their lives and less worried about their future, the future of their children, and their grandchildren. In the USA people are losing their jobs, homes and livelihoods, and there is still talk about sending more troops to the Middle East or other parts of the world to wage more wars.²

As I have told my new friends in Iran, people in USA have more personal freedom than people in Iran, but there is a big difference between having a personal freedom and having a political freedom which I don‘t think exists in this country. And of course, one should expect some degree of personal freedom in a country that consider itself a model for freedom and democracy for the rest of the world. So I hope American people will put their focus more on their own struggle for freedom and democracy in this country and let people in other countries worry about freedom and democracy in their countries.

As a conscientious citizen of this world and a mother two boys, I am tormented by the ways things are in the USA, Iran, and other parts of the world. Let us try for a second to see the big picture here for a change; let us try to see humanity as whole for a change; let us try to see in ourselves others for a change: the homeless people, the poor, the orphans, the ones that they have been wounded in the wars that are destroying lives and countries, the ones that are being tortured and the ones that are being kicked out of their homes, the ones who don’t have money to pay for their medical bills, the ones that have nothing to eat and those who eat mud cakes to survive … the ones that are being denied medial supplies because of sanctions on their countries … the ones that are committing suicide because they have no hope for future … the ones that have lost their children in wars waged by powers at hand to serve their interests with no regards for human life … to them we are all collateral damage, and we will remain collateral damage if we stay silent.

In the past couple months, I have been thinking a lot about what pushes a society to go through some meaningful changes and how do these changes take place. How do we go about creating democratic societies that it will respond to the basic needs of all citizens and in all aspects of their lives. How does a governing body of any society becomes a true representation of all its citizens ?

1. For an introduction on the history of theses sanctions Wikipedia is reasonably good place to start.
2. Anyone who thinks that in the USA people are enjoying more than a superficial degree of political freedom and democracy better read the Chris Hedges recent article: “Democracy in America Is a Useful Fiction.”

Boa Sr, who died last week aged around 85, was the last speaker of ‘Bo’, one of the ten Great Andamanese languages. The Bo are thought to have lived in the Andaman Islands for as much as 65,000 years, making them the descendants of one of the oldest human cultures on Earth.¹

Boa Sr was the oldest of the Great Andamanese, who now number just 52. Originally ten distinct tribes, the Great Andamanese were 5,000 strong when the British colonized the Andaman Islands in 1858. Most were killed or died of diseases brought by the colonizers.

Having failed to ‘pacify’ the tribes through violence, the British tried to ‘civilize’ them by capturing many and keeping them in an ‘Andaman Home’. Of the 150 children born in the home, none lived beyond the age of two.

The surviving Great Andamanese depend largely on the Indian government for food and shelter, and abuse of alcohol is rife.

Boa Sr survived the Asian tsunami of December 2004, and told linguists, ‘We were all there when the earthquake came. The eldest told us ‘the Earth would part, don’t run away or move’. The elders told us, that’s how we know.’

Linguist Prof. Anvita Abbi, who knew Boa Sr for many years, said, ‘Since she was the only speaker of [Bo] she was very lonely as she had no one to converse with… Boa Sr. had a very good sense of humour and her smile and full throated laughter were infectious.’

‘You cannot imagine the pain and anguish that I spend each day in being a mute witness to the loss of a remarkable culture and unique language.’

Boa Sr told Abbi she felt the neighbouring Jarawa tribe, who have not been decimated, were lucky to live in their forest away from the settlers who now occupy much of the Islands.

Survival International’s director Stephen Corry said today, ‘The Great Andamanese were first massacred, then all but wiped out by paternalistic policies which left them ravaged by epidemics of disease, and robbed of their land and independence.

‘With the death of Boa Sr and the extinction of the Bo language, a unique part of human society is now just a memory. Boa’s loss is a bleak reminder that we must not allow this to happen to the other tribes of the Andaman Islands.’

1. Listen to Boa Sr singing in Bo.

… the executive director of the National Nurses Union. She contacted the [Obama] administration. She got put off. She had no response. Then they sent her to some low-level person that had no authority to do anything.

And then, finally, she’s contacting me. And she says, ‘Do you know any way to get a hold of President Obama?’ And I’m going, ‘Well, this is pretty pathetic if you’re having to call me. I mean, you are the largest nurses union… I don’t know what I can do for you. I mean, I’ll put my call in, too.’ But as we sit here today, not a whole heck of a lot has happened. And it’s distressing.

The courage and compassion of thousands of people willing to enter a chaotic disaster zone threatened with aftershocks are very real. Compassion arises out of a recognition that ‘their’ suffering is no different to ‘my’ suffering. The heart trembles and softens in response to this awareness. Such a subtle resonance and yet it has the power to relieve much of the world’s despair. It is the only counter force to the brutality and greed of human egotism willing to sacrifice everyone and everything for ‘me’.

But if compassion is to make a real difference, it must be allied to rational analysis. In the absence of this analysis, compassion is like a bird with a broken wing flapping in futile circles, never leaving the ground.

Joining compassion with reason means asking why over 80 per cent of Haiti’s population of 10 million people live in abject poverty. Why less than 45 per cent of all Haitians have access to potable water. Why the life expectancy rate in Haiti is only 53 years. Why seventy-six per cent of Haiti’s children under the age of five are underweight, or suffer from stunted growth, with 63 per cent of Haitians undernourished. Why 1 in every 10,000 Haitians has access to a doctor.

In September 2008, Dan Beeton of the US-based Center for Economic and Policy Research told us:

Media coverage of floods and other natural disasters in Haiti consistently overlooks the human-made contribution to those disasters. In Haiti’s case, this is the endemic poverty, the lack of infrastructure, lack of adequate health care, and lack of social spending that has resulted in so many people living in shacks and make-shift housing, and most of the population in poverty. But Haiti’s poverty is a legacy of impoverishment, a result of centuries of economic looting of the country by France, the U.S., and of odious debt owed to creditors like the Inter-American Development Bank and World Bank. Haiti has never been allowed to pursue an economic development strategy of its own choosing, and recent decades of IMF-mandated policies have left the country more impoverished than ever.¹

John Pilger has witnessed the reality on the ground that explains Western interest in the country:

When I was last in Haiti, I watched very young girls stooped in front of whirring, hissing, binding machines at the Port-au-Prince Superior Baseball Plant. Many had swollen eyes and lacerated arms. I produced a camera and was thrown out. Haiti is where America makes the equipment for its hallowed national game, for next to nothing. Haiti is where Walt Disney contractors make Mickey Mouse pyjamas, for next to nothing. The US controls Haiti’s sugar, bauxite and sisal. Rice-growing was replaced by imported American rice, driving people into the cities and towns and jerry-built housing. Years after year, Haiti was invaded by US marines, infamous for atrocities that have been their specialty from the Philippines to Afghanistan.²

Peter Hallward examined recent US policy in Haiti in the Guardian:

Ever since the US invaded and occupied the country in 1915, every serious political attempt to allow Haiti’s people to move (in former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s phrase) ‘from absolute misery to a dignified poverty’ has been violently and deliberately blocked by the US government and some of its allies.³

The US Double Game

Aristide took office in February 1991 and was briefly the first democratically elected President in Haiti’s history before being overthrown by a US-backed military coup on September 30, 1991. The Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs observed after the coup:

Under Aristide, for the first time in the republic’s tortured history, Haiti seemed to be on the verge of tearing free from the fabric of despotism and tyranny which had smothered all previous attempts at democratic expression and self-determination.” His victory “represented more than a decade of civic engagement and education on his part,” in “a textbook example of participatory, ‘bottom-up’ and democratic political development.”⁴

Aristide’s balancing of the budget and “trimming of a bloated bureaucracy” led to a “stunning success” that made White House planners “extremely uncomfortable”. The view of a US official “with extensive experience of Haiti” summed up the reality beneath US rhetoric. Aristide, slum priest, grass-roots activist, exponent of Liberation Theology, “represents everything that CIA, DOD and FBI think they have been trying to protect this country against for the past 50 years.”⁵

Following the fall of Aristide, also with US support, at least 1,000 people were killed in the first two weeks of the coup and hundreds more by December. The paramilitary forces were led by former CIA employees Emmanuel Constant and Raoul Cedras. Aristide was forced into exile from 1991-94. Noam Chomsky summarised the situation:

Well, as this was going on, the Haitian generals in effect were being told [by Washington]: ‘Look, murder the leaders of the popular organisations, intimidate the whole population, destroy anyone who looks like they might get in the way after you’re gone.’… And that’s exactly what Cedras and those guys did, that’s precisely what happened — and of course they were given total amnesty when they finally did agree to step down.⁶

In 1994, the US returned Aristide in the company of 20,000 troops. This was presented as a noble defence of democracy, but in fact the US was playing a double game. As Chomsky noted, Aristide was allowed to return only after the coup leaders had slaughtered much of the popular movement that had brought him to power. His return was also conditional on acceptance of both the US military occupation and Washington’s harsh neoliberal agenda. The plans for the economy were set out in a document submitted to the Paris Club of international donors at the World Bank in August 1994. The Haiti desk officer of the World Bank, Axel Peuker, described the plan as beneficial to the “more open, enlightened, business class” and foreign investors.⁷

In 2004, the US engineered a further coup by cutting off almost all international aid over the previous four years, making the government’s collapse inevitable. Aristide was forced to leave Haiti by US military forces. US Congresswoman, Barbara Lee, challenged the US government:

“It appears that the US is aiding and abetting the attempt to violently topple the Aristide government. With all due respect, this looks like ‘regime change’.”⁸

In our search of the Lexis Nexis media database (February 3) we checked for articles containing the word ‘Haiti’ over the last month. This gave 2,256 results (some online press articles are not captured by Lexis Nexis). Our search for articles containing ‘Aristide’ gave 47 results. The words ‘Haiti’ and ‘Voodoo’ gave 53 results. The words ‘Haiti’ and ‘looting’ gave 136 results.

These numbers give an idea of how the broken wing of media analysis keeps public compassion grounded in an endless circling that is powerless to end the suffering of the people of Haiti.

Media Performance

The 47 mentions of Aristide in 2,256 articles discussing Haiti contained around nine articles that discussed US responsibility for his overthrow. We found several more online articles — notably two excellent pieces by Mark Weisbrot and one by Hugh O’Shaugnessey in the Guardian — that were not picked up by Lexis Nexis.

Hallward made a brief reference in his Guardian article, cited above. Seumas Milne wrote in the Guardian that Aristide’s challenge to Haiti’s oligarchy and its international sponsors “led to two foreign-backed coups and US invasions, a suspension of aid and loans, and eventual exile in 2004.”

Isabel Hilton wrote in the Independent:

“President Clinton negotiated his [Aristide’s] return in 1994, reportedly on condition that he accept a US blueprint for Haiti’s economic development. When Aristide won a second election in 2001, he was again deposed, in 2004, this time forcibly flown by George W Bush’s administration to exile in Africa, where he remains.”

Mark Steel, Patrick Cockburn and Andrew Buncombe made similar comments in the Independent. To his credit, Buncombe published two pieces mentioning the US role in Aristide’s overthrow. This handful of brief references to the US role in destroying Aristide, restricted to two national newspapers — the Guardian and the Independent — represents most of the honest commentary on this issue available to the public. Meanwhile, a flood of mainstream broadcast and print coverage has depicted the US as the high-tech saviour of Haiti.

Even more shocking, not one of the above national media journalists made any mention of the role of the +media+ in suppressing the truth of the US role in Haiti. Journalists apparently do not find this silence problematic.

If it is important for journalists to hold governments to account, then why not their own industry? Public awareness and outrage +do+ have the power to obstruct government criminality. But the public cannot know enough to be outraged, to resist, if the media does not tell them what is happening and why.

Nevertheless, it seems clear to us that there has been a marked improvement in current media performance on Haiti compared to the output we analysed in 2004. Then, the US role was almost completely buried out of sight.

It could be that Aristide’s fate simply matters less now. Alternatively, it could be, as we believe, that this is evidence that the mainstream is beginning to improve its performance in response to pressure from alternative, web-based media. With all mainstream trend lines pointing down, notably advertising revenues, and with readers turning in droves to non-corporate websites, it could be that the mainstream liberal media are being forced to compete by publishing more honest, radical material. If so, this is an extremely hopeful sign for everyone who cares about working for a more peaceful, rational world.

Of Devils And Dignity Lost

The rest of recent media performance is consistent with earlier coverage. In 2004, as democracy was being crushed, The Times observed:

“Mr Aristide, a former Roman Catholic priest, won Haiti’s first free elections in 1990, promising to end the country’s relentless cycle of corruption, poverty and demagoguery. Ousted in a coup the following year, he was restored to power with the help of 20,000 US troops in 1994.”⁹

There was no mention of the history of US support for mass murderers attacking a democratic government and killing its supporters.

The Guardian also believed the US had “restored” Aristide:

To a degree, history repeated itself when the US intervened again in 1994 to restore Mr Aristide. Bill Clinton halted the influx of Haitian boat people that had become politically awkward in Florida. Then he moved on. Although the US has pumped in about $900m in the past decade, consistency and vision have been lacking.¹⁰

The BBC, Channel 4 News and other media followed the same themes¹¹

Following the January 12 earthquake, Charles Bremner wrote in the Times: “Bankrupt, barren, misruled and ravaged by nature and human violence, the country on the western end of Hispaniola island serves as a text-book example of a dysfunctional nation.

“While the rest of the Americas have been pulling out of poverty in recent decades, Haiti has sunk deeper into destitution, dependent on foreign charity and a United Nations force to keep its eight million people from starving and fighting.”

And the explanation for this? Bremner quoted Joel Dreyfuss, a Haitian journalist, who observed sagely: “Some countries just have no luck. Haiti is one of those places where disaster follows on disaster.”

The photo caption to Vanessa Buschschluter‘s piece on the BBC website read: “The Clinton Administration intervened to restore President Aristide to power.” She added: “US troops left after two years — too soon, some experts argue, to ensure the stability of Haiti’s democratic institutions.”

In the Observer, Regine Chassagne could only lament “the west’s centuries of disregard.”¹²

Tragicomically, the media has preferred to focus on the colonial past 200 years ago rather than on the destruction of democracy in the last decade. Ben Macintyre wrote in The Times: “But for many Haitians, the fault lies earlier — with Haiti’s colonial experience, the slavers and extortionists of empire who crippled it with debt and permanently stunted the economy. The fault line runs back 200 years, directly to France.”

As for the role of the US: “When the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, pledged a US presence in Haiti for today, tomorrow and the time ahead, she was addressing a central concern of a relationship that has swung wildly from intervention to neglect.”

In the Guardian, Jon Henley wrote a piece entitled, ‘Haiti: a long descent to hell.’

We wrote to Henley on January 26:

Hi Jon

In your January 14 Guardian article, ‘Haiti: a long descent to hell,’ you discussed Haiti’s history without once mentioning the role of the United States. Also in the Guardian, Peter Hallward wrote on January 13:

“Ever since the US invaded and occupied the country in 1915, every serious political attempt to allow Haiti’s people to move (in former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s phrase) ‘from absolute misery to a dignified poverty’ has been violently and deliberately blocked by the US government and some of its allies.” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/13/our-role-in-haitis-plight)

In 2004, Jeffrey Sachs, professor of economics at Columbia University, wrote in The Nation:

“Haiti, again, is ablaze. Almost nobody, however, understands that today’s chaos was made in Washington – deliberately, cynically, and steadfastly. History will bear this out.” (Sachs, ‘Fanning the flames of political chaos in Haiti’, The Nation, February 28, 2004)

Why did you make no mention of these issues?

Best wishes

David Edwards

Henley replied on January 27:

hi david
obviously i “did not once mention the role of the united states” (which is untrue, in fact: i did mention the occupation) because i am a fervent believer in the longterm benefits of US cultural and commercial imperialism.
happy?
no seriously: the article was about haiti’s colonial and post-colonial inheritance, the impossible reparations it was still paying until 1947, and the impact of its own corrupt and despotic rulers. i had five hours to write the piece and i ran out of time nd space to discuss the aristide era, about which many readers know something already and which in any event only compounded the country’s pre-existing problems.
i’m sorry this meant the article did not meet your high quality criteria. many other people have expressed their appreciation for throwing some light on an earlier period in haiti’s troubled history about which they knew nothing.
best wishes
jh
ps i assume you have chapter and verse to substantiate rofessor achs’s comment. unfortunately, at time of writing, didn’t.

If the media has had little time or space to consider the recent demolition of Haitian democracy, there has been room aplenty for speculation on the mysterious causes of Haitian suffering: “Why does God allow natural disasters?”, asked philosopher David Bain on the BBC website.

Archbishop of York John Sentamu wisely declared that he had “nothing to say to make sense of this horror”, while Canon Giles Fraser preferred to respond “not with clever argument but with prayer.” American Christian televangelist Pat Robertson said of Haitians: “They were under the heel of the French, you know Napoleon the third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil… ever since they have been cursed by one thing after another.”

For others the problem with Haiti appears to be the innate lawlessness of Haitians – “looting” has been a constant, shameful theme in media reporting of survivors’ efforts simply to stay alive. The BBC’s well-fed Washington correspondent, Matt Frei, opined from the stricken country that “looting is the only industry” and “the dignity of Haiti’s past is long forgotten”.

Other commentators have been awestruck by the fortitude and dignity of a people tragically accustomed to struggling against impossible odds.

Talk of colonial betrayals, deals with the devil, and a loss of dignity are fine. They are embarrassing, certainly, but not to the vested interests with the power to reward and punish. Expressions of sympathy in response to heartbreaking pictures on the evening news are also fine — they are important and admirable but ultimately unthreatening to the political and economic forces crushing the Haitian people.

More even than water, medicine, food and petrol, the people of Haiti need truth. They need donations of honesty from journalist whistleblowers willing to defy the self-imposed super-injunction on the complicity of their industry. They need journalists willing to break the silence, to defy the lie that only governments are to blame for the misery in our world.

Donate to Haiti.

1. Email to Media Lens, September 9, 2008.
2. Pilger, ‘The kidnapping of Haiti.’
3. Hallward, ‘Our role in Haiti’s plight,’ The Guardian, January 13, 2010.
4. Quoted, Chomsky, Year 501 — The Conquest Continues, Verso, 1993, p.209.
5. Quoted, Paul Quinn-Judge, ‘US reported to intercept Aristide calls,’ Boston Globe, September 8, 1994.
6. Chomsky, Understanding Power, The New Press, 2002, p.157.
7. Quoted Noam Chomsky, ‘Democracy Restored,’ Z Magazine, November 1994.
8. Quoted Anthony Fenton, ‘Media vs. reality in Haiti,’ February 13, 2004.
9. ‘Barricades go up as city braces for attack’, Tim Reid, The Times, February 26, 2004.
10. ‘From bad to worse’, Leader, The Guardian, February 14, 2004.
11. See our media alerts ‘Bringing Hell To Haiti’ and Part 2.
12. Chassagne, ‘Think of Haiti and imagine all that you love has gone,’ The Observer, January 17, 2010.

In 1990, the UN Commission on Human Rights appointed a Special Rapporteur on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography with a mandate to investigate the problem and submit reports to the General Assembly.

Today, Gulnara Shahinian holds the post, and on June 10, 2009 addressed Haiti’s Restaveks, a century-old system under which impoverished families, mostly rural and unable to adequately provide for their children, send them to live with wealthier or less poor ones in return for food, shelter, education, and a better life in return for tasks performed as servants — de facto slaves subjected to verbal and physical abuse.

Some as young as three are beaten, forced to do anything asked, request nothing, speak only when spoken to, display no emotion, and receive none of the benefits parents expected, just exploitation and mistreatment that’s often severe. Too often it’s from relatives as poor families often send their children to live with those better able to provide care, yet they seldom do.

Haiti’s poor also use them to help with domestic and other chores, and some work for homeless families under the worst of conditions, including nothing to eat for days, harder work, greater abuse, at times whippings leaving scars, getting attacked by rats in their sleep or street predators any time, and being easy prey for kidnappers who seize them for prostitution or forced labor, internally or abroad.

On July 10, 2009, Shahinian released a report titled, “Promotion and Protection of all Human Rights, Civil, Political, Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, including the Right to Development” covering contemporary forms of slavery that affect adults and children.

She called it a global issue in traditional and emerging forms that haven’t been sufficiently addressed. She also found that where laws on forced labor exist, enforcement is limited, and “very few policies and programmes… address bonded labour.” They should given its scale worldwide, affecting an estimated 27 million people conservatively and very likely many more as much of the problem is unreported.

In March 2009, this writer addressed it in an article titled, “Modern Slavery in America.” It’s disturbing and pervasive despite US laws prohibiting all forms of human trafficking through statutes created or strengthened by the 2000 Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act (VTVPA) providing for imprisonment for up to 20 years or longer as well as other penalties. Other laws were also enacted, including the 2003 Protect Act to end child exploitation.

Yet slavery exists in different forms, affecting farm workers, domestic help, factory and other sweatshop labor, restaurant and hotel work, guest workers on US military bases in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, and most of all for prostitution and sex services that exploit children as well as adults.

The International Labor Organization (ILO) defines forced labor as follows:

“… all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which said person has not offered himself (or herself) voluntarily.”

Forced child labor is:

(a) all forms of slavery or practices similar to slavery, such as the sale and trafficking of children, debt bondage and serfdom and forced or compulsory labor, including forced or compulsory recruitment of children for use in armed conflict;

(b) the use, procuring or offering of a child for prostitution, for the production of pornography or for pornographic performances;

(c) the use, procuring or offering of a child for illicit activities, in particular for the production and trafficking of drugs as defined in the relevant international treaties; (and)

(d) work which, by its nature or the circumstances in which it is carried out, is likely to harm the health, safety or morals of children.

The Free the Slaves.net’s definition is being “forced to work without pay under threat of violence and unable to walk away.”

Article 4 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.”

If sweatshop wage slavery is included, the problem is far greater, affecting many hundreds of millions of exploited workers globally, including a 2004 UNICEF estimate of about 218 million children performing labor (other than domestic), some as young as five, many in forced bondage, the majority doing hazardous work, and governments doing little or nothing to protect them.

On December 29, 1994, Haiti ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Under its provisions, authorities issue reports on the problem as required, but little else. Until he was ousted, however, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide addressed it. He created a special Haitian National Police child protection unit, and in 2003, got a new law passed prohibiting child domestic labor, mostly as Restaveks. Other legislation also passed banning trafficking in persons, a longstanding problem affecting adults as well.

Except for measures under Aristide, Haiti did little before or after his tenure to curb the problem, claiming a lack of resources. Instead, it established a hotline for children and others to report abuses, has a minimal staff, gets about 200 requests a year, visits homes for educational purposes, advises violators to stop their practices, occasionally removes abused children, but barely addresses the problem Shahinian called tantamount to slavery and condemned.

After a nine-day visit in early June, she said Haiti’s Restavek system:

deprives children of their family environment and violates their most basis rights such as the rights to education, health and food as well as subjecting them to multiple forms of abuse including economic exploitation, sexual violence and corporal punishment, violating their fundamental right to protection from all forms of violence.

She condemned professional recruiters who exploit children for financial gain and called for establishing a National Commission to eliminate the problem. She recommended registering all of them, providing alternative income generating programs for poor families, compulsory free primary education, and training for government officials to address the issue. Under the current Preval government, practically nothing has been done so far.

In June 2009, the US State Department Trafficking in Persons Report called Haiti a: “Special Case for the fourth consecutive year as the new government formed in September 2008 has not yet been able to address the significant challenges facing the country, including human trafficking.”

Urging its government “to take immediate action to address its serious trafficking-in-persons problems,” it was silent about America’s role in ousting Aristide and the fascist regime it installed. In collusion with Haitian elites, the result has been rampant oppression, sham elections, destruction of the majority democratic opposition, jails overflowing with political prisoners, and ending the beneficial political, economic and social changes Haitians briefly enjoyed.

Now the State Department calls Haiti a:

“source, transit, and destination country for men, women, and children trafficked for the purposes of forced labor and sexual exploitation. Haitian women, men, and children are trafficked into the Dominican Republic, The Bahamas, the United States, Europe, Canada, and Jamaica for exploitation in domestic service, agriculture, and construction…. Several NGOs noted a sharp increase in the number of Haitian children trafficked for sex and labor to the Dominican Republic and The Bahamas during 2008,” the majority being Restaveks, including those trafficked internally.

Dismissed and runaway Restaveks comprise “a significant proportion of the large number of street children, who frequently are forced to work in prostitution or street crime by violent criminal gangs. Women and girls from the Dominican Republic are trafficked into Haiti for commercial sexual exploitation.”

Some Haitians in the Dominican Republic, The Bahamas and America become virtual slaves as forced labor on sugar-cane plantations, in agriculture and construction. To a large degree, America bears major responsibility, yet is silent and initiates no change.

The Restavek Foundation

Founder Jean-Robert Cadet was once one himself, “endur(ing) years of physical and emotional abuse as a domestic slave until he received access to education-first in Haiti and later in the United States.”

He now addresses the problem on his web site and by speaking at colleges and universities throughout America and to government organizations globally. He also uses his foundation to help trapped children, providing them opportunities for education, paying for their tuition, uniforms and books, feeding them once a day, monitoring their health and well-being, and restoring their dignity.

His mission is to end Haitian child slavery and give hope to those enslaved. The Restavek Foundation “invest(s) in Haiti so that Haiti will allow us to invest in the children” — through a network of over 500 advocates across the country acting as a “voice for the voiceless.”

In the aftermath of Haiti’s quake, the Foundation is providing food and other essentials to areas not reached by others. They need help and ask for donations on their web site.

Post-Quake Child Trafficking

On February 1, New York Times writer Ginger Thompson headlined, “Case Stokes Haiti’s Fear for Children, and Itself,” reporting that, on January 29, 10 Americans were detained at the Dominican border for illegally trying to spirit 33 children from the country.

“The 10 Americans, the authorities said, had crossed the line.” Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive called them “kidnappers (who) knew what they were doing was wrong.” National Judicial Police chief, Frantz Thermilus, said: “What surprises me is that these people would never do something like this in their own country.” He’s wrong as the US is beset with adult and child trafficking, and the problem is global.

Affiliated with two Idaho-based Baptist churches, the excuse given rings hollow, saying that: “God wanted us to come here to help children, we are convinced of that. Our hearts were in the right place.”

They were headed for a Dominican Republic orphanage, existing only on paper, later to be “adopted” by US Evangelical Christian families. When stopped at the border, Haitian agents found them packed inside a bus. None had passports, and no documents authorized their transfer.

SOS Children’s Villages ran the Port-au-Prince orphanage where they were temporarily placed. Its regional director, Patricia Vargas, told Agence France Presse that “The majority of these children have families. Some of the older ones said their parents are alive, and some gave an address and phone number.” One eight-year child said “I am not an orphan. I still have my parents.” The Haitian Social Ministry confirmed that so did others. On January 30, SOS Villages was asked to help under the circumstances.

Its officials accused the Idaho group of taking “children under false pretenses. The allegations have to be thoroughly investigated but the Haitian police consider this incident as organized child trafficking.”

Laura Silsby heads the groups as CEO of a Boise-based online shopping web site called personalshopper.com. Last November, it filed papers with Idaho authorities to establish the New Life Children’s Refuge, ostensibly as an NGO. As part of their “Haitian Orphan Rescue Mission,” they plan a Dominican Republic orphanage for up to 200 children, earmarked for US adoptions, conversion to Evangelical Christianity, and apparent extremist indoctrination, given Silsby’s admission that Sarah Palin and the Manhattan Initiative are two of her favorites, the latter a right-wing Evangelical group opposed to abortion and gay marriage.

Although one scheme was stopped, UNICEF says, pre and post-quake, documented evidence shows many Haitian child abductions, including from hospitals, orphanages, and the street where so many are vulnerable.

The agency explained that pre-quake, Haiti had about 380,000 orphaned children. The number now is incalculable, but the message is clear. Many are on their own own to find food, shelter and medical care, making them vulnerable to traffickers for profit and exploitation.

In 2000, the UN adopted the Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, then in 2003, its Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children. Under its provisions, trafficking is illegal, defined as:

Trafficking in persons (by) the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation.

Exploitation is defined, “at a minimum,” to include “prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs.”

Anyone under 18 is considered a child, and State Parties are called on to adopt laws or other measures “to establish criminal offences” under the Convention. Haiti hasn’t done so, leaving its children vulnerable to trafficking and other abuses.

Pan American Development Foundation (PADF) Report on Child Trafficking in Haiti

In November 2009, PADF published a report titled, “Lost Childhoods in Haiti: Quantifying Child Trafficking, Restaveks & Victims of Violence.” It’s a disturbing picture of “extremely poor children who are sent to other homes to work as unpaid domestic servants,” and end up being beaten, sexually assaulted, and exploited by host families. Later, in their teens, “they are commonly tossed to the streets to fend for themselves and become victims of other types of abuses” because Haitian labor laws require employers to pay domestic workers over aged 15.

PADF studied the problem through “the largest field survey on human rights violations, with an emphasis on child trafficking, abuse and violence.” It conducted 1,458 personal interviews in troubled urban neighborhoods in Port-au-Prince, Cap-Haitien, Gonaives, Saint-Marc and Petit-Goave and learned the following:

• children are moving from impoverished households to less poor ones;
• in urban areas, an estimated 225,000 children are Restaveks, two-thirds of them girls;
• the impoverished Cite Soleil Port-au-Prince neighborhood had the highest percentage of Restavek children – 44%;
• families in the southern peninsula communities of Les Cayes, Jacmel, Jeremie and Leogane supply the most Restaveks to Port-au-Prince;
• some children sent to host families for education aren’t classified as Restaveks, but perform similar duties;
• more than 7% of urban households report incidents of rape, murder, kidnapping, or gang involvement, but the true number is likely higher as many incidents go unreported; and
• Port-au-Prince households had over double the amount in other cities (16%).

Over 30% of surveyed households have Restavek children, affecting 16% of all children and 22% of them treated that way. Overall, study findings show Restaveks aren’t solely a rural phenomenon given the high proportion of urban households with them.

The majority of urban ones were born in rural Haiti, but urban households comprise the largest recruitment destination. All regions supply them, the most important being southern peninsula rural areas. In addition, many households take in children as school borders, the vast majority treated like Restaveks without the label, and some families with them also send their own children to live with host families in return for services performed.

Kinship is a prime and more socially acceptable recruiting source. However, family ties may camouflage poor treatment when children are away during the school year. They traditionally do household chores at home, but as Restaveks far more in an abusive environment.

PADF cited other issues, including:

• growing numbers of street children forced to beg to survive;
• young women (including underage adolescents) recruited for prostitution;
• Restavek cross-border trafficking to the Dominican Republic, including for sex;
• kidnappings to sell children and women into bondage; and
• violence in urban neighborhoods, including organized murder, rape, other physical assaults, and kidnappings committed by the Haitian National Police, UN MINUSTAH peacekeepers, other armed “authorities,” and politically partisan gangs.

PADF Summary of Key Findings

An “astonishing high percentage” of surveyed children live with host families — 32% and 30% of surveyed households had Restaveks present. Other findings included:

• 16% of all surveyed children were placed as Restaveks, and 22% were treated that way, including 44% in Cite Soleil;
• two-thirds of Restaveks are girls;
• poverty is the root cause of Restavek placements;
• a significant minority of Restavek households placed their own children with host families; yet kinship ties don’t shield them from abusive treatment, even for those sent only for the school year;
• “the magnitude of the intra-urban movement of children within… metropolitan area(s) is (a) significant new development;”
• most urban Restaveks were born in rural areas, but in Port-au-Prince, other households are the largest single source; thus Restavek recruitment no longer can be viewed solely as a rural to urban phenomenon;
• other victimization forms include rape, murder, kidnapping, and cross-border trafficking; and
• most abused victims don’t seek help from authorities because little is available, including in court.

Public Policy and Haitian Law

Haitian law doesn’t specifically prohibit trafficking internally or cross-border, so seeking judicial redress is futile, and the police child protection unit doesn’t pursue these cases because statutory restrictions don’t exist.

Nonetheless, in March 2009, the Haitian parliament ratified (but doesn’t enforce) the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and its protocols on human trafficking and smuggling. The parliament is also considering a human trafficking law, but real social change was never before achieved, except under Aristide. Haitians have been oppressed for over 500 years. The current government has done nothing to change things, and now can’t under occupation.

A Final Comment

Given their overwhelming hardships, the last thing Haitians needed was the January 12 quake (the most destructive in the region in 170 years), affecting Port-au-Prince, surrounding areas, and other parts of the country, devastating the capital, killing many thousands, injuring many more, and disrupting the lives of three million or more people, adding to their crushing burden.

Many tens of thousands lost everything left stranded on their own, given the lack of essential aid most still aren’t getting. Everything is in shambles. Rubble is everywhere. The National Cathedral, Palace of Justice, and Supreme Court collapsed. So did hotels, other municipal buildings, business structures, schools and hospitals.

People still wander the streets dazed, searching for loved ones. The National Palace was heavily damaged, now under US control as a command center. So was UN headquarters, and many of its employees remain missing. In the wealthy Petionville neighborhood, a hospital, ministry building and private homes collapsed. So did other buildings across the capital and in rural communities like Leogane. Jacmel in the southeast also sustained major damage.

The Parliament collapsed. So did public buildings and hospitals, and those functioning are packed with victims or others queued outside waiting for treatment. The World Food Program (WFP) reached only 100,000 people as of January 31. On February 2, targeted vaccinations will begin that, according to the world’s foremost authority, Dr. Viera Scheibner, will exacerbate, not lessen the communicable disease problem as vaccines often cause the diseases they’re designed to prevent.

Enough food, clean drinking water and medical care remain urgent problems, the US occupation force doing nothing to help and actually obstructing aid deliveries by restricting incoming humanitarian flights and letting supplies stack up undelivered at the airport it controls. As a result, vital shipments are reaching a fraction of the millions who need them.

In its latest February 1 report, OCHA said hundreds of thousands of displaced Haitians need shelter provisions. Poor sanitation greatly increases the risk of communicable diseases and remains a huge challenge, and virtually all essential needs are in short supply.

It added:

Preliminary results from Port-au-Prince found that 93 percent of people surveyed said there was no adequate lighting; 93 percent said there were no latrines for women and men; 41 percent said the level of security was acceptable and 29 percent said it was very poor. The preliminary findings confirm that food, water, sanitation, health and shelter are the areas with the most urgent needs.

Before the tragedy, most Haitians had no running water, electricity, sanitation, or other public services leaving them on their own, virtually out of luck, and now out of it entirely with relief expected only for the privileged, not them beyond lip service and bare essentials, way short of what’s needed.

It’s an old story for some of the most abused, exploited, and neglected people anywhere, mostly by their powerful northern neighbor allied with Haitian economic elites; names like Acra, Apaid, Baussan, Biglo, Boulos, Brandt, Coles, Kouri, Loukas, Madsen, Mevs, Nadal, Sada, Vital, Vorbes, and other influential bourgeoisie interests exploiting their own people for profit.

Hundreds of thousands around the country are still coping with the damage that summer 2008 storms caused leaving them without food, clean water, other essentials, and around 70,000 homes destroyed. Gonaives, Haiti’s third largest city became uninhabitable. Most of Haiti’s livestock and food crops were destroyed as well as farm tools and seeds for replanting. Irrigation systems were demolished, and buildings throughout the country collapsed or were damaged, many severely. Now this, affecting Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas with the overall toll yet to be assessed.

For poor Haitians, it’s already known. Decimated by unimaginable hardships and deprivation, they’re on their own and out of luck because of the callous disregard for their lives and well-being – and their country now occupied for the duration.

Effective teams do this in business, sports, or any enterprise. An overall concept unites individual responses with someone actively corralling attention, and people accomplish together what none could alone. One singer can’t produce a Verdi opera nor one engineer a trip to the moon.

Many who count themselves as extreme individualists fail to note that their actions accrue meaning from a concept larger than themselves. The reclusive artist’s work becomes significant from the throngs that appreciate it. “The Army of One,” the military’s assertion of a soldier’s self-reliance, makes sense from its place in the nation’s military might.

Outcomes are proportioned to the number of people involved and the unity of thinking among them. High unity among even a few (think suicide bombers) may have great effect, but big constructive tasks demand both large numbers and intense unity. Common slogans united generations of mass movements–the Abolitionists, the Women’s Suffrage Movement, the Labor Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and the struggle of the farm workers. Religions have impact as numbers unite around a purpose, and as they lose either numbers or focus, their influence wanes.

What does it take to bring numbers and unity of mind together?

The glue is a concept important enough to warrant people devoting their lives to it. Armed forces of every country prepare to be shot at, missionaries leave the comfort of placid homes, and many, while sustaining themselves in commonplace work, devote the substance of their time to advancing a value. Such people constitute the backbone of political parties and associations promoting the well-being of humans and other living things. You could label us “a nation of believers” who believe it’s a good thing to unite voluntarily around a common purpose.

But why does the unifying factor need to be a concept?

The concept in humans serves in place of instinct in elephants or wolves for coping with problems. Humans instead invent the idea they think sustains their well-being and helps them sort among tradeoffs. It’s the last bar of appeal as they prioritize: this effort leads more directly to our goal than that. Without it, disputants are afloat in a sea of opinions and power, drawn this way and that by voices–the loudest, most fear-inducing, most recent, and with the strongest coercive power. Without a guiding concept, people unwittingly play out a British lawmaker’s description of another: “Lord X is like the cushion of a chair which retains the impression of the last person that sat upon it.”

In insecure times, people not committed to a constructive, unifying concept are easily manipulated to act against their own interests (Hitler, Joe McCarthy, the Red Scare). The Terrorist Scare of recent years induced some Americans to promote torture along with other foolish decisions. Even representative government itself can undermine people’s reflection on the direction of their country through its implication that some know better than others, and that the latter should cede control of the nation to the former. This has proven to be a flawed assumption. There may be no cognoscenti who know what others don‘t. Confident as we are of our civilized postures, we might recall that Germans were highly educated yet elected Hitler–even while his inner circle were saying privately, “If they elect us, we will never relinquish power.” A destructive idea united enough Germans to subvert government’s duty to insure the well-being of its citizens.

Re-examining our unifying ideas matters especially today as we face factors that can alter human life. Later generations may view as fatal our current contest between aggressive pursuit of short-term economic gain on the one hand, and the long-term life of the planet on the other (showing up later as desertification, species’ die-off, depletion of fresh water and other resources, climate change, and ocean pollution). Ideological militancy–mediocre thinking bound to intense emotion–may resort to dirty atomic weapons, and biological and chemical warfare. An international economic system that steadily transfers more wealth to the wealthy could induce worldwide disasters. While some five hundred billionaires rule the world economy, five of the world’s six billion people live in poor countries. Such invented disparities may already have so paralyzed our collective ability to respond that even governments together may be unable to avert the disastrous effects of climate change, and unable to prevent catastrophes such as errant meteors striking our planet.

What unites society’s varied influences now is their separateness. They individually go their own way, pursuing gain or advantage narrowly conceived. But even a cursory observation of cause and effect warrants the conclusion that they gradually destroy the planet and that effects will worsen until corralled within a better unifying idea.

If we could cleanly separate ideas and label this one good and that one bad, our task would be easier, but the conflict is between good things. Our personal choice of good may appear to another as a barrier to his. We emphasize the value of our own perceived good and run it as far as we can, preferring not to look at values we cancel out and ignoring even the conflict between two things we want. In Arizona last year, citizens were asked whether they wanted more or less spending by state government. A large majority predictably wanted less. They were asked then, for each of seven budget categories, whether they wanted more or less spending on it, and wanted more on six of the seven, with prisons the only exception. We want the good thing in fuzzy dimension, but not the details that accomplish it.

This pattern extends beyond Arizona. People, in general, are seldom guided by a comprehensive concept but instead go first to their personal needs and interests. Guiding oneself by an overarching value isn’t automatic nor instinctive, but depends on conscious training in the value of self-discipline. Left to ourselves, we cluster in groups that vie against each other, arguing whether to save banks, whales, houses, birds, jobs, trees, children, elders, or the unemployed.

We defer our own short-term interest easiest upon recognizing that long-term well-being matters more and that our self-restraint now will benefit others we regard as our own. We seldom reach this conclusion on our own because it stretches our natural, tribal-level concept of group. Usually others must remind us of the distant effects on others we don’t see and enduring effects on people yet to be born. Social change involves much explaining, imagining, and sense-making.

However we come to it, the nation (and world) can really use a vision of the whole right now that people in every corner of society can buy into. It’s especially timely because we‘re going to ask them to limit their short-term gain for the sake of better long-term results for everyone. Our point isn’t to pit the rich against the poor as the Communists did, or risk takers against the secure, or educated against the uneducated. The issue is more subtle. Addressing those who now benefit most from the prevailing system or who seek benefits that will destroy other values, we ask them if a value exists that’s larger than their current advantage. We project a future for them and their kind that might interest them more than does greater benefit for themselves just now. A parallel shift has appeared in business literature in recent years with the question, “Can business save the world?“ Entrepreneurs who look for it can often find a way to solve a problem while profiting themselves and employing others. If instead we only change the terms of conflict, we gain little and perpetuate manipulation of interests.

The phrase I propose to describe the emergent unifying concept is a direction to pursue, a criterion to apply, and not an end-state to fulfill. The concept of the good of the whole pictures constructive action simultaneously on all fronts possible; taking into account all the effects of our decisions so they’re as helpful as they can be, and bidding us defer action while we investigate outcomes that even could be destructive. Our blindered assertion of a narrow value we replace with a willingness to look around and to the side for effects we hadn’t noticed. Even those who promote capitalism as an unmitigated good have discovered recently that its good has limits; that unless guided by broader values, it can run society into the ground. Too many ways to pursue a good leave the field of action deep in detritus.

My previous articles suggested that constructive social change comes with a price, and that better quality thinking is crucial to fulfilling it. Here I add the notion that people need a common unifying idea, which I refer to as the good of the whole.

Next I’ll discuss how people take up a common idea.

Communication is what one does with words and what they do to us.

— J. Samuel Bois, The Art of Awareness¹

Our language points up contrasts and dichotomies while reality often falls through the cracks between the categories.

— S.I. Hayakawa and William Dresser, Dimensions of Meaning²

Aristotle was right in acknowledging that “the power of speech is intended to express what is advantageous and what harmful, what is just and what unjust.” Our ability, as human beings, to communicate with each other, to inspire and motivate, to exchange ideas about the world, has not only made life easier, but separated us from other breeds of species surrounding. And, it appears to me, the value of language (or communication) can be used to measure the quality of life within any society and community.

The words used; the verbs expressed; the labels invented—all measurements of a people’s understanding of, and connection to, reality. If this is true, what can be said of the “illegal immigration” debate that has taken greater command of the imaginations of our society in recent times? And what can be delineated from the key words bandied around ruthlessly?

Right off the bat, we are informed—by Right-wing ideologues—that Mexican citizens who cross the border overnight to establish humble livings for themselves in the U.S. are not “undocumented workers” but “illegal aliens.” In this context, there is little room left for the histories and backgrounds of the “criminals” to breathe. The policies that provoke families, for instance, to take such drastic measures is utterly erased—and condemned as inconsequential. They are “aliens”—foreign species unworthy of recognition and hostile to the well-being of human beings—citizens. That the combination of “illegal” and “alien” is nonsensical at best and intellectually valueless at worst never crosses the minds of the pundits and shock jocks whose hard work has brought it into mainstream and celebrated discourse. It would seem, to those below the legal alcohol limit, that no rational basis exists upon which to condemn an “alien” as “illegal.”

The very nature of an “alien” prescribes wholly different sets of principles—unlike the pre-established tenets used to punish or promote citizens—for engagement and interrogation. An “alien,” by nature, belongs to a different world and different geographical territory. And, if Star Wars is to be taken seriously, aliens demand unique devices just to understand them—let alone control and repress them. But the adjective “illegal”—as opposed to, say, “undocumented” or “unregistered”—came to life once brain-zapped nitwits, bent on dehumanizing otherized citizens (“aliens”), ran out of creative options to make ends meet. They convinced themselves: by adding “illegal” as a prefix, no one would be left unsure if our targets are innocent or guilty. Whether or not the term “illegal alien” is just as silly—if not more—as “illegal criminal” isn’t of mental merit. This, unfortunately, is the limit to which many are willing to go beyond in criminalizing and demonizing those seen as different—thus deficient.

It’s critical intellectuals and educators take seriously the effect words can have on citizens who otherwise consider themselves enlightened enough to stay clear of semantic manipulation. History shows even the most advanced of men and women can be seduced into unconscionable deeds by trained orators. As was the case in Germany during the Hitlerian regime, many never thought themselves that gullible, that impressionable; but even words that appealed to most as abstract and indirect evoked strong and costly reactions in the hearts and minds of everyday citizens.

Language scholars S.I. Hayakawa and William Dresser explained more definitely four decades ago how vulnerable human beings really are to “magic words”:

The Nazis purposely used terminology which appeared concrete but was in reality ambiguous and meaningless. The “enemies” of Germany that had to be destroyed, said Hitler, were the “November criminals,” the “red dragon,” the “Jewish plague,” the “parliamentarians,” the “democratic-Marxist-Jew,” the “Jewish bacillus.” All these referentially meaningless abstractions were in turn grouped together into the equally abstract “System.”³

English psychiatrist Anthony Storr added deeper layers in suggesting that Hitler’s words, specifically at Nuremberg rallies, “was not intended to convey information but took on the quality of an incantation or chant.”⁴ Storr noted that the marching bands and musical instruments preceding and proceeding Hitler’s remarks provided much cover for his oratorical deficits and “reinforce[d] the effect which the music, the banners, the search-lights, and the processions had already induced.”⁵ Thus, even the most inhumane and repugnant charges, in this sense, took on melodic tones—better digested and internalized.

Many on the extreme Right today, though not as powerful or skilled or smart as Hitler was, have been eliciting just as dangerous an effect in listeners’ minds. A man who shot his way into a Tennessee Unitarian church in June 2008 confessed he “hated the liberal movement” in America and didn’t care too much for “liberals in general as well as gays.” He was particularly disturbed by some of the liberal stances taken by the Unitarian church in past times.⁶ In a letter written right before his murderous rampage, the gunman expressed desire to “kill … every Democrat in the Senate & House [and] the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg’s book.” Here, he was making reference to a book written by the conservative commentator, 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America (And Al Franken Is #37), in which liberals and democrats are recreated as America-hating traitors with deep-seated desires to see their country destroyed. Police officers also discovered other liberal-bashing books at the gunman’s house which, by their title, reveal how effective hate speech can be in pushing human beings over the edge of sanity: Liberalism is a Mental Disorder, Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism and Liberalism.

Shock-jocks understand that in times of economic uncertainty and political upheaval, human beings are vulnerable and impressionable, and can be manipulated with ease. A local Tennessee police chief explained how the church shooter, a 58-year-old unemployed truck driver, came to blame liberals for his financial woes: “It appears that what brought him to this horrible event was his lack of being able to obtain a job, his frustration over that, and his stated hatred for the liberal movement.”

Like in Hitler’s Germany when it was fashionable to blame the Jews, and in George Wallace’s Alabama where it was rational to blame the Niggers, so it is in the hard-Right’s America easy to blame the liberals, or democrats, or progressives—or anyone bold enough to think for themselves.

With tens of millions of Americans tuned into the various streams of talk radio, those who cherish the very foundations upon which a livable society stands must become more concerned about the level of acidity spewed daily in the name of Free Speech. Examples of the corrosiveness that today passes for rhetoric from those corners are endless, but a few are worth citing.

Consider the words of talk show host Michael Savage on Autism, which he considers “a fraud, a racket”:

I’ll tell you what autism is. In 99 percent of the cases, it’s a brat who hasn’t been told to cut the act out. That’s what autism is. What do you mean they scream and they’re silent? They don’t have a father around to tell them, “Don’t act like a moron. You’ll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz. Straighten up. Act like a man. Don’t sit there crying and screaming, idiot.”⁷

Similar comments were made by fellow crackpot Neal Boortz who, in early 2008, ridiculed then-candidate John Edwards’ work on behalf of New Orleans residents, insisting that “so-called refugees” from the region who sought relief around the country following the 2005 category-5 hurricane “was just a glorified episode of putting out the garbage.” He went further:

That wasn’t the cries of the downtrodden. That’s the cries of the useless, the worthless. New Orleans was a welfare city, a city of parasites, a city of people who could not, and had no desire to fend for themselves. You have a hurricane descending on them and they sit on their fat asses and wait for somebody else to come rescue them.⁸

FOX News star Bill O’Reilly had laid the foundation three years earlier:

Now, our government has a duty to provide a safety net so these people aren’t living under bridges. But some of them are anyway, because all the entitlement money they get they spend on heroin or crack or alcohol. … Many, many, many of the poor in New Orleans … weren’t going to leave no matter what you did. They were drug-addicted. They weren’t going to get turned off from their source. They were thugs.⁹

These aren’t just the expressions of relatively heartless values and presuppositions; they are marching orders to listeners who, as is the case with one celebrated commentator, happily refer to themselves as “dittoheads.” And you don’t have to take my words for it. Talk show host Rush Limbaugh, currently the most listened-to personality in the genre, explained over a decade ago that the primary purpose of the shock jock is “to make you mad. And the formula for making you—the viewer or the listener—mad hasn’t changed a bit; yet people keep falling for it.” And whether the “dittoheads” who’ve made an idol of him are aware at all, his fulfillment is not in educating or enlightening, but in “stirring them up.” For Limbaugh, “callers are like music on a record station—you play the top ten. You don’t take bad calls.” These “callers” cannot be granted license to “control the show.” After all, “people turn on the radio to be entertained, to be entertained, to be entertained.”¹⁰

Unsurprisingly, Limbaugh’s language pales in comparison to those shared by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. who, in a talk to Black radio announcers in 1967, cautioned broadcasters to be cognizant of “the role which the radio announcer plays in the life of our people—for better or for worse.” King praised the efforts of Tall Paul White, Pervis Spann, and Georgia Woods for using their airwaves to furnish social justice—educating, fundraising, etc.—during the Civil Rights battles of the ‘60s. “We would certainly not have come so far without your support,” King told them. “In a real sense, you have paved the way for social and political change by creating a powerful, cultural bridge between Black and White.” Dr. King believed the radio was the only avenue upon which the masses depended for information; and with that much given, much was required from radio announcers. King, nonetheless, acknowledged much still had to be done to expand the possibilities, on a national scale, of radio as an educational tool: “But, my brothers and my sisters, we are only beginning. We still have a long, long way to go.”

How disappointed might Dr. King be today, in what has come to define radio as we know it? How embarrassed might he be to witness the rise of the shock jock and the decline of the radio educator? And how morally indignant might he feel toward the various ways talk show personalities dangerously inflame passions and incite emotions in viewers—often culminating in lamentable episodes, such as Bill O’Reilly’s accused contribution to the murder of abortion doctor George Tiller (whom he numerously attacked as “Tiller the Baby Killer”). Media critic Rory O’ Conner explained in a Bill Moyers feature just how listeners are, as Limbaugh might put it, stirred up—over and over again:

Here’s the real problem. When you shock somebody, if you come back the next time and you apply the same stimulus, it’s not shocking any longer. It’s already happened. So you have to ratchet it up a little bit. So how do you cut through? How do you really shock? … [Y]ou have to constantly be jacking up the pressure. And ultimately, there’s gonna be some deranged person out there in that audience who’s gonna say, “You know what? That’s a good idea. Let me act on that.”¹¹

When words are used weapon-like, to attack and destroy, to conquer and dominate, those who suffer the most are those on the sidelines—those considered spectators, entertained by the spectacle of cruelty. What is rarely addressed is how much of a psychological impact takes toll on the minds of listeners and viewers who, day-in-day-out, are terrorized by on-air personalities whose careers rest solely on calling enemies incendiary names and putting political fatwahs on the heads of opponents. If the incidents of the Unitarian church and the abortion doctor are of any significance, its clear more emphasis must be placed on the non-neutral observers who are “shocked” into ever higher levels of inhumanity by men who consider themselves little other than entertainers.

As Henry Giroux put it recently,

the language of oppression and cruelty becomes normalized, removed from the sphere of criticism and the culture of questioning. Such a language does more than normalize ignorance, illiteracy and irrationality; it also produces a kind of psychic hardening and deep-rooted pathology in a society increasingly willing to eliminate the policies that enable social bonds and protections necessary for a substantive democracy.¹²

In times such as this, marked by mass civic illiteracy, coupled with economic uncertainty, tripled with political instability, quadrupled with the arrogance of private and political elites, citizens are most vulnerable to the primitive suggestions of the low-grade thinkers employed by Right-wing organizations to bluster on for four hours daily.¹³ But it is also in times like this that those same vulnerable populations can be best uplifted and educated by concerned thinkers and intellectuals dedicated to making the best with what’s left of our wobbling world.

1. J. Samuel Bois, The Art of Awareness: A Textbook on General Semantics and Epistemics (Dubuque, Iowa: W. C. Brown Co., 1973), p. 130.
2. S.I. Hayakawa and William Dresser, Dimensions of Meaning (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1970), p. 5.
3. Ibid., p. 50.
4. Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind (New York: Free Press, 1992), p. 46.
5. Ibid., p. 47.
6. Associated Press, “Police: Killer targeted church for liberal views,” MSNBC (July 28, 2008).
7. Transcript and Audio
8. Transcript and Audio
9. Transcript and Audio
10. Video
11. Bill Moyers Journal, “Rage on the Radio,” PBS (September 12, 2008).
12. Henry A. Giroux, “Language and the Politics of the Living Dead,” TruthOut (January 19, 2010).
13. Chris Hedges, “America the Illiterate,” Truthdig (November 10, 2008).

The British couple were kidnapped by Somalian pirates in the Indian Ocean. Paul and Rachel may be facing a doomed fate as the British Government is blocking a deal for their release.

A company that claimed to have had a deal for the release of Paul and Rachel Chandler said it was scuppered by the British Government’s refusal to negotiate with hostage-takers and said today that it demanded to be allowed to arrange their release.

In the centre of the British Government’s refusal to interfere in this saga we meet none other than David Miliband the Foreign Secretary

The Guardian reported that Miliband insisted that “the government would not get involved in any ransom payments to secure the Chandlers’ release”.

Miliband said he could not stop private individuals from pursuing a ransom deal, but it was not in Britain’s interests to make concessions to hostage-takers.

On the face of it Miliband’s stand can be easily understood. The foreign secretary could argue, for instance, that negotiating with pirates or other outlaws may expose more Brits to different security risks. Yet, it is very perplexing to find out that as much as Miliband is reluctant to interfere with the release of the abducted British couple, he rushed to voice his support in favour of the release of the IDF guard Gilad Shalit. In spite of the fact that Shalit is not a British subject and was taken prisoner in a military action while serving as a guard in the biggest concentration camp known to man namely Gaza, Miliband was rather vocal in demanding his ‘immediate’ release.

One would expect the Foreign Secretary to care primarily about British citizens rather than foreign soldiers who maintain an illegal occupation and the starvation of millions.

Here is the transcription of Miliband’s emotional plea to Hamas. It is taken from a British official governmental site.

Today is the third anniversary of the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit. Both British Ministers and the British Ambassador in Israel have had repeated contact with Gilad’s family and emphasized our support for Gilad’s immediate release. Last September, the Ambassador helped to deliver over 2,000 Jewish New Year cards for Gilad to the ICRC as part of a campaign organized by the UK Jewish community. I repeat the UK’s call to Hamas for his immediate, unconditional, and safe release. We share the Shalit family’s dismay at Hamas’s refusal to allow the ICRC access to Gilad. (British Foreign Secretary David Miliband)

It is perplexing to find out that Miliband showed far more ‘restraint’ in his support of his troubled fellow British citizens: Paul and Rachel Chandler. Bearing in mind that Miliband is listed as an Israeli Hasbara (propaganda) author on an official Israeli website, one way to explain it all may have something to do with the teaching of Rabbi Akiva.

According to the Jewish Magazine, Rabbi Akiva teaches us that ‘Love your fellow Jew as you love yourself’ is the great general commandment of the Torah. According to the magazine, Akiva is basing it on the verse, “and you shall love your fellow Jew, for I am the Lord, your G-d.” The command to love your fellow Jew is one of the basic mitzvas of the Torah.¹ So much so, that Rabbi Akiva made this the pivotal point upon which all of the Torah is based. And yet with all due respect to the Torah, Rabbi Akiva and other Rabbis, Brits may expect their foreign minister to care for the British Chandlers at least as much as he cares for an IDF soldier Gilad Shalit.

1. This very Judeo-centric interpretation of Rabbi Akiva’s insight as a tribal bond is rather common within Jewish Rabbinical circles. However, it is crucial to mention that the Hebrew translation of Akiva’s insight is universal in its spirit. It could be translated as ‘love your neighbour as yourself’. As many scholars before have said, though Judaism could also be interpreted as a universal insight, in reality, the shift into a universal ethos was led primarily by Christianity which aimed to transcend itself beyond the tribal.

Since 1948, hundreds of UN resolutions and civil society actions condemned Israel’s lawlessness; its crimes of war and against humanity; occupation; discriminatory policies; illegal home demolitions, land seizures and settlements; oppression of a civilian population; the Separation Wall; the Gaza siege; and preemptive imperial wars.

Nothing so far has worked. Palestine is still occupied. Its people continue to suffer. Their human rights are denied. World leaders ignore them. This no longer can be tolerated. In solidarity, people of conscience everywhere must pressure Israel with BDS initiatives that include boycotting Israeli companies, their products and services, and global ones supporting the occupation. They’re numerous, many with familiar names.

Below is a partial list, starting with global giants, Israeli companies following. Others can be added, but use it as a good start along with a New Year’s resolution to boycott them and encourage others to do it as well.

Motorola

The US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation “aim(s) to change those US policies that both sustain Israel’s 42-year occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, and deny equal rights for all.” It started with a boycott campaign to “Hang up on Motorola” and its subsidiary, Motorola Israel, that support the worst of illegal occupation practices. They produce:

• 980 Low Altitude Proximity Fuses for the MK-80 series of high-explosive bombs used against civilian and other non-combatant targets with devastating effect;
• the “Mountain Rose” secure cell phone communication system, used exclusively in Occupied Palestine;
• Wide Area Surveillance System (WAAS) to monitor and secure the Separation Wall, built on about 12% of stolen West Bank land; and
• radar detection devices and thermal cameras for dozens of illegal West Bank settlements.

Morotola consumer products are sold globally, including its cell phones, cordless and corded phones, the Droid phone, accessories, cable modems, digital video equipment, and more. “Hang up on Motorola” and get others to do it, too.

Estee Lauder

Board Member Ronald Lauder chairs the Jewish National Fund and is former a JNF president. In 1901, the Fifth Zionist Congress established it to “purchase, take on lease or in exchange, or otherwise acquire any lands, forests, rights of possession and other rights… for the purpose of settling Jews on (Palestinian) lands.” About 80% of the land was confiscated, not bought from its rightful owners — expelled Palestinians in Israel’s “War of Independence.”

JNF calls itself “Caretakers of the land of Israel for over a century (and) a global environmental leader by planting 240 million trees, building over 200 reservoirs and dams, developing over 250,000 acres of land, creating more than 1,000 parks, providing infrastructure for over 1,000 communities (and) bringing life to the Negev Desert,” exclusively for Jews on stolen Palestinian lands.

JNF develops land. It doesn’t sell it, but can lease it to Jews or any Jewish-controlled company, organization or entity. It holds these lands on behalf of “the Jewish People in perpetuity.” Non-Jews are entirely excluded from renting or buying property, getting financing, opening a business, or doing virtually anything on Jewish land under a strict apartheid policy. JNF policies have been legally challenged, so far without success.

Besides Ronald, other Lauders are also involved – Leonard, Evelyn and William. The company produces skin care, makeup, fragrance and hair care products that include Clinique, Aramis, Lab Series, Prescriptives and Origins. Acquired brands include M*A*C, Bobbi Brown, La Mer, Jo Malone, Aveda, Bumble and Bumble, Darphin, and Ojon. It’s also the fragrance and beauty products licensee for Kiton, Tommy Hilfiger, Donna Karan, Michael Kors, Sean John, Missoni, Tom Ford, and Mustang.

Other products sold through alternative channels include American Beauty, Flirt!, good skin, Daisy Fuentes, Coach, and Eyes by Design. The company is headquartered in New York, with many stores nationally and in Canada operating Estee Lauder “counters.”

L’Oreal/Body Shop

The Palestinian BDS National Committee calls L’Oreal “Makeup for Israeli apartheid,” and asks consumers globally to boycott “the products of the French cosmetics giant… due to its deep and extensive involvement in business relations with Israel….”

There since the mid-1990s, its L’Oreal Israel subsidiary operates a factory in Migdal Haemek in the Lower Galilee where the Migdal Haemek settlement expelled Palestinian residents, denies their right of return, and expropriated their land for exclusive Jewish use.

L’Oreal Israel makes a line of Natural Sea Beauty products using Dead Sea minerals. However, one-third of its western shore is in the West Bank, and the entire area and its resources are off limits to Palestinians to let Israel exploit it for mining and international tourism.

In July 2008, the company also gave a $100,000 “lifetime achievement” award to an Israeli Weizmann Institute scientist, a research center that clandestinely develops nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons for the IDF war machine.

In addition, L’Oreal Israel’s chairman, Gad Propper, is the founding chairman of the Israel-EU Chamber of Commerce, and was heavily involved in promoting trade with Australia and New Zealand. Since the mid-1990s, Israel has been L’Oreal’s regional commercial center.

Its brands include Maybelline, Lancome, Matrix, Redken, Vichy/Dermablend, and Helena Rubinstein. It also owns the Body Shop, a company reputed to be socially conscious, except when it comes to Palestine.

Intel

The technology giant produces computer processors and other hardware components employing thousands of Israelis. It’s been one of Israel’s major supporters since opening its first development center outside America in Haifa in 1974. Ever since, it’s heavily invested in the country and operates an annual billion dollar export business. It has a microprocessor plant in Har Hotzvim, Jerusalem, another development center there as well, a plant in Lachish-Qiryat Gat, a branch for the development of network communications products in Omer, close to Beersheba, as well as other operations.

Its Qiryat Gat plant lies on Iraq al Manshiya village land where 2,000 Palestinians were expelled to construct the illegal settlement that replaced it. Al-Awda (the Palestinian Right to Return Coalition) urges legal action against Intel for using it.

Intel Israel also supports apartheid education, saying the company:

“promot(es)… higher education (through) scholarships for (Israeli) students (and) allocates considerable resources to funding research and purchasing laboratory equipment.”

The company disdains Palestinian rights by supporting Israeli apartheid, lawlessness, and repressive policies.

McDonald’s

It’s the world’s largest fast food retailer, operating in about 120 countries globally, including in Israel since 1993, with about 150 restaurants and a policy of firing Arab workers caught speaking Arabic.

McDonald’s is also a major partner of the Jewish United Fund (JUF) and Jewish Federation. Through its Israel Commission, JUF “works to maintain American military, economic and diplomatic support for Israel; monitors and, when necessary, responds to media coverage of Israel.” JUF is also a major fundraiser, and, through its “Partnership to Israel” program, contributes large sums annually to further illegal settlement development on occupied Palestinian land.

Coca-Cola

The company is the world’s largest soft drink maker, with numerous brands sold virtually everywhere globally. Since the mid-1960s, it’s been been a staunch Israel supporter, and in 1997, the country’s Chamber of Commerce and Economic Mission praised its chairman, Roberto Goizueta, for 30 years of support and for refusing to honor an Arab boycott at the expense of lost regional business. In 2002, Coca-Cola announced plans to build a Kiryat Gat plant on stolen Palestinian land, and in 2005, raised its investment in the Israeli-based Tavor Winery to 51%.

In 2002, the company also helped fund a pro-Israel propaganda lecture by National Public Radio’s Linda Gradstein, claimed to be unbiased.

Disney

The company’s Florida Epcot Center Millennium exhibition depicts occupied Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, a joint effort by Tel Aviv and Disney to Judaize the city preparatory to legitimizing Israel’s claim.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry, in charge of the exhibit, says it highlights the city’s importance to Muslims, Christians and Jews alike, but a formal statement asserts:

There is no doubt that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel (and) the position of Jerusalem as the key component to the Israeli pavilion… speaks for itself without a clearer or stronger statement being necessary.

Of the exhibit’s $8 million cost, Israel paid less than one-fourth, Disney the rest.

Home Depot

As the world’s largest home improvement retailer, it’s second only to Wal-Mart in total retail sales. Its founder and former chairman, Bernard Marcus, actively supports Israel, including through the Marcus Foundation promoting Jewish issues.

IBM

The company invests heavily in Israel, and according to former executive, Lawrence Ricciardi, “This wedge of land and the huge ideals it represents are very important to IBM.”

In June 2001, the American-Israel Friendship League praised the company and two others at its Partners for Democracy Award dinner. In May 2002, the Israel-America Chamber of Commerce gave IBM the Ambassador’s Award “in recognition of its outstanding contribution to the development of the Israeli high-tech industry and (for) advancing trade between the US and Israel.”

IBM began its regional operations in 1949 and was the first large US company with a wholly owned Israeli subsidiary. Its Haifa Research Laboratories employs over 2,000 people doing extensive research cooperatively with the US-based operations. For decades, it’s also been involved with Israeli start-ups and venture capital funds.

Revlon

Billionaire Ronald Perelman controls the company, a major producer of cosmetics, skin care, fragrance and personal care products. He also supports Israeli causes, and is a trustee of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the notorious pro-Israel front group with over 300,000 global members and support from prominent figures like himself, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Senator Charles Schumer, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and many others.

Starbucks

Chairman Howard Shultz is staunchly pro-Israel. In 1998, the Jerusalem Fund of Aish HaTorah gave him “The Israel 50th Anniversary Friend of Zion Tribute Award” for “playing a key role in promoting a close alliance between the United States and Israel.” In 2002, Israel’s Foreign Ministry praised him for being key to the country’s long-term PR success, through his provocative speeches accusing Palestinians of terrorism, calling intifada resistance anti-semitism, asking Americans to back Israel against a common enemy, and sponsoring fund raisers for Israeli causes.

Jointly with the Israeli-based Delek Group, Starbucks Coffee International operated a joint venture in Israel, opened six stores, then shut them after heavy losses.

The Limited

The company is a major retailer with five specialty brands, including Express, The Limited, Lane Bryant, Lerner New York and Structure as well as the major ownership of Intimate Brands.

Its founder and CEO, Leslie Wexner, is a board member of the pro-Israeli Emet News Service, and through his Wexner Foundation promotes “strengthening Jewish Leadership in North America and Israel.” One of its initiatives finances up to 10 Israeli officials at Harvard annually for a year-long Master in Public Administration program (MPA) combined with intensive leadership development. Many alumni return home to high ministerial positions and similar IDF ones.

Wexner also sponsors “Birthright Israel” that brings young American Jews to the country for intensive indoctrination. He supports Hillel, Israel’s bastion on college campuses, and in April 2003, a leaked Wexler commissioned Luntz Research document revealed Israel’s propaganda strategy following the Iraq war. The report titled, “Wexler Analysis: Israeli Communications Priorities 2003″ had 11 key recommendations “on behalf of Israel… in a post-Saddam world.”

It called Saddam Hussein “two of the most hated words in the English language” and the ones (tying) Israel to America…. The day we allow Saddam to take his eventual place in the trash heap of history is the day we lose our strongest weapon in the linguistic defense of Israel.”

Replacing him are Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Iranian government as designated “terrorists,” propagandized against to portray Israel as surrounded and threatened by hordes of hostile Muslims bent on its destruction, when, in fact, the Jewish state is the main regional threat.

The Luntz report also called the illegal settlements Israel’s “Achilles heel” against which there’s no good defense. Wexner is one of its best.

News Corporation

It’s the Rupert Murdoch-owned media giant that includes dozens of print publications, motion pictures, book publishing, and Fox News, what Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) calls “the most biased name in news… with its extraordinary right-wing tilt” that includes one-sided Israeli support, and no wonder.

Murdoch invests heavily in Israel and was one of three US companies the American-Israel Friendship League honored for their support at their June 2001 Partners for Democracy Awards dinner. Murdoch, in fact, co-chaired the dinner, was a close friend of Ariel Sharon, calls himself a lifelong ally of Israel, and shows it through one-sided reporting allowing no wiggle room for staff deviation.

Sara Lee

It’s the world’s largest clothing manufacturer, owning in whole or in part familiar brands, including Hanes, Playtex, Champion, Leggs, and Wonderbra. Its food brands include Sara Lee, Ball Park, Hillshire Farm, and Jimmy Dean, and its global businesses include Fresh Bakery, North American Retail, Foodservice, International Beverage, International Bakery, and International Household and Body Care. It also owns a 30% stake in the Israeli company Delta Galil. More on it below.

In 1998, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu awarded Sara Lee Personal Products executive Lucien Nessim (from its European subsidiary) its highest honor, the Jubilee Award, in recognition of those individuals or organizations who’ve helped Israel’s economy most through trade and investments.

Many other companies and/or their officials have also won it, including Johnson and Johnson, the UK retailer Marks & Spencer, the French food company Danone, Kimberly-Clark, L’Oreal, Nestle, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Pratt & Whitney, Volkswagon, De Beers, Goldman Sachs, Archer Daniel Midland, Cisco Systems, Motorola, AOL, formerly AOL/Time Warner, and numerous others.

Major Israeli companies include:

Delta Galil Industries Ltd.

Israel’s largest textile manufacturer produces clothing and underwear for popular brands including, Gap, J-Crew, JC Penny, Calvin Klein, Playtex, Victoria’s Secret, Hugo Boss, Banana Republic, Ralph Lauren, and others.

Dov Lautman founded and chairs the company, is close to top Israeli officials, and achieved notoriety after sweatshopwatch.org called him a “Sweatshop Czar” for exploiting Arab labor in Egypt and Jordan. In March 2007, he won the Israel Prize for lifetime achievement for his contribution to the country and its people at the expense of neighboring Arabs he exploits.

Ahava

From its illegal Mitzpe Shalem settlement facility, the company produces cosmetics using Dead Sea salt, minerals, and mud, natural substances extracted from West Bank Palestinian land.

Code Pink’s “Stolen Beauty” campaign says:

Ahava promises “Beauty Secrets from the Dead Sea.” And wait until you hear those secrets! Because Ahava is hiding the ugly truth — its products actually come from stolen Palestinian natural resources…. Don’t let the ‘Made in Israel’ sticker fool you — when you buy Avaha products you help finance the destruction of hope for a peaceful and just future for both Israelis and Palestinians.

Avaha uses Palestinian resources without their permission and pays no compensation for them. In addition, Israel denies Palestinians access to the West Bank portion of the Dead Sea so companies like Avaha can exploit it.

Dorot Garlic and Herbs

Established in 1992 in Kibbutz Dorot, the company is now Israel’s largest frozen seasonings supplier to food retainers, hotels, and restaurants in America, Canada and Europe.

The Strauss Group and Its Subsidiaries

Israel’s second largest food and beverage company supports the Golani reconnaissance platoon, infamous for its decades of slaughtering Palestinians, most recently during Operation Cast Lead.

In the “corporate responsibility” section of its website, a sub-heading titled “In the Field With Soldiers” states:

“Our connection with soldiers goes as far back as the country, and even further. We see a mission and need to continue to provide our soldiers with support, to enhance their quality of life and service conditions, and sweeten their special moments… at the front to spoil them with our best products,” including Max Brenner Chocolates — another brand to boycott because the company backs Israel’s killing machine.

Sabra is another Strauss company in a joint venture with Pepsico. It produces traditional Arab salads like hummus, baba ghanoush, and fried eggplant.

Agrexco

The company is half Israeli state-owned, exporting fresh fruits, vegetables, and herbs from Israel and the Occupied Territories, operating under the Carmel, Jaffa and Coral brands. In the West Bank, Agrexco exploits Palestinian workers, including children, paying sub-poverty wages, no benefits, no sick or holiday pay, no rights, and no union.

Hadiklaim

The Israeli Date Growers’ Cooperative sells 65% of all Israeli and West Bank settlement-produced dates under the brand names King Solomon and Jordan River. They also supply supermarkets and retail chains that market them under their own private brands. Customers include UK-based Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury, Tesco and Waitrose.

Harvesting dates is hard work and why Israelis use cheap Palestinian labor for it — preferably children who are small, agile, work for less, and are easier to cheat.

The job entails days beginning at 5AM, being hoisted atop date palm trees up to 12 meters, left there for up to eight hours with no break and no way down until mechanically returned at day’s end. Workers cling to trees with one arm, using the other for their quota, with no break, and if they complain or fall behind, they’re fired.

Agrexco and Hadiklaim harvest and sell most dates produced in Israel or on illegal West Bank settlements, including brands mislabeled “West Bank.”

Gush Shalom’s BDS Support

Translated from Hebrew, Gush Shalom means “The Peace Bloc” — hard core, especially in times of crisis. Opposing the occupation, it supports an independent Palestine “in all the territories occupied by Israel in 1967″ with East Jerusalem its capital and diaspora refugees free to return or be justly compensated for lost land and property.

In July 2006, it listed settlement-made products/factories to be boycotted, headed by the comment that “A penny to the settlements is a penny against peace.” Consumer ones include:

• Avaha cosmetics;
• Aphrodite cosmetics;
• AMB cosmetics;
• Adora Screens;
• Aladin cleaning products;
• Abadi “Mizrahiot” salted bagel cookies;
• Ahva halva and candy;
• Adanim Tea;
• Arava Grapes;
• Areva Herbs;
• Barken Cellars wine makers;
• Bel Efri jewelery;
• Barken Sweets;
• Barshap cosmetics;
• Better and Different health food;
• Beigel & Beigel pretzel bakery;
• Beitili furniture and carpets;
• Ben-Or toys;
• Doron Furnitures;
• Dotan leather goods;
• Eden Springs Ltd. mineral water;
• Edumim fish processed food;
• Euro Veavers carpets;
• Ever & Levin jewelry;
• Gilad spices;
• Golan Cheese;
• Golan Wines;
• Gush Ezion Wines;
• Harduf Eggs;
• Hebron Wines;
• Hlavin Industries;
• InterCosma cosmetics;
• Kedem Herbs;
• Keter Plastics plastic furniture;
• Kravitz stationery;
• Keisaria Carpets;
• Lankry foods;
• Luiza herbal tea;
• Lital furniture;
• Meirtecs blankets;
• Motola Preservers pickles;
• Malchi-Jourden Industries cosmetics;
• Modan satchels and handbags;
• Netanel Spices;
• Nimrod Cheese;
• Noah Winery;
• Of Habira chicken;
• Openheimer chocolate and sweets;
• Organica spices;
• Ramat Hagolan Cellars wine makers;
• Ramat Hagolan Dairy;
• Shamir Salads;
• Sharp Delicatessens sausages;
• Soda Club home soda water devices;
• Shemesh Spices;
• Shomron Meat;
• Super Drink drinks;
• Sus Etz toys;
• Tekoa Mushrooms;
• Tekoa Wines;
• Tel Arza Wines;
• Tohikon arts and crafts;
• Winter Carpets;
• Yenon processed food;
• Zion Wines; and
• Zivanit shoes and sandals.

To paraphrase Chicago community organizer Saul Alinsky, the way to beat organized oppression is with organized boycotts against Israeli companies and global corporate giants allied with its government’s war machine.

It’s a democratic non-violent weapon of the powerless against the powerful, the tactic Gandhi preferred. It fights fire with activism. It’s how South Africa’s apartheid was beaten, and it can end decades of Israeli lawlessness the same way, bring peace and reconciliation, and give Palestinians their long-denied rights in their own state or together with Jews equally in one land, the way it should be in any just nation.