Author: jameswagner

I went to the INS Building this morning to be a part of the demonstration against “Special Registration.”
What I really did was join about two hundred people who are willing to make at least a small fuss about the fact that our government is now practicing de jure racism, establishment of religion, and age and sex discrimination.
Most everyone there this morning and well into the afternoon were what some call “brown people.” They were bright and beautiful people from proscribed muslim countries stretching from Morocco to Indonesia, and from North Korea [I don’t think I could have pointed out anyone from North Korea today, but that is another story] whose boys and young men have been ordered to “register” with the federal immigration authorities.
If they don’t show up they are subject to prosecution and deportation (if they are found). If they do show up to register it means that, after standing in the cold for hours, they are subject to being photographed, fingerprinted and interrogated. Hundreds have then been incarcerated (many flown out of their states for the lack of large enough detention facilities), some for various minor infractions, others for being a couple of days late in registering and many because of administrative errors or backlog within the INS itself. Many of those in these prisons who have been able to communicate with people outside have reported being strip searched, held in crowded and unheated quarters and denied food and medicines. Most have had no access to an attorney.
Their offense was and remains that of not being American citizens.
There were few “American citizens” among those protesting on lower Broadway on this, or on previous occasions, in front of the sad line of INS “clients” which winds around the corner on Federal Plaza every day. This is a terrible indictment of the city to whom the French nation made a gift of the Statue of Liberty.
If we all understood that there really is no such thing as “illegal people,” and that there are no “aliens” anywhere on the planet, there would not even have been the need for a protest today.
All this should be especially important for Americans to remember today as our Constitution is being disassembled.
A young man handed a blue triangle emblem to me this morning. Seventy years ago the Nazis had designated a blue triangle as the identification of “stateless” people of all descriptions. My plain triangle bears the text,

ABDOU TAGELDIN
35 YEARS OLD
EGYPTIAN
DISAPPEARED
IN THE USA

There are many, many other identities on many, many of these triangles.
This monstrousness must be stopped.

This administration does martial plans, not Marshall Plans: billions for offense, not one cent for reconstruction.

Paul Krugman speaks of the proud, generous and sensible postwar U.S. which, yes, reconstructed Europe and Japan from ashes, disgrace or penury, bringing victors and vanquished together to the very highest level of friendship and cooperation. He compares that accomplishment with the cowardly, stingy and very stupid U.S. which is now throwing its weight around the world thrashing every friend in sight, imagining enemies which aren’t and encouraging those which are, to bring the world to the brink of anarchy and disaster.
We’ve already failed the test in the eyes of the world. The Bush regime is offering grand promises and monetary handouts to create and maintain a domestic and a foreign “coalition of the willing,” but the world has seen the White House abandon its promises and withhold its subsidies once it has gotten what it wanted, whether the victim has been the Kurds, Afghanistan or New York City. Turkey and democracy in Iraq will be next.

If this all sounds incredibly callous and shortsighted, that’s because it is. But then what did you expect? This administration doesn’t worry about long-term consequences — just look at its fiscal policy. It wants its war; there’s not the slightest indication that it’s interested in the boring, expensive task of building a just and lasting peace.

Barry posts this tonight:

I think the logic of all of the people who say anti-war protesters are coddling (or appeasing) a dictator boils down to this: “If those Iraqis knew what was good for them, they would let us bomb them to rescue them from Saddam Hussein and bring them democracy.”

Isn’t there another real New Yorker out there right now besides Jimmy Breslin?
Today he writes, just before citing Wayne Barrett in this week’s Village Voice, that he usually doesn’t quote other people, “because as I have just said, I am interested in my own voice.” And what a voice! For very good reasons, I’m not very interested in my voice, so here are some quotes from Jimmy’s column today, on the subject of Mayor Bloomberg’s idea of free speech:

[Bloomberg had said after the march on saturday that people who wanted to protest certainly had the ability to do so. Breslin quotes him here as the Mayor elaborates.] “Maybe not as much as they’d like, but given that this is a dangerous world, I thought the Police Department did an excellent job of balancing the rights of people to say what they want to say with the needs of all of us, and all of them, to provide security for everybody.”
I don’t know where Bloomberg gets that from.
I don’t know where he gets the idea that anybody can be pleased with any situation in which the right to assemble can be blocked and the right to speak can be thwarted.
I don’t know where he gets the idea that he can judge how much free speech I want.
The answer is, all that my voice can stand.

We can’t help Dan’l. Dan’l can’t help us.
It turns out that he was not being sarcastic when he ended his account of being handcuffed and searched by subway soldiers with assault rifles sunday night by saying, “anyway, i have to say that i feel safer after all this than i did before….”
Barry and I, and many others who read about the incident on his site or on mine, had a different take on his experience and we wanted to report it, make a formal protest and get it to the media, believing that there was still a possibility we could make a difference amid the ruins of our republic.
But without Dan’l we can’t help him and he can’t help us.
We’re scared to death and the bad guys are way abead.
Giving it one more try, this afternoon I got through to Councilmember Chis Quinn‘s office [in whose district our sightings and Dan’l’s assault and arrest occurred] to ask what the office knew, and to seek her help, but they knew less than I did and told me what I already knew, that if my friend was not interested in complaining there was nothing they could do. Her assistant, Jeremy Hoffman, is however going to consult with Congressman Nadler‘s office and make serious inquiries with the Mayor’s office, the Police Chief and the Office of Emergency Management. Continued silence is our most formidable enemy.
If we can’t have a role in the decisions which direct our fate, we can at least hope to make those decisions more visible. Let’s at least throw some light on the fungus while it is working its destruction.
Speak up, act up, fight back, fight tyranny!

What an incredibly powerful piece! Nathan Newman compares the new Israeli wall separating Arabs from the Jewish part of Bethelhem to the Warsaw Ghetto.

When the Nazi comparison is made, Israel defenders mount the barricades, since the Palestinians are not being gassed in ovens. But the horrors of Nazism started much earlier, as the Jews were stripped of their humanity and autonomy long before they lost their lives.

Newman does not let us off easily.

No, it is not Nazi Germany circa 1943.
It is Nazi Germany circa 1938.
Those who can defend Israel on that basis should be ashamed.

The Israeli author Amos Oz explains why “many decent people of enlightened and pragmatic views oppose an invasion against Iraq.”

And I do object to an Iraq invasion — because I feel that extremist Islam can be stopped only by moderate Islam, and extremist Arab nationalism can be curbed only by moderate Arab nationalism. America, Europe and the moderate Arab states must work to weaken Saddam Hussein’s despicable regime — but they should do so by helping those who would topple it from within.
An American war against Iraq, even if it ended in victory, is liable to heighten the sense of affront, humiliation, hatred and desire for vengeance that much of the world feels toward the United States. It threatens to arouse a wave of fanaticism with the power to undermine the very existence of moderate governments in the Middle East and beyond. This pending war is already splitting the alliance of democratic states and cracking the ramshackle edifice of the United Nations and its institutions. Ultimately, this will benefit only the violent and fanatical forces menacing the peace of the world.

Allow me to digress a bit. While he doesn’t say it himself here, there is of course no way to avoid including the Bush administration as among the most deadly of those forces.
Think about it. When has one man been able to threaten the peace and security of the entire planet on his own? No, Osama Bin Laden doesn’t cut it, even Hitler couldn’t stride the geography our very own madman does, and Napoleon’s brief European hegemony, Mr. Blair, at least brought many of the blessings of the French Revolution permanently to parts of Europe still suffering a plodding medieval system.

The crowd count?
I thought that I had already mentioned the really extraordinary absence of any aerial photographic evidence of the size of the massive New York anti-war protest saturday. I just checked however, and it seems that I had not, as bj reminds me this morning in his comment.
In this commercial media-mad world I think there can be only one reason why we see nothing.
I’ve seen aerial photos of rallies all around the world, but, in spite of the obvious presence of helicopters over our heads all day, not one shot of the New York protest taken from the air. A single photograph of hundreds of thousands of people standing in the perfect line-graph-like grid of Manhattan would just about end arguments about whether we were 100,000 strong or closer to one million, and these numbers do matter.
I am certain that the reason we are seeing nothing reflects the continuing deliberate cover-up of the anti-war movement by both government and the U.S. media.