Category: Politics

Noam Chomsky, within the text of an extraordinary discussion (in an interview with a Croatian journalist) of the events since September 11 and of broader topics, joins other progressive commentators in arguing that Americans really are not asleep! So, we can’t even believe the media when it reports our attitude toward its attitude?

More surprising, to me at least, was that the Sept. 11 atrocities had the opposite effect among the US population. Very quickly, it was clear that there is far more openness to critical and dissident analysis, and there has been a remarkable upsurge of concern, often activism, about issues that were pretty much off the agenda before – including, among others, the US role in the Middle East. Naturally the media and journals of opinion claim the opposite, hoping to still independent thought and impose obedience. But people who have any contact with the general population know better. Demands for talks have spiralled competely out of control, and the scale and engagement of audiences is without precedent apart from the peak moments of the anti-war movement in the late 1960s. The same is evident in sale of books, and in fact by every other relevant measure. Even the media have been to some extent effected, and though still highly restricted, are more open than they have ever been in my experience over 40 years of intensive activism.

The entire interview is fairly long, but long on fairness, and accuracy, and well worth a read.

It takes more than epithets to deal with complex problems. It never hurts to do some thinking. Sharon is almost an open book these days, but many of us want to know why we have such a problem with Arafat?

What is it about Yasir Arafat that makes him so troubling to the United States and Israel? In fact, the problem is not the man himself, as Mr. Sharon and President Bush seem to think, but the political position of the Palestinians in the Arab world today.

We pride ourselves as a nation on many things, but we are beginning to realize the extent to which there is much false pride. To include our treatment of children in the list may surprise many of us.

The other sticking point for the American delegation [to the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Children] is the degree to which the conference document can refer to a landmark 1989 treaty on children’s rights. Along with Somalia, the United States is the only country [on earth] that has not ratified the so-called Convention on the Rights of the Child. The treaty prohibits countries from using the death penalty against criminals under age 18, a practice permitted in many American states.

Note that Somalia does not now and has not for some time had any semblance of a government, precluding the possibility of its ratification of an agreement of any kind. We have no such excuse.

Beautiful in its simplicity and its morality, and an argument against the blind anger and fear that surrounds us all, this letter in the New York Times today should pull us all up short.

Some 30 years ago, a Hebrew University law faculty member wrote, “A border is secure when those living on the other side do not have sufficient motivation to infringe on it.”
As another Hebrew University professor put it: After every victory, “the abyss of mutual hatred will deepen and the desires for vengeance will mount.”
A few months after the 1967 war, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a leading Israeli intellectual, said that the occupation was unjust and would lead to the subjugation of the Palestinians, and even to the corruption of Israeli society.
Ancient Israel gifted the world with the revolutionary idea that it is justice, not military might, that brings peace. Now is the hour for that wisdom to be reborn.

A reminder from some who were impacted the most by the neglect and malignancy of the late, unlamented Giuliani adminstration.
Shame on the Episcopalian hierarchy! Their generally tolerant and progressive members deserve much better, as does all of New York!

The Episcopal Diocese of New York honored former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani Monday, as a group of parishioners protested outside.
. . . .
“They’re honoring him now for what he did September 11,” said protestor Glenda White. “We want him to remember what we went through for seven years.”

. . . don’t have to be jewish to be gay; don’t have to be jewish to be Israeli.
Not everyone has a problem with co-existence in this city of both jews and palestinians. Sometimes it helps to be gay.

[Jerusalem] Mayor Ehud Ulmert recently expressed the need for a massive march in the center of the city to show its citizens and the world that life goes on, El-Ad [director of the gay community center] mentions. “It’s difficult for me to think of a more appropriate event than Gay Pride to celebrate life in Jerusalem and to do it in a way that is relevant and meaningful to the current situation.”

The Onion reports this week, in banner headline, “God Re-Floods Middle East.”

JERUSALEM—In what theological and meteorological authorities are calling “a wrathful display of Old Testament proportions,” the Lord Almighty re-flooded the Middle East Tuesday, making good on last week’s threat to wipe the region clean if there was not an immediate halt to the bloodshed between Arabs and Jews.

If I can be forgiven , just this once, a religious metaphor of the sort loved by all true americans, allow me to suggest that our appointed government is driving us all to hell in a handbasket.
Just think about what has happened to the planet in only the last year and a half, and, even more exciting, what mischief is planned for the future (all of this accompanied by skyrocketing approval ratings, or so we are told).
It’s all so exciting, it makes one pee in one’s pants.

Would the world, after the experience of the Holocaust, step in to stop a new wave of anti-semitism and persecution of the jews?
Any answer to the question should require an examination of how effective world opinion has been in a defense against the more than fifty (to be historical, maybe we should say one hundred) years of humiliation and persecution visited on another victimized people, the non-jewish palestinians.
This appalling and continuing world neglect would actually be the best argument for the continued need for a strong and independent jewish state, except that it hasn’t worked. Jews aren’t safe in Israel, certainly no safer than in 1948 or anytime after, and jews are now imperiled all over the world in a way not seen since 1945, largely because of a general tendency to confound the attitude of jews everywhere with the specific policies of the Israeli government, a confusion dangerously encouraged by so many jews themselves.
The strong jewish state is ironically a threat to itself and to jews everywhere.
What is to be done to help the jews and the palestinians in the Middle East? The people who seem not to be able to live with each other but not to be able to live apart from each other can realize what they want and need, if those wants and needs are separated from their respective fanaticisms, by constructing a single large, inclusive state which would comprise all of 1948 Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, or something close to all that, and call it Palestine, the Unholy Land, Abrahamland or whatever. It must however be a state where all residents enjoy full and equal freedoms and citizenship under a single, truly secular government, one which is recognized and jealously protected by its neighbors, and by the entire world, precisely for the safety of those neighbors and that world.
After the horrors of the most recent weeks, if not months, and those too easily imagined for the near and even distant future, this is certainly no more unrealistic or preposterous a proposal than any now being advanced.
It is a proposal which should be on the table now, and it surely will be there as all others are successivly rejected or, if effected, seen to be as calamitous as the jerry-rigged unstable status quo which repels us all now.

I am unable to say a thing. The report will have to speak for itself.