Category: War

the Madtown Liberty Players portray the Fourth Amendment under attack (two years ago)

The House voted today to make the “Patriot Act” permanent. In what may be the least patriotic vote ever recorded in that chamber, our representatives effectively moved to revoke the Fourth Amendment for all time.
My countrymen are cowards. They are ignorant of themselves and of the world. The unknown is always what we fear, and this country has an enormous dark store of the nameless feeding its private terrors.
Americans don’t know who they are, and they don’t know the outside world. We never had to learn anything about either subject, and for pretty much the same reason: the country was just so big; we were busy filling it up and we could pretty much ignore everyone outside our borders and most of them inside. We don’t like people anyway, whether they’re from another continent, another city, another neighborhood, another family. I don’t even have to mention our class, racial and ethnic insularity, they are so well-documented. We don’t even like to be too close to those in our own families. We like the separation the oceans furnish us and we wish there were others on our northern, and especially southern, borders. We want as much space as we can manage to arrange between ourselves and the next fellow’s place, and everyone in the family should have a private room and bath, as well as his or her own car.
I’m appalled, but not surprised, by this cowardice on the one hand and on the other a welcoming, even enthusiastic, support for, excuse the expression, but I do know my history, clearly “fascist” concepts of political control that are being embraced by so many of our fellow freedom-loving Americans. These are people who will still boast tomorrow that they enjoy a unique island of liberty and democracy blessed by a god who favors their virtue.
America has indeed been terrorized. It was the work of a single brilliant and monstrous blow, but the land of the free and the home of the brave is now willing to trash its heritage for the mere illusion of security. While most of its people are willing to admit the trade, they don’t see the disconnect.
We’re doomed.

[image from Madison Indymedia]

a Palestinian man walks next to a section of a wall eight-meters high built by the Israeli government, arbitrarily separating Jerusalem (and some additional annexed lands) from the Palestinian suburb of Abu Dis

We will not prevent terrorist acts by raising walls or bombing innocent strangers with sophisticated weaponry; by increasing the legal penalties for posession of a bomb; by spying on each other, high-tech or otherwise; by humiliating “the other;” by outlawing nail files or lighters; by putting an armed guard in every environment which has been a previous target; by incarcerating all the brown people on earth; by staying at home behind drawn curtains.
If we want to see it cease, we have to look to the cause of the terrorist response, not its manifestations. And it is a response; terrorism is always a response of the weak to the assaults of the powerful.
Terrorism feeds on imperialism. Neither of these is a state, merely a tactic; eliminate the imperialism and the threat from terrorism will disappear. We will never be made safe by building walls or by extending the power of our own state at home or abroad; the entire planet will survive and prosper if we recognize the appropriate limitations of that state and the proper proportion of our people, and placing both in the community of all nations and peoples.

[image from Newsday by Moises Saman]

[unless it helps the White House – or the NYTimes]


Sophie Hurndall, Tom Hurndall’s sister: “. . . but there are thousands of cases out there where people don’t have the weight behind them that we have.”

UPDATE:

In Britain the media is interested in the Battle of Trafalgar and Tom Hurndall, even though both are dead. We get runaway brides and the ten commandments on a lawn. If you live in the right place once in a while you get a peek at a real story, but only a peek and only on terms supported by a larger agenda.
Lest anyone think that the nationality of the victim is key to the quality of justice extended or press coverage provided, the story of the very American Rachel Corrie is more than a caution. Oh, and she and her family were just as photogenic, just as white, just as blond as the Hurndalls. The usual popularity of the type is familiar to everyone in America; viz. the description of the ubiquitous missing children and young women in never-ending reports on the pretend-news programs of CNN and Fox. Sometimes war and politics trumps everday racism, even in America.
In a tiny article [scroll down] on page 8 today, the NYTimes reports that the Israeli soldier who killed Tom Hurndall two years ago has been found guilty by a military court.
For more, see this BBC story for a description of the crime, and this one for a bit on the trial itself.

The defendant was led out of the court in handcuffs and tried to attack a number of photographers and cameramen filming him.
More than 50 people crowded into the small courtroom on a military base in southern Israel, to hear the verdict – which took more than an hour to read out.
In addition to the manslaughter verdict, [Taysir] Hayb was found guilty of obstruction of justice, incitement to false testimony, false testimony and improper conduct.
The court was told Hayb fired at Mr Hurndall from an Israeli army watchtower, using a sniper rifle with a telescopic sight.
Witnesses said Mr Hurndall, from north London, had been escorting children away from gunfire when he was hit in the head by a single shot.
The Israeli army initially disputed this account, but under pressure from Mr Hurndall’s family and the British government it ordered a full investigation. It later indicted Hayb, a member of Israel’s Bedouin Arab minority [my italics].

The identity of the defendent serves to further dramatize the story as both a personal tragedy and as representative of the much larger human disaster fed by the U.S.-supported Israeli government occupation policy, the incompetence of Palestinian leadership, and the silence of good people everywhere.

[image from BBC News]