The Corporate State and the Subversion of Democracy
May 31, 2008
TruthDig: Chris Hedges gave this keynote address on Wednesday, May 28, in Furman University’s Younts Conference Center. The address was part of protests by faculty and students over the South Carolina college’s decision to invite George W. Bush to give the May 31 commencement address.
When it was announced in May that President Bush would deliver the commencement address, 222 students and faculty signed and posted on the school’s Web site a statement titled “We Object.” The statement cites the war in Iraq and the administration’s “obstructing progress on reducing greenhouse gases while favoring billions in tax breaks and subsidies to oil companies that are earning record profits.”
“We are ashamed of the actions of this administration. The war in Iraq has cost the lives of over 4,000 brave and honorable U.S. military personnel,” the statement read. “Because we love this country and the ideals it stands for, we accept our civic responsibility to speak out against these actions that violate American values.”
I used to live in a country called America. It was not a perfect country, God knows, especially if you were African-American or Native American or of Japanese descent in World War II or poor or gay or a woman or an immigrant, but it was a country I loved and honored. This country gave me hope that it could be better. It paid its workers wages that were envied around the world. It made sure these workers, thanks to labor unions and champions of the working class in the Democratic Party and the press, had health benefits and pensions. It offered good public education. It honored basic democratic values and held in regard the rule of law, including international law, and respect for human rights. It had social programs from Head Start to welfare to Social Security to take care of the weakest among us, the mentally ill, the elderly and the destitute. It had a system of government that, however flawed, was dedicated to protecting the interests of its citizens. It offered the possibility of democratic change. It had a media that was diverse and endowed with the integrity to give a voice to all segments of society, including those beyond our borders, to impart to us unpleasant truths, to challenge the powerful, to explain ourselves to ourselves. I am not blind to the imperfections of this America, or the failures to always meet these ideals at home and abroad. I spent 20 years of my life in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans as a foreign correspondent reporting in countries where crimes and injustices were committed in our name, whether during the Contra war in Nicaragua or the brutalization of the Palestinians by Israeli occupation forces. But there was much that was good and decent and honorable in our country. And there was hope.
Iraqi Clerics Against US Bases
May 31, 2008
Horrors We Have No Choice But To Forget
May 31, 2008
Cannes 2008 Film Clip | Trailer
While I’ve not experienced the kind of traumatic horrors that Robert FIsk has, I do experience the amnesia he describes. Everyday I read fervently to remember how people are suffering, to keep motivated, to keep my rage on the boil. Its a daily battle that I face because my mind forgets so easily, emotionally I move on, perhaps we all do, and perhaps thats the problem.
I have a clear memory of a terrible crime that was committed in southern Lebanon in 1978. Israeli soldiers, landing at night on the beach near Sarafand – the city of Sarepta in antiquity – were looking for “terrorists” and opened fire on a car load of female Palestinian refugees.
It took the Israelis a day before they admitted shooting at the car with an anti-tank weapons, by which time I had watched civil defence workers pulling the dead women from the vehicle, their faces slopping off on to the road, an AP correspondent holding his hands to his face in shock, leaning against an ambulance, crying “Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ. I suppose all this is because of what Hitler did to the Jews.” Save for his remark, however, all I remember is silence. As if the whole scene was muted, sound smothered by the dead.
Israel’s Self-Destruction as a Jewish State
May 31, 2008
Veteran journalist William Pfaff forecasts the demise of the Zionist project.
The laws of physics say that actions produce equivalent counteractions, and in international relations these may not be what’s expected.
American policy in the Middle East under George Bush and Condoleezza Rice has sought to polarize the region’s forces in the belief that it benefits by promoting a clear confrontation between those, as President George W. Bush said in 2001, “who are with us and those who are against us.” Washington reckons that it wins because it is, in conventional terms, the more powerful.
But suppose the situation is not a conventional one, and the application of power produces ricochet, indirect or asymmetrical reactions. Take the case of Lebanon, whose modern history is one of compromise among the communities that make up the country, which are not automatically hostile to one another but have distinct and divergent interests, and historically have also been the object of foreign intervention and attempts to set the communities against one another.
Carter Says Israel Has 150 Nukes
May 30, 2008
Aijaz Ahmad: Why is corporate media marginalizing a former President?
More here.
A Saint Goes Marching In
May 30, 2008
Bishop Desmond Tutu, the closest we have to a living saint, is on a visit to Gaza to investigate the killing of 19 Palestinians by the Israeli Occupation Forces, and he is shaming the world with his courage and honesty. The lobby has long been on the assault against Tutu, but far from caving to its pressure, he is raising hell and lambasting the international ‘community’ for its complicity. Following are two reports on his visit.
Silence on Gaza blockade shames us all
By Donald Macintyre
Friday, 30 May 2008Archbishop Desmond Tutu has denounced the international community for its “silence and complicity” on what he called Israel’s “abominable” 11-month blockade of Gaza.
The South African Nobel Laureate, who ended a three-day visit to Gaza yesterday, strongly condemned the blockade imposed after Hamas’s enforced takeover of the Strip last June that has reduced electricity, severely cut fuel supplies and brought industry to a halt.
The Archbishop, mainly here on a UN mission to investigate what he called the Beit Hanoun massacre of 21 civilians by Israeli tank shelling 18 months ago, said: “All we had heard about conditions in Gaza – deprivation, a sense of despair, the lack of economic activity – had not prepared us for the stark reality which we saw.”
Murdoch’s Game
May 30, 2008
Rupert Murdoch is already a king-maker in Britain. With his control of the largest circulation papers he issues the marching orders masses follow. When the Tories looked irredeemable, he started shopping for an alternative. He found a particularly pliant surrogate in Blair. Now Murdoch who already owns the Fox (Faux) News channel and two of the countries 10 largest circulation papers is in the process of further expanding his empire (he can thank Clinton’s Telecommunication’s Act of 1996 for allowing such consolidation). He along with his fellow mogul Haim Saban (another staunch Zionist) was earlier betting on Clinton, but with his mare finally biting the dust, he is now angling for Obama. This however does not mean a shift in ideology for Murdoch. However, it is more likely that Obama, the shrewd politician that he is, will accommodate his principles to the realities of Murdoch’s expectations.
Following is an excellent report from Jim Lobe — the finest US investigative journalist – on where Murdoch’s game is presently at.
Murdoch Goes After Condi, Urges Blockade Against Iran
There was considerable speculation in press circles when he took over the Wall Street Journal that Rupert Murdoch would make the newspaper’s editorial positions a little bit more mainstream and a little less neo-conservative than they had been, if for no other reason than to further expand its competitiveness with the New York Times. While I only read the Journal’s foreign policy-related editorials, columns, and op-eds, I think I’m safe in saying that the speculation has so far proved unfounded.
Take just the past couple of days’ opinion pages as examples. On Tuesday, it published yet another Islamophobic rant by its “Global View” columnist and former Jerusalem Post editor, Bret Stephens, comparing the recent guidelines by the Departments of Homeland Security and State on the possibly counter-productive use of politically and religiously provocative words in the “global war on terror” with George Orwell’s “Newspeak.” It also published a particularly unenlightening — and not very credible — excerpt from ultra-Likudist Doug Feith’s recent book, War and Decision. Although it’s hard to figure out exactly why the Journal published the article other than to help him promote the book — Stephens wrote a glowing review (unfortunately not available online) of it a few weeks ago — the excerpt appeared designed to reassure readers that Iraq’s alleged WMD programs and terrorist ties really were the main reasons the Bush took the nation to war in Iraq (a thesis that has once again been cast into doubt by Scott McClellan’s new book) and that he, Feith, was right and everyone else was wrong about the administration’s post-invasion “communications strategy” that made democracy promotion the principal justification. (It apparently didn’t occur to Feith that the administration had to come up with a new rationale, beyond WMD and terrorist ties his office worked so hard to establish, in order to justify keeping U.S. troops there.)
Raytheon 9
May 30, 2008
During the July war activists in Northern Ireland, shocked by the Israeli onslaught, occupied their local Raytheon arms manufacturer. Knowing full well Raytheons complicity in unfolding events the group halted production and destroyed the Raytheon computer system. A brave and moral act of resistance these activists are now on trial for criminal damage and affray, for more information visit their website – Support the Raytheon 9.
Petraeus’ Iran Obsession
May 30, 2008
Andrew Cockburn on the ‘Rough Sledding for Bush’s Covert Iran Finding‘.
Seven weeks ago, as exclusively reported in CounterPunch, President Bush signed what was formally designated as a “lethal finding” authorizing stepped-up covert actions on various fronts against Iran. The campaign was to cover a wide area of operations, from Lebanon to Afghanistan, wherever the hated Ayatollahs challenged American power. So far, according to former officials with knowledge of the finding, the results have been in line with most other U.S. initiatives in the region, i.e. the strengthening of Iran.
In Lebanon, the ambitious effort to get the Siniora government to hit at Hezbollah by ripping up the latter’s fiber-optic communications system (immune to US/Israeli electronic interception) ended with the U.S. surrogates in headlong retreat in the face of Hezbollah’s efficiently swift occupation of Beirut, not only withdrawing their earlier demarche, but caving in to longstanding political demands by the Iran-allied group.
State of Denial: Israel, 1948-2008
May 29, 2008
The excellent Israeli historian Ilan Pappe writing on the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and why Israel cannot face up to her crimes. Worryingly Pappe states that ‘The moral implication [of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine] is that the Jewish State was born out of sin—like many other states, of course—but the sin, or the crime, was never admitted. Worse, among certain circles in Israel, it is acknowledged and, in the same breath, advanced as a future policy against Palestinians wherever they are.’
For Israelis, 1948 is the year in which two things happened, one of which contradicts the other.
On the one hand, in that year the Jewish national movement, Zionism, claimed it fulfilled an ancient dream of returning to a homeland after 2,000 years of exile. From this perspective, 1948 is a miraculous event, the realization of a dream that carries with it associations of moral purity and absolute justice. Hence the military conduct of Jewish soldiers on the battlefield in 1948 became the model for generations to come. And subsequent Israeli leaders were lionized as men and women devoted to the Zionist ideals of sacrifice for the common cause. It is a sacred year, 1948, the formative source of all that is good in the Jewish society of Israel.
On the other hand, 1948 was the worst chapter in Jewish history. In that year, Jews did in Palestine what Jews had not done anywhere else in their previous 2,000 years. Even if one puts aside the historical debate about why what happened in 1948 happened, no one seems to question the enormity of the tragedy that befell the indigenous population of Palestine as a result of the success of the Zionist movement.
