How
the Press & the CIA
Killed Gary Webb's Career
Today's
Stories
January 15
/ 16, 2005
James Petras
The
Kidnapping of a Revolutionary
January 14,
2005
Robert Fisk
"The
Tent of Occupation"
Lee Sustar
Bush's Social Security Con Job
José
M. Tirado
The Christians I Know
Dave Zirin
The Legacy of Jack Johnson
Sheldon Rampton
Calling John Rendon: a True Tale of "Military Intelligence"
Tracy McLellan
Under the Influence
Yves Engler
The Dictatorship of Debt: the World Bank and Haiti
Tom Barry
Robert
Zoellick: a Bush Family Man
Website of
the Day
Ryan for the Nobel Prize?
January 13,
2005
Mark Chmiel
/ Andrew Wimmer
Hearts
and Minds, Revisited
Joe DeRaymond
The Salvador Option: Terror,
Elections and Democracy
Greg Moses
Every Hero a Killer?...Not
Dave Lindorff
The Great WMD Fraud: Time for an Accounting
Jorge Mariscal
Dr. Galarza v. Alberto Gonzales: Which Way for Latinos?
Christopher Brauchli
Gonzales and the Death Penalty: the Executioner Never Sleeps
Gary Leupp
"Fighting
for the Work of the Lord": Christian Fascism in America
January 12,
2005
Robert Fisk
Fear
Stalks Baghdad
Josh Frank
The
Farce of the DNC Contest
Jack Random
Casualties
of War: the Untold Stories
John Roosa
Aceh's Dual Disasters: the Tsunami and Military Rule
Carol Norris
In the Wake of the Tsunami
Mike Whitney
Pink Slips at CBS
Alan Farago
Can
the Everglades be Saved?
Paul Craig
Roberts
What's
Our Biggest Problem in Iraq...the Insurgency or Bush?
January 11,
2005
Tom Barry
The
US isn't "Stingy"; It's Strategic: Aid as a Weapon
of Foreign Policy
James Hodge
and Linda Cooper
Voice
of the Voiceless: Father Roy Bourgeois and the School of the
the Americas
Linda S. Heard
Farah Radio Break Down: Joseph Farah's Messages of Hate and Homophobia
Derrick O'Keefe
Electoral Gigolo?: Richard Gere and the Occupied Vote
Gila Svirsky
A Tale of Two Elections
Harry Browne
Irish
"Peace Process", RIP
January 10,
2005
Ramzy Baroud
Faith-Based
Disasters: Tsunami Aid and War Costs
Talli Nauman
Killing
Journalists: Mexico's War on a Free Press
Uri Avnery
Sharon's Monologue
Dave Lindorff
Tucker
Carlson's Idiot Wind
Dave Zirin
Randy
Moss's Moondance
Dave Silver
Left Illusions About the Democratic Party
Charles Demers
Plan Salvador for Iraq: Death Squads Come in Waves
William A.
Cook
Causes
and Consequences: Bush, Osama and Israel
January 8 /
9, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Say,
Waiter, Where's the Blood in My Margarita Glass?
John H. Summers
Chomsky
and Academic History
Greg Moses
Getting Real About the Draft
Walter A. Davis
Bible Says: the Psychology of Christian Fundamentalism
Victor Kattan
The EU and Middle East Peace
John Bolender
The Plight of Iraq's Mandeans
Robert Fisk
The Politics of Lebanon
Fred Gardner
Situation NORML
Joe Bageant
The Politics of the Comfort Zone
Mickey Z.
I Want My DDT: Little Nicky Kristof Bugs Out
Ben Tripp
CounterClockwise Evolution
Ron Jacobs
Elvis and His Truck: Out on Highway 61
Saul Landau
Sex
and the Country
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Time to End the Blackout
Ellen Cantarow
NPR's Distortions on Palestine
Richard Oxman
Bageantry Continued
Poets' Basement
Gaffney, Landau, Albert, Collins
January 7,
2005
Omar Barghouti
Slave
Sovereignty: Elections Under Occupation
Kent Paterson
The Framing of Felipe Arreaga: Another Mexican Environmentalist
Arrested
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Old
Vijay Merchant and the Tsunami
David Krieger
Cancel the Inauguration Parties
Gideon Levy
New Year, Old Story
Dave Lindorff
Ohio Protest: First Shot Fired by Congressional Progressives
Christopher
Brauchli
Privatizing the IRS
Roger Burbach
/ Paul Cantor
Bush,
the Pentagon and the Tsunami
January 6,
2005
Brian J. Foley
Gonzales:
Supporting Torture is not His Greatest Sin
Greg Moses
Boot
Up America!: Gen. Helmly's Memo Leaks New Bush Deal
Petras / Chomsky
An
Open Letter to Hugo Chavez
Alan Maass
The Decline of the Dollar
Dave Lindorff
Colin Powell's Selective Sense of Horror
Jenna Orkin
The EPA and a Dirty Bomb: 9/11's Disastrous Precedent
P. Sainath
The
Tsunami and India's Coastal Poor
January 5,
2005
Alan Farago
2004:
An Environmental Retrospective
Winslow T.
Wheeler
Oversight
Detected?: Sen. McCain and the Boeing Tanker Scam
Jean-Guy Allard
Gary Webb: a Cuban Perspective
Fred Gardner
Strutting, Smirking, As If The Mad Plan Was Working
David Swanson
Albert Parsons on the Gallows
Richard Oxman
The Joe Bageant Interview
Bruce Jackson
Death
on the Living Room Floor
January 4,
2005
Michael Ortiz
Hill
Mainlining
Apocalypse
Elaine Cassel
They
Say They Can Lock You Up for Life Without a Trial
Yoram Gat
The
Year in Torture
Martin Khor
Tragic
Tales and Urgent Tasks from the Tsunami Disaster
Gary Leupp
Death
and Life in the Andaman Islands
January 3,
2005
Ron Jacobs
The
War Hits Home
Dave Lindorff
Is
There a Single Senator Who Will Stand Up for Black Voters?
Mike Whitney
The Guantanamo Gulag
Joshua Frank
Greens and Republicans: Strange Bedfellows
Maria Tomchick
Playing Politics with Disaster Aid
Rhoda and Mark
Berenson
Our Daughter Lori: Another Year of Grave Injustice
David Swanson
The Media and the Ohio Recount
Kathleen Christison
Patronizing
the Palestinians
January 1 /
2, 2005
Gary Leupp
Earthquakes
and End Times, Past and Present
Rev. William
E. Alberts
On "Moral Values": Code Words for Emerging Authoritarian
Tendencies
M. Shahid Alam
Testing Free Speech in America
Stan Goff
A Period for Pedagogy
Brian Cloughley
Bush and the Tsunami: the Petty and the Petulant
Sylvia Tiwon
/ Ben Terrall
The Aftermath in Aceh
Ben Tripp
Requiem for 2004
Greg Moses
A Visible Future?
Steven Sherman
The 2004 Said Awards: Books Against Empire
Sean Donahue
The Erotics of Nonviolence
James T. Phillips
The Beast's Belly
David Krieger
When Will We Ever Learn
Poets' Basement
Soderstrom, Hamod, Louise and Albert
December 31,
2004
Farrah Hassen
The
Palestinian Right of Return: a View from Syria
Dave Lindorff
US Air's Bold New Idea: Work for Your Boss for Free!
George Capaccio
Tsunami Hits Iraq
Mike Whitney
Iraq v. Tsunami: Media Duplicity
Peter Phillips
The Tsunami and the Corporate Media: Waves of Hypocrisy
Christopher
Deliso
War
and the Tsunami: Putting It in Perspective
December 30,
2004
Lila Rajiva
Unnatural
Disaster? Earthquakes, Tsunamis and Nuclear Testing
Robert Fisk
The
Ghosts of Vietnam
Roger Burbach
Argentina
v. the IMF
Stan Cox
9/11 and 12/26: How to React
Walter Brasch
Bush and Tsunamis: Heartless in Crawford
Christopher Brauchli
Empire of the Misers
Alexandra Spieldoch
NAFTA Through a Gender Lens: "Free Trade" Pacts and
Women
Paul Kincaid Jameison
Grief, Relief and the Stingy West
Dan Bacher
The Water Kings of California
Paul Craig
Roberts
Unbecoming
Conduct
December 29,
2004
Dave Lindorff
Us,
Stingy?: It's All Relative
M. Shahid Alam
America
and Islam: Seeking Parallels
Ronald D. Hoffman
Tsunamis
and Nuclear Power Plants
Sam Bahour
/ Todd May
Elections
Without Democracy
Fred Gardner
Ricky Does 60 Minutes
Ali Khan
Who's Feeding the Bin Laden Legend?
John Hansen
Family Farms Are Being Fed to Corporate Sharks
Sam Lewin
How the Justice Department Continues to Screw the Sioux
Richard Oxman
As Time Goes By With Andy Goldsworthy
Mickey Z.
A Wave of Questions: Putting a Disaster in Context
Website of the Day
Banking While Muslim
December 28,
2004
Brian Cloughley
The
Chief Weirdo at the Pentagon: Rumsfeld Must Go
Joshua Frank
Privacy Piracy? What Howard Dean May Bring to the DNC
Jessica Leight
The
Chilean Miracle: Less Than Meets the Eye
Dave Lindorff
A
Shameful Response to Disaster
John Walsh
Disappearing the Anti-War Movement at the NYTs
Dave Zirin
The Death of Reggie White: an Off the Field Obituary
Dr. Teresa Whitehurst
Be Careful Not to Get Too Much Education: It's Happened to a
Lot of Good Christians
Ron Jacobs
Iran
2004: The Resistance and the Western Anti-War Movement
December 27,
2004
M. Junaid Alam
"Civilization
v. Barbarism": an Interview with Noam Chomsky
Michael Donnelly
Greens and Greenbacks: How Nonprofit Careerism Derailed the "Revolution"
Greg Moses
Texas Election Scandal: Forty Faxes and a Whisper
Toni Solo
Colombia's Appalling Vista: Justice With Eyes Wide Open
Brian Kwoba
Blaming the Victims of the 2004 Elections
Genna Goodman-Campbell
Honduras Validates Its Banana Republic Status, Again
Mike Whitney
Disappearing Act: Fallujah and the Media
Ari Shavit
"Zionism Has Exhausted Itself": an Interview with Amos
Elon
Richard Oxman
Reflections on a Handful of Activists
Saul Landau
James
Cason's Cuban Delusions
December 25
/ 26, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Yup,
It's Moral Outrage Time
Diane Christian
The Christmas Christ
Dr. Susan Block
Faith-Based Sex
Gary Leupp
Rumsfeld, His Critics and the Draft
Ron Jacobs
Music in Wartime
Elaine Cassel
Articles I Didn't Write
Jim Minick
Beyond Organic
Poets Basement
Louise, Landau, Orloski, Albert
and Collins
December 24,
2004
Diane Christian
Winning:
Rummy and John Milton
Chad Nagle
Ukraine's
Real Underdog
Saul Landau
My Friend Richard Barnet
Greg Moses
Ramsey Muniz Speaks
Joe DeRaymond
The Endless War in Colombia: a View From Within
Borzou Daragahi
Iraq's Christians: Tolerated by Saddam; Targets Under Occupation
Mike Whitney
Rummy's Quagmire of Lies
Francis A. Boyle
O Little Town of Bethlehem: Another Christmas Under Occupation
William Loren
Katz
Florida 1837: Christmas Eve Resistance to the First US Occupation
December 23,
2004
Chad Nagle
Report
from Kiev: Yushchenko's Not Quite Ready for Sainthood
David Smith-Ferri
The
Real UN Disgrace in Iraq
Bill Quigley
Death
Watch for Human Rights in Haiti
Mickey Z.
Crumbs
from Our Table
Christopher Brauchli
Merck's Merry X-mas
Greg Moses
When
No Law Means No Law
Alan Singer
An
Encounter with Sen. Schumer: a Very Dangerous Democrat
David Price
Social
Security Pump and Dump
Website of the Day
Gabbo Gets Laid
December 22,
2004
James Petras
An
Open Letter to Saramago: Nobel Laureate Suffers from a Bizarre
Historical Amnesia
Omar Barghouti
The Case for Boycotting Israel
Patrick Cockburn / Jeremy Redmond
They Were Waiting on Chicken Tenders When the Rounds Hit
Harry Browne
Northern Ireland: No Postcards from the Edge
Richard Oxman
On the Seventh Column
Kathleen Christison
Imagining
Palestine
Website of the Day
FBI Torture Memos
December 21,
2004
Greg Moses
The
New Zeus on the Block: Unplugging Al-Manar TV
Dave Lindorff
Losing
It in America: Bunker of the Skittish
Chad Nagle
The View from Donetsk
Dragon Pierces
Truth*
Concrete
Colossus vs. the River Dragon: Dislocation and Three Gorges Dam
Patrick Cockburn
"Things Always Get Worse"
Seth DeLong
Aiding Oppression in Haiti
Ahmad Faruqui
Pakistan and the 9/11 Commission's Report
Paul Craig
Roberts
America
Locked Up: a System of Injustice
December 20,
2004
Gary Leupp
Japan
in Iraq
Robert Fisk
An
Army Without Compassion
Uri Avnery
The Mountain and the Mouse
Francisco Letelier
My Case Against Pinochet
Patrick Cockburn
The Polls of Fear
Bill Conroy
Charles Bowden on the Legacy of Gary Webb: "He Drew Blood"
Yoshie Furuhashi
Chokeholds of a Giant: Attacking Wal-Mart's Supply Chain
David Swanson
Media Blackout of Bush's War on Labor
Chad Nagle
Did Yushchenko Poison Himself?
December 18
/ 19, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Why
They Hated Gary Webb
Saul Landau
Gen.
Pinochet Should Also Face Charges in DC
Patrick Cockburn
Losing
Mosul: Once They Called It a Model for the Occupation
Douglas Valentine
Wolves
and Revolution in Venezuela: a Caracas Romance
Ray McGovern
Laughing Dragon, Dancing Bear: the New China / Russia Alliance
Fred Gardner
DEA Upholds Grower's Marijuana Monopoly
Jean-Guy Allard
Locked Up Naked in a Hole Within a Hole: Have the Cuban 5 Been
Tortured in US Prisons?
Ron Jacobs
Drifters Escape, Again: Encounters with Berkeley's Police
Raymond G.
Helmick, S.J.
The Law and Peace in the Middle East
Sean Sellers
Values Voters, Desperate Housewives and Sweatshop Tacos
Lee Sustar
Christmas
on the Picket Line at CNH: "They Want to Break Our Unions"
Richard Thieme
Webb's Wife: "Gary Was Never the Same After They Attacked
Him"
Sam Bahour
WANTED:
Middle East Negotiator
Joshua Frank
The
Spin Doctor: an Interview with Mickey Z.
Dave Lindorff
A Man Who Confers with God Should Have Good Hearing
Stan Cox
What Kids Cost: Dallas v. Delhi
Chris Frasier
Farming By Numbers: More Poets, Fewer MBAs
Poets' Basement
Katz, Melek, Harley, Albert and Ford
December
17, 2004
Cockburn /
St. Clair
CounterAttack:
How the Press and the CIA Killed Gary Webb's Career
Dave Lindorff
Racism:
Philly Style
Dan Bacher
Bush Abandons Salmon Restoration
Marisa Jacott
NAFTA and the Environment: Trade Still Runs Roughshod
Francis Thicke
How Now, Industrial Cow?
Rupert Cornwell
The Inuit Strike Back
Website of the Day
Franz Boas Unrolls Over in His Grave
December
16, 2004
Michael
Neumann
How We Became Barbarians
Merlin
Chowkwanyun
An Interview with Ralph Nader
Gabriel
Espinoza Gonzales
The Dubious Career of John Bolton
Christopher
Brauchli
Louis Freeh's New Gig: Usurer
Patrick
Cockburn
Allawi's Pre-Election Ploy: Putting "Chemical Ali"
on Trial
Mike
Whitney
Gearing Up for a Draft?
Walter
Brasch
Hillbilly Humvees and Rumsfeld's New Physics
Bill
Conroy
How Gary Webb Saved My Ass from the FBI
Website
of the Day
Saturday Memorial for Gary Webb
December
15, 2004
Robert
Fisk
Who Killed Baha Mousa?
Jennifer
Van Bergen
The Monster Under the Bed
Heather
Gray
Will the Real Christians Please Stand?: a Personal Testimony
Dave
Lindorff
The DNC, Albright and the Iraq Elections
Luis
Hernandez Navarro
To Die a Little: Migration and Coffee
in Mexico and Central America
Joshua
Frank
The Ohio Recount: an Exercise in "Dumbocracy"
Greg
Moses
Eighty-Sixing Civil Rights in Ohio?
George
Caffentzis
The Petroleum Commons
December
14, 2004
Dave
Lindorff
DNC Meddling in the Ukraine Elections
Larry
Birns / Seth DeLong
Haiti is Unraveling and No One is Saying
Anything
Richard
Thieme
My Last Talk with Gary Webb: "I Knew It Was the Truth and
That's What Kept Me Going"
Patrick
Cockburn
A Year After Saddam's Capture, Iraq
is Getting Worse
Chris
Floyd
Client State: Moral Values and Voluntary Servitude in Bush's
America
Akiva
Eldar
A One-time Hanukkah Miracle
Burbach
/ Cantor
The Legacy of Pinochet: Kissinger
and the Teflon Tyrant
December
13, 2004
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Gary Webb: a Great Reporter, Trashed
by the CIA's Claque
David
Phinney
"Contract Meal Disaster" for Iraqi Prisoners: Rancid
Food Sparked Abu Ghraib Riots
Paul
Craig Roberts
A Dose of Non-Delusional Reality
for Douglas Feith
M.
Junaid Alam
The War is the War Crime
Robert
Jensen
The US Has Lost the Iraq War...and That's a Good Thing
Richard
Oxman
Kafkaesque Lessons for the Left
Greg
Moses
Send No Messengers of Defeat
Douglas
Lummis
The Pentagon's Neurosis: Fallujah
Gulag
December
11 / 12, 2004
Alexander
Cockburn
Running an Empire on the Cheap
Ron
Jacobs
The Drugs of War: Getting High in the Green Zone?
Saul
Landau
Listening and Talking to God About
Invading Other Countries
Gary
Leupp
Bush's Capital
Sharon
Smith
The Horrible Toll on US Troops
Dave
Lindorff
Deja Vu All Over Again: 5,000 Desertions and Counting
Uri
Avnery
The Boss Has Gone Crazy
Jude
Wanniski
The Neo-Con Smear on Kofi Annan: What Food-for-Oil Scandal?
Heather
Gray
How the South Became Republican: an Interview with John Egerton
Patrick
Cockburn / Ken Sengupta
Fallujah: the Homecoming and the Homeless
John
Pilger
Return to Kosovo: Calling the Humanitarian Bombers to Account
Joshua
Frank
All the Rage: Mr. Solomon, Say You're Sorry
Ben
Tripp
O Canada!: the Truth About the Election of 2004
John
Stanton
God Speaks!
Laura
Nathan
Porn Stars are People, Too: a Talk with Christi Lake
Poets'
Basement
Capaccio, Davies, Louise, Ford and Albert
Website
of the Day
Fallujah Photos: Killed in Their Beds
December
10, 2004
Ralph
Nader
President Bush, Stop Destroying the
Mosques of Iraq
Greg
Moses
Whitewashing Voter Fraud
Nicole
Colson
Rebellion in the Ranks: Grunts Are Resisting Stop-Loss Orders
Frederick
B. Hudson
"They Still Got Those Dogs": A New Book Probes Old
Civil Rights Lessons
Patrick
Cockburn
Iraq's Insurgents Oppose the Occupation, Not the Elections
Kathy
Kelly
From Haiti to Iraq: Burying Water
December
9, 2004
Greg
Moses
Ask Not Who Bankrolled Fallujah
Joshua
Frank
Cobb and the Ohio Recount: Vote Fraud as Fundraiser!
Ralph
Nader
An Open Letter to Bush: It's Time to
Disclose the Real Casualty Figures
Lee
Sustar
Bhopal: the Making of a Disaster
Tom
Barry
Restrictionist Resurgence
Mickey
Z.
Sander Hicks and the 9/11 Truth Movement
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush in the Bubble
Mark
Donham
Why are House Democrats Trying to
Deny Cynthia McKinney Seniority?
Gary
Corseri
On the Anniversary of John Lennon's Death, 2012
Paul
de Rooij
The Voices of Sharon's Little Helpers
December
8, 2004
Ralph
Nader
Will the Real Michael Moore Ever Re-Emerge?
Ann
Harrison
The Ohio Recount: Reluctant Officials
and Few Rules
Paul
Craig Roberts
War Crime
Dave
Lindorff
They've Got a Secret: Inside the $40 Billion Black Budget for
Spying
Patrick
Cockburn / Andrew Buncombe
CIA Warning on Iraq: Fallujah Did Not Break the Back of the Insurgency
Col.
Dan Smith
Rules of Engagement in Iraq
Emily
Alves / Michael Johnson
Paradise Lost: Corruption and Clientelism in Costa Rica
Richard
Oxman
The Dylan Bob Wouldn't Mention: Up With Dylan Thomas
Ron
Jacobs
In Fallujah, Freedom Isn't Free
December
7, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn
Running Battles in Baghdad
Behrooz
Ghamari
Lost Muslim Voices of Dissent
Dave
Lindorff
American Fantasies: Psst! Hey Buddy,
Did You Hear How Well the War's Going?
Joshua
Frank
Dean at the DNC?
Richard
Oxman
Down with Dylan: the Insufferable Interview
Ray
McGovern
All Mosquitoes, No Swamp
John
Chuckman
The Invasion of Hallifax: The Imperial Wizard Visits Canada
James
Petras
Latin America: the Empire Changes Gears
Website
of the Day
ToxMap: Who's Poisoning You
December
6, 2004
Paul
Craig Roberts
Paranoia and Pre-emption: Is the
Bush Administration Certifiable?
December
4 / 6, 2004
Alexander
Cockburn
Politicize the CIA? You've Got to
be Kidding
Joe
Bageant
Dining with the Rhinos
Alan
Maass
Reporting from the Ground in Iraq: an Interview with Patrick
Cockburn
Brian
Cloughley
Democracy, Bush-style, in the Gulf
Laura
Carlsen
Latin America Shifts Left
Lenni
Brenner
Jefferson, Madison, Bush and Religion
Anna
Ioakimedes
Brazil's Haitian Mission: Doing God's Work or Washington's?
Uri
Avnery
Widow of Opportunity?
Fred
Gardner
Supreme Court Hears Medical Pot Case
Dave
Zirin
Steroids to Heaven
Jackie
Corr
Mining Camp Blues: the Red State Variation
Don
Fitz
Will Greens Abandon IRV?
Lucy
Herschel
"Art can be a Weapon of the Oppressed": an Interview
with Artist Anthony Papa
Richard
Oxman
No Angels in America: Bashing the Gay Play
Ron
Jacobs
Holiday Greeting Card
Poets'
Basement
Collins, Albert, LaMorticella
December
3, 2004
Dave
Lindorff
Lie Then Escalate
Ben
Tripp
Fun With Boycotts: How to Shop in a
Time of Crisis
Joe
Allen
Murder in El Salvador: the Assassination of Teamster Organizer
Gilberto Soto
Matthew
B. Riley
Human Rights Court Fails Lori Berenson
Meir
Shalev
In the End, It is the Violin that Wins
Bob
Wing
The White Elephant in the Room: Race and Election 2004
Christopher
Brauchli
When McCain Bit His Tongue
Sasan
Fayazmanesh
The EU, the US, Israel and Iran
December
2, 2004
Tito
Tricot
No Justice in Chile: I'm a Torture
Survivor in a Country Where Torturers Still Run Free
Behzad
Yaghmaian
The Murder of Theo Van Gogh and Muslim Migration
Dr.
Susan Block
Lana and Me: Meetings with Remarkable Apes
Frank
/ Chowkwanyun
Liberalism and Its Bounds
Lee
Sustar
Standoff in Ukraine: the Bad v. the Corrupt
Patrick
Cockburn
Another Grim Record in Iraq
Mark
Engler
Seattle at Five
Michael
Donnelly
Something Stinks in South Bend: the Firing of Tyrone Willingham
Nate
Collins
The Bay Area Mall on an Ohlone Burial Grounds
Saul
Landau
The Assassination of Danilo Anderson
December
1, 2004
Phillip
Cryan
Associated with Whom? Rightist Bias
in Wire Coverage of Colombia
Dave
Zirin
What's the Matter with "Leon"?:
Budweiser's Racist Commercial
Ghali
Hassan
Iraq's Health Care Under the Occupation:
200 Children Die Every Day
Donna
J. Volatile
Beware Western Nations Threatening "Democracy"
Patrick
Cockburn
How Saddam Tried to Arm the Insurgency
Nick
Meo
Chemical War Over Afghanistan
Mike
Ferner
The Battle of Toledo
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Shame and Determination on Global AIDS Day: 40 Million and Rising
Kathy
Kelly
Looking the Other Way: the Real Crimes
of the UN in Iraq
November
30, 2004
Jennifer
Van Bergen
The Veil of Secrecy
Toni
Nelson Herrera
Meeting Kurtz: When Art is a Crime
Paul
Craig Roberts
The Bush Delusions: Successful at Incompetence
Patrick
Cockburn
The Insurgency Strikes Back: There Are No Safe Havens in Iraq
Chuck
Munson
WTO Protests Five Years Later: Seattle Weekly Trashes Anti-Globalization
Movement
Adam
Williams
Citizenship Sold: Back to Business in Indiana
Gregory
Elich
A Dangerous Turn in the US Plans for
North Korea
Website
of the Day
Read Lynne Cheney's Lesbian Novel Online!
November
29, 2004
Dave
Lindorff
Blowback in Ukraine: The Hand of
the CIA?
Omar
Barghouti
"The Pianist" of Palestine:
Roadblock Concerto at Gunpoint
Mike
Whitney
The US Media and Fallujah: How to
Market a Siege
Uri
Avnery
The Abu Mazen Style: "Give Me
Some Credit!"
Matt
Vidal
Globalization and Economic Inequality: a Look at the Numbers
Patrick
Cockburn
An Interview with Iraq's Foreign
Minister
Alan
Farago
Sex Change and Salvation: God, Girly Men and Endocrine Disrupters
Justin
Huggler
Bhopal 20 Years Later
Antony
Loewenstein
How Australia Reported Arafat's Death and Legacy
Gary
Leupp
Ukraine: Poll Results Aren't the Real
Issue
Website
of the Day
Mosul: Images from a Kill Zone
November
27 / 28, 2004
Peter
Linebaugh
Torture & Neo-Liberalism with
Sycorax in Iraq
Alexander
Cockburn
What Happened to O'Reilly's Loofa?
Fred
Gardner
Ashcroft v. Raich: Medical Marijuana and the Supreme Court
Kathy
Kelly
What We Can Control
Diane
Christian
The Other Cheek: "Empire Doesn't Analyze, It Acts"
Gary
Leupp
One More Neocon Target: South (Yes, South) Korea
Lenni
Brenner
Equality and Rights of Return: Jefferson Instructs the New York
Times
Ron
Jacobs
Death Squads and Iraq's Elections: the Mysterious Murders of
the AMS Clerics
Joshua
Frank
An Interview with Kevin Zeese on Nader, Kerry and the ABB Crowd
Toni
Solo
The Murder of Danilo Anderson
Saul
Landau
Fallujah, the 21st Century Guernica
JoAnn
Wypijewski
Matthew Shepard Case 6 Years Later: Why Hate Crimes Laws are
No Cure for Homophobia
Justin
Taylor
Empire's Lawless Opportunities
Amos
Harel
The Case of Captain R.
Walter
A. Davis
Tabloid Justice
Stephen
Hendricks
God's Kind of Men
Poets'
Basement
Albert, LaMorticella and Ford
November
26, 2004
Peter
Feng
Gavin Newsom: Man or Machine?
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It's the White Vote, Stupid
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Ali Khan
The Devil's Work: Bush's Minority Appointments
Michael
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Why Bush Should Be Banned from Canada: a Memo to the Ministry
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Nation of Sheep, Turkey of an Election: Urkrainians Show the
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Corseri
When Black Friday Comes...
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Whatever Happened to Conservatives?
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Iraq Pipeline Watch
November
25, 2004
Willliam
Loren Katz
Giving Thanks to Whom?: "Thanks
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Mitchel
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Why I Hate Thanksgiving
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Ferner
An Uncommon Mom
November
24, 2004
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Svirsky
License to Kill: the Example of Violence
is Set by the State
Winslow
T. Wheeler
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Other Mess in Congress
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Brauchli
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Dave
Lindorff
Double Standards on Exit Polls: Hypocrisy Sans Irony
Ron
Jacobs
The Occupation of Iraq is the Root of t he Problem
Ken
Sengupta
Witnesses: War Crimes in Fallujah
Diana
Barahona
The Final Holocaust or Why I Voted for Ralph Nader
John
L. Hess
Safire the Shameless
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Leopold
Did Harvard Hire (Another) War Criminal?
Jeffrey
St. Clair
The Mark of McCain: the Senator Most Likely to Start a Nuclear
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Now and Then: 2004 v. 1860
November
23, 2004
Forrest
Hylton
Bush and Uribe at the Beach
November
22, 2004
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Zirin
Fight Night in the NBA: Selective Outrage
in Detroit
Paul
Craig Roberts
On to Iran: We Won't Get Fooled Again?
Michael
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Why Bush Should be Banned from Canada
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Helmkamp
Our Son: a Marine Who Won't Kill
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The Triangle of Death: "This is Now the Most Dangerous Place
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Greenspan's Hammer
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The Poisoned Chalice
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Abbas
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The Horrors of Fallujah: a First-Hand Account
Kevin
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Mishandling Nader
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The Vulcans Consolidate Power: The Rise of Stephen Hadley
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Pot Shots: Ask Dr. Todd
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Triumph of the Will: the Sequel
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Sandwiches and Car Bombs
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|
Weekend Edition
January 15 / 16, 2005
An Ideological Tower of Babel
Christian
Zionism
By
LILA RAJIVA
This
article is excerpted from Lila Rajiva's upcoming book "The
Language of Empire: Abu Ghraib and the American Media" published
by Monthly Review Press.
Like the repressed, history also returns.
The repressed of the neo-liberal maximizer of utility returns.
Self-directed, self-interested man looks into a warped mirror
and finds homo religiosis. The sublime of religion that appalls
us, also fascinates. What shows itself in the scenes of prison
abuse does not appear as only defensive, the planned, rational
response of threatened modernity. but as something more burdened
with emotion, something that simmers under the glassy surface
of "no-touch," something sharp, frenzied, even exhibitionistic.
It calls attention to itself. Underneath the neo-liberal rhetoric
of a defensive war of modernity against the rise of a new barbarism,
we must ask if we find instead a war of religion, an aggressive
war against an ancient enemy, a new Crusade. There are those
who think so.
In an October 23, 2003 AP report,
General Boykin, assistant to Cambone, described the battle against
Islamic terrorists as a clash between Christianity and "a
guy named Satan" and suggested that Christians needed to
support the divine plan that had put Bush in office, "Why
is this man in the White House?" he asked rhetorically.
"The majority of Americans did not vote for him. He's in
the White House because God put him there." Earlier, in
January 2003, Boykin also told a congregation how the Somali
warlord Osman Atto had boasted on CNN that "Allah"
would protect him and Boykin had capped the story with the remark,
"Well, you know what? I knew that my God was bigger than
his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol."
In June 2002, he showed a congregation pictures of Mogadishu,
the capital of Somalia, that had been taken from an Army helicopter
in 1993 just after the battle with Somali war lords which killed
18 American soldiers, a debacle depicted in the film, "Black
Hawk Down." He said he had enlarged the photos when he had
got back home to the US. and noticed what looked like a dark
blemish over the city. "This is your enemy," he declared
to the congregation, "It is the principalities of darkness
.... It is a demonic presence in that city that God revealed
to me as the enemy." It was Boykin who briefed Stephen Cambone
his boss on Miller,s visit to Abu Ghraib. It was Boykin who encourages
the directive to change policy there along the lines that had
proved so effective at Guantanamo.
Boykin represents the enormous
power of evangelicals in the Bush administration Except for a
notorious call for a crusade immediately after Sept 11, Bush
has been careful in speeches to differentiate between the war
on Iraq and one on Islam. Muslim ambassadors have for the first
time participated in a formal Ramadan dinner at the White House
and a Muslim chaplain has officiated at the opening prayers of
Congress, but others close to him have been more intemperate.
Franklin Graham, whose father Billy converted Bush, has called
Islam evil and Graham,s decision to join other Christian evangelists
in Iraq both to aid and convert Iraqis must bolster the Muslim
perception of the invasion as an alliance of "Jews and Crusaders."
Bush claims to be unable to restrain him because of concern for
civil liberties, but his reluctance may have more to do with
the contribution that evangelicals like Graham, Jerry Falwell,
and Pat Robertson have made to his election. And in private too,
Bush has revealed his own conviction that his presidency is a
mission given to him by God.
Was the abasement at Abu Ghraib
crafted to sear the religious conscience? Was the Iraq invasion
part of a master plan of crusading Christianity and Judaism?
Religious language seems to drench the administration. "Rods
from God" is the name for the bundles of tungsten rods fired
from orbiting platforms that hurtle down to earth at 3,700 meters
per second and destroy even underground targets anywhere on the
planet at a few minutes' notice. David Frum, until last year
a speech writer for Bush, claims in a recent book that he heard
a staff member say to Bush's chief speech writer, Michael Gerson,
"Missed you at Bible study." Christian fundamentalists
who have the President,s ear include the Apostolic Congress,
affiliated with the United Pentecostal Church, which in addition
to its missionary work in Israel (illegal under Israeli law),is
active in the increasingly Christian work of pro-Israel activities
in the United States. In an interview with the Village Voice,
its leader, Pastor Upton, claimed that he had coordinated the
directing of 50,000 postcards to the White House to oppose the
Middle East "Road Map, " the plan which aims to create
a Palestinian state. NSC Near East and North African Affairs
director, Elliott Abrams, sits down regularly with the Apostolic
Congress to assuage their fear that Israel might give up any
of its Biblical claims to land.
Bush also has strong connections
to apocalyptic millennialists like Tim LaHaye, one of the authors
of the Left Behind novels, who believes that a world-wide conflagration
centered in the Middle East will be the prelude to the return
of Christ. Before his thousand year rule over the world, however,
millennialists believe that select believers will be taken up
directly to heaven in a Rapture. Other fundamentalists like the
dominionists are more concerned with the present day than the
apocalypse and seek to remake the United States as country under
Biblical law, focusing on the expansion of Christianity as a
power. What all these groups have in common, however, is support
for the Iraq war, a belief that Islam is false, and faith in
Zionism. Christian Zionists advocate the unconditional support
for Israel, the return of all Jews to Israel, the legitimacy
of the West Bank settlements, a greater (Eretz) Israel that spreads
from and includes Jerusalem with the Temple of Solomon rebuilt
on the present site of the sacred Al-Aqsa mosque. The power of
this pro-Israeli lobby ensures that Israel receives 3-8 billion
dollars annually from the US in aid and military assistance and
that House members on both sides are neutered on the subject
of Israel. In March 2004, Senator Inhofe stated in a speech on
the Senate floor that he supports Israel because God said so.
It was the same Inhofe who claimed that he was more outraged
by the outrage over Abu Ghraib than over the treatment of the
prisoners. "They're murderers, they're terrorists, they're
insurgents. Many of them probably have American blood on their
hands. And here we're so concerned about the treatment of those
individuals." Should we draw a connection between Inhofe,s
Zionist beliefs and his view of Iraqi prisoners?
Christian Zionists constitute
a vocal 3 million of America's 98 million evangelicals and with
the 30 million other Christians who have Zionist beliefs of some
kind have long been the mainstay of U.S. support for Israel,
operating through such political groups as the powerful Council
for National Policy, which was founded by LaHaye, a former head
of the Moral Majority, and has included John Ashcroft, Ed Meese,
Ralph Reed, the editor of The National Review, Robertson, Falwell,
Grover Norquist, and Oliver North among its members. Ashcroft
has been reported as saying: "Islam is a religion in which
God requires you to send your son to die for him. Christianity
is a faith where God sent his son to die for you." Jerry
Falwell has told the CBS news program "60 Minutes"
that Muhammad is a "terrorist." The only non-Jew ever
to receive the Jabotinsky medal for services to Israel, from
the militant Zionist's ardent disciple, Menachem Begin, Falwell
was even permitted by President Reagan to attend NSC briefings
while best-selling Armageddon author, Hal Lindsey, was allowed
to speak on nuclear war with Russia to top Pentagon strategists.
(Born again zionist - mother jones sept 2002) Lindsey,s 1970,s
best-seller, the Late Great Planet Earth is responsible for bringing
to world wide fame the dispensationalist view that since the
return of the Jews to Israel, history has been unfolding according
to Revelations. In recent years, these and other evangelicals
have targeted as their priority a swath of the world dubbed "the
10/40 window" (North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia between
10 degrees and 40 degrees north latitude) for conversion. Fundamentalists
routinely mischaracterize Islam as idolatry, paganism, or a cult.
One former leader of the Southern Baptist Convention has even
called the prophet Muhammad a "demon-possessed pedophile."
Was the abasement at Abu Ghraib
intended to exorcize the possessed? The man who was responsible
for directing the re-opening of Abu Ghraib prison under the U.S.,
Lane McCotter, selected for the job by John Ashcroft, resigned
under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections
in 1997 after a schizophrenic inmate died while shackled naked
to a restraining chair for 16 hours. Yet Cotter was also selected
to train guards at Abu Ghraib. Perhaps some of the prison bosses
in Iraq, like some of the guards, were inclined by religion and
temperament to see their charges as in need of punishment or
therapy.
Certainly the silence of many
fundamentalist Christian leaders on Abu Ghraib was stunning.
World magazine was quick to defend Rumsfeld, labeling the torture
the "perverse acts of a few." Chuck Colson and Gary
Bauer called for the vindication of America's military through
the swift punishment of the "bad apples" involved.
An article on the American Family Association web site briefly
condemned the atrocities, then spent the rest of its space on
the unwillingness of the "liberal media" to display
pictures from the Fallujah burnings.
It is not too much to see in
this reaction the frame of reference for administration policies
or to suggest that some evangelical,s beliefs about Muslims might
coincide with politicians who for other reasons might find detention
and torture the best response to a recalcitrant population. For
those to whom terrorism is either religious extremism or violent
heresy, the rooting out of that heresy may take such medieval
forms as the scourging of the body in which the heretical spirit
lodges. In this way, apocalyptic Christianity joins with the
corporate-state in the disciplining of flesh. and the prisoner
posed in the Vietnam like a hooded Christ ultimately recalls
us uncannily to both the Inquisition of Catholic Spain and
the witch-hunts of the Puritan forebears of America.
ISRAEL FIRST
But are Bush,s policies driven
largely by the rise of the fundamentalist right? Don Wagner,
an expert in fundamentalism believes that the current hard-line
pro-Israel movement in the U.S. draws its strength from these
evangelicals and is "predominantly gentile." But he
may be placing the cart before the horse. It is true that Christian
Zionists are numerically powerful, but a look at history quickly
lets us know that their rise in importance in American politics
coincided with the desire of Jewish Zionists to broaden their
constituency and goes back to the late 60,s and 1970s to the
1967 Arab-Israeli war, the Arab defeat, and then during the Yom
Kippur War in 1973 an oil crisis caused by an embargo by OPEC,
the oil cartel, of the western nations that supported Israel
in that war. As oil prices sent shock waves into the Western
economies and apprised them of the power of Arab nationalist
sympathy for Palestine, other new intellectual currents in Western
thought were also strengthening support for that power - feminism,
third world nationalism, anti-colonialism, environmentalism,
and a peace movement aimed at de-nuclearizing the world, under
the impact of which Western Europe, including the U.K. and Japan,
began to rethink its reflexive support for Israel. The Soviet
Union, which already in the early 1960s had begun to support
the Palestinian cause militarily, supported the Arabs in 1967
even as Soviet Jews openly demonstrated for Israel. The Soviet
government as a socialist body officially committed to anti-imperialism
and anti-nationalism was forced to clamp down on them as well
as other dissidents providing the context for agitation among
diasporic Jews in the US against Soviet emigration policy. Despite
being couched in terms of human rights, this American pressure
had not much to do with the oppression of other dissident ethnic
groups for a refusenik was by definition a Soviet Jew who had
been refused the right to emigrate. Legislation such as the Jackson-Vanik
amendment linked trade with Russia to freedom of emigration for
Soviet Jews. In 1975 the UN General Assembly passed Resolution
3379, condemning Zionism as "racist" by 72-35 and it
became transparent that Israel,s time as a race-based settler
state was marked.
Only at this point did neo-conservatives
make their transition from the left to the right, claiming they
had seen the light on communism and the need for US military
muscle to keep the world safe from appeasers. They had come to
realize that American military and financial aid as well as a
favorable population ratio in the settler state was the best
bulwark against any future transformation of Israel from a Jewish
state into merely a state for Jews. The Arab womb was the real
weapon of mass destruction they feared.
It was at this time that US
support for Israel, until then equivocal, moved to the center
of American foreign policy. The rise of this Israel-centered
foreign policy was therefore neither logically necessary nor
spontaneous but the result of a sustained campaign born from
fear that the U.S. too might ultimately follow its own interests
and cultivate good relations with the Arab world at the expense
of Israel. With Arab countries beginning to exhibit political
clout, Israel began systematically organizing the influential
and wealthy diaspora in the west, labeling any perception of
similarity between Nazi and Zionist policies as "communist"
and fostering a general intellectual reaction against the emergence
of the post-colonial world.
It is this secular history
that provides the context for the emergence of the anti-Arabisn
whose visible face we see in the extraordinarily demeaning images
of Abu Ghraib. Using their preeminence in Hollywood, the media,
government-related lobbies, law firms, and academia, the diaspora
began a campaign to dehumanize and demonize the Arab, and wanting
for allies, began to make common cause with the defense industrial
complex, and more dangerously, with the Christian right. Dangerous,
because aside from their support of Israel, Christian Zionist
theology entails the eventual conversion or destruction of the
Jews and under Geneva Conventions, the forced destruction of
a people,s way of life and beliefs is also genocide. In 1980,
the wooing of the right received the official sanction of the
Israeli government and an "International Christian Embassy"
in Jerusalem was established whose function was and remains to
coordinate worldwide Christian support for Israel and its policies
and which raises funds to help finance Russian Jewish immigration
to Israel and settlement in the West Bank. Enter Christian Zionism
to the center stage of American politics.
JEWISH ZIONISM
But reading history in these
terms lays one open to the charge of anti-Semitism, for many
would argue that Zionism is merely the Israeli version of the
same territorial claim that all other nations make without any
criticism. Why should one see in Zionism anything anti-Arab,
unless the intent is to de-legitimize the Jewish homeland? After
all, many non-Jewish commentators take as hard-line a position
on the Palestinians as Jewish Zionists - among them Cal Thomas,
Michael Novak, Bill Bennett, and George Will. Thomas, who has
even called for the expulsion of the Palestinians from Israeli
territory, is of course a Christian Zionist, but Novak and Bennett
are both Catholics and Will is an Episcopalian. Some would say
that their voices are an indication that Zionism in America is
merely the expression of support for the natural security concerns
of an ally.
That argument is not tenable
on several counts. First, the record indicates that on certain
issues the American media apparently takes its cue from the Israeli
lobby and does not operate with genuine independence but in a
prearranged concert.
Edward Hermann, author of several
influential works on the American media, describes instances
of Israeli scripting of media language on important issues.
In 1979, when Israel was under world pressure to end the "redemption
of the land" program, the Jonathan Institute in Israel brought
US officials and journalists like Bush, Will, Senators Jackson
and Danforth, the historian Paul Johnson and others together
to set the tone: the PLO was to be labeled a terrorist group
tied to Moscow and Israel was to be portrayed as the victim.
In Washington in 1984, the same script was reiterated to Secretary
of State George Shultz, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Senator Moynihan,
Daniel Schorr and Ted Koppel of NBC. Hermann argues that the
Israeli lobby in America, no longer satisfied with the pro-Israeli
slant of the NYT, WP and CNN, now seeks to actually black-out
inconvenient facts or viewpoints with the charge of anti-Semitism.
Elected officials who dare to criticize Israel, from Republican
Senators Percy and Findley to black representatives Hilliard
and McKinney, have been thwarted in their bids for office. On
campus, the campaign for divestment of stock in Israel has been
dubbed "anti-semitic in effect, if not intent" by Harvard
President Lawrence Summers.
Publicists simply toe a line
enforced by the Israeli lobby and to regard them as having an
equal power outside their conformism on Israel is unsupported
by the facts. The influence or beliefs of the Christian right
can be denounced - and is so routinely - without heads rolling
but any imputation of a pro-Israeli bias is liable to call down
an avalanche of letter-writing orchestrated by the Anti-Defamation
League, the B,nai Brith and a host of Jewish groups whose influence
on Capitol Hill is the elephant in the room that everyone acknowledges
and no one talks about. Jewish Zionists have made an alliance
of convenience with the Christian right, but there is little
doubt who the senior partner is. In any case, Jewish groups themselves
boast of their influence, and as Michael Kinsley puts it, "you
shouldn't brag about how influential you are if you want to get
hysterically indignant when someone suggests that government
policy is affected by your influence."
The second reason the anti-Semitic
charge founders is evident from the language of the debate on
Palestine which shows something quite different from simply nationalist
concerns. Which nationally influential ultra-right Christian
group in America, for instance, could get away with couching
its appeals in the nakedly racial language used by some influential
Zionists in Israel? Jewish ultra-nationalists like Gush Emunim
are not simply nationalists but assume instead that that Jewish
people "are not and cannot be a normal people," because
"their eternal uniqueness" is "the result of the
covenant God made with them at Mount Sinai" which transcends
the "human notions of national rights." This refutes
entirely the classical Zionist claim that only by emigrating
to Palestine and forming a Jewish state there can the Jews become
like any other nation. According to Rabbi Aviner of Gush Emunim,
"while God requires other normal nations to abide by abstract
codes of 'justice and righteousness', such laws do not apply
to Jews." When the Israeli Haredim (ultra-Orthodox) refused
to donate or receive blood transfusion from non-Jews, because
their blood is "impure," they were supported by many
distinguished Israeli rabbis, including former Chief Rabbi, Mordechay
Eliyahu. With religious parties representing 25% of the electorate,
ultra-nationalists and fundamentalists heavily influence the
Israeli government, especially Ariel Sharon's right-wing Likud.
Gush Emunim members, who constitute a significant percentage
of IDF's elite units, reportedly exhibit greater brutality toward
Palestinians, a brutality justified by the twin senses of historical
persecution and incipient crisis that attends Jewish exceptionalism.
To such exceptionalists, criticism of Israel is inextricably
linked with a desire to destroy Jewish people. Criticism invokes
the holocaust. Neo-conservative publicist David Horowitz, for
example, refuses to accept any Israeli accountability in Palestine,
"The Middle East struggle is not about right versus right...it
is about the desire (of the Arabs) to destroy the Jewish state."
Moreover, it is not only ultra-nationalists but many other Jews,
both conservative, as Berg was, and reform, who are deeply committed
to the Zionist dream of reestablishing the Jewish dream of Eretz
Yisrael. For all of them "Aliya [the return to Israel] is
the highest expression of Zionist fulfillment, because it allows
for the most direct involvement in shifting Jewish values from
the realm of theory into the practice of statehood."
Zionism is an ideology of blood
and soil and the ideology of even secular Zionism involves "Jewishness"
even though there is no racially pure separate group of Jews.
The most powerful and numerous group - the Ashkenazi - are ethnically
Eastern Europeans from Khazar who converted in the middle ages.
It is the Sephardic Jews and Arab and Christian Palestinians
- second-class citizens in Israel - who actually share the blood
of the original Jews of the Bible. For this reason even while
many religious Jews reject Zionism, secular Zionism itself needs
religion for its raison d,etre for there is no real tie of blood
to which they can otherwise appeal. Among secularists, political
Zionists like Theodore Herzl may have once thought of Argentina
and Uganda as possible choices for the Jewish people, but after
1905, only Palestine, the Biblical land, was considered. Similarly,
cultural Zionism does not conceive of simply a state for the
Jews but a Jewish state, one where Hebrew learning, culture,
and Judaic studies are central. Even Labor Zionism manages to
marry the socialism of the kibbutz movement to Jewish consciousness.
You would not know these things
from the American media, however, which characterizes Israel
as a western liberal democracy in which all citizens are equal
before the law and treats Zionism as any other nationalism, tacitly
condoning the existence of a "Jewish" race-based state,
while nevertheless repudiating the notion of a white or Christian
state in America.
Charles Krauthammer writes
in the Jewish World Review:
"Kofi Annan's personal
representative in Iraq now singles out the policies of the world's
one Jewish state, and the only democratic state in the Middle
East, as "the great poison in the region."
While the Los Angeles Times
even editorializes that "Israel must remain a Jewish state."
(Oct 11, 2004)
Consider the policies of this
bulwark of secularism, human rights, and democracy: Employment,
housing, and access to services follows a discriminatory pattern
with Ashkenazi Jews from Europe getting the best, Sephardic -
Middle Eastern - Jews the next, followed by Moslem, Druze and
Christians, many of them the original inhabitants, and at the
bottom "Israeli Arabs," that is, Palestinians within
the 1948 borders. By the Law of Return, Israel must accommodate
any Jews from anywhere who might at any time migrate to Israel
but cannot accommodate the indigenous Palestinian population
which fled Israeli terror in 1948 if they wished to return. Israeli
identity cards can list the official ethnicity of a person -
Jewish, Arab, Druze ... - but not the nationality - Israeli.
Since 1967 to date, Israel has arbitrarily detained over 630,000
Palestinians. In 1989 alone, Israel detained 50,000 Palestinians,
representing 16% of the entire male population of the West Bank
and Gaza Strip between the ages of 14 and 55. By contrast, that
same year, out of a total African population of 24 million in
South Africa, no more than 5,000 or 0.2% were detained for security
offenses under apartheid. Palestinians have the highest rate
of incarceration in the world - approximately 20 percent of Palestinians
in the occupied territories have, at one time, been arbitrarily
detained by Israel.
Without knowing this history,
we cannot follow the trail of blood that leads from Iraq to
Palestine, from the torture at Abu Ghraib to the practices of
the IDF. And not seeing that trail, we think of Abu Ghraib as
error, or incompetence, or folly when it was none of these. It
was not a matter of "security" or "law and order,"
but a part of a war on the population, a war in which torture
had a specific role, the same role it has in Gaza, to intimidate
the population into submission.
Yet having said this, it is
also true that Zionism as a racial and political ideology of
itself is not unique and does not operate alone in a vacuum and
that therefore as an analytic tool it becomes somewhat elusive.
Simply put, Zionism explains why some of the prominent players
acts as they do, but it does not fully explain why, for one thing,
what they do finds a receptive audience and is effective. The
real question is why the language of religious chuavinism that
masks itself in a discourse of superior civilization has such
purchase with the American public.
THE LANGUAGE
OF AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM
We understand this only when
we look at America,s own history of exceptionalism. Zionism finds
a responsive chord because America itself is convinced of its
unique national destiny, a belief that powerfully influences
its foreign policy. "Manifest destiny," as it is termed,
ultimately also has religious roots that can be traced to the
Calvinist doctrine of the elect, those 144,000 souls who are
predestined for salvation not because of their inner righteousness
but because the worldly success that accompanies their deeds
is seen as a mark of providential favor. Today this exceptionalism
is no more purely religious but a secular ideology as well; it
is the American civic religion.
In this secular religion, to
believe oneself "favored" rather than "blessed"
is to believe that one's essence rather than one's acts set one
apart. One's status as the chosen, whether American or Jewish,
is thus derived from the success, not the rightness, of one's
acts; from the power that makes one's representations alone real
and others, unreal. It is this power to which the will of our
enemies is irrelevant that is behind both the shock and awe bombing
of Iraq and its virtual counterpart, the pornographic torture
of prisoners. Thus a senior Bush aide states in a much quoted
exchange, "That's not the way the world really works anymore...
We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality...
We're history's actors.., and you, all of you, will be left to
just study what we do."
Abu Ghraib is the end result
of this solipsism of the Promethean state that is shared by both
Zionist as well as non-Zionist American actors.
Both secular and religious
exceptionalists also share a unique relationship to the law that
suggests that law and legal institutions are themselves implicated
in the policies of Abu Ghraib and clarifies why it may not be
possible to look to them alone for salvation.
Both groups share the heritage
of covenant theology which reads holy scripture as the record
of legal contracts between God and man, a heritage which both
privileges the law while simultaneously also promoting a sense
of not being subject to it. The written contract binds us, but
the interpretation of that contract remains with the state whose
favored status has been granted by the law. Take for instance
a January 9, 2002 memo from the Justice Department. It refuses
to find international law applicable to President Bush in his
detention of Al Qaeda or Taliban members but it finds the same
law applicable to terrorist suspects and insists that they can
be prosecuted under it. Perhaps this is only common hypocrisy,
but one can also see it as inextricably bound up with the Promethean
doctrine of an American state beyond law because it embodies
the very contract between God and man that undergirds all law.
We can see in it a parallel to the doctrine of Sola Scriptura,
resonant in American religious history, which recognizes the
Bible as the Word of God not primarily because of logical or
historical arguments but by the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit,s
"internal testimony," a mystery which is ultimately
impenetrable to rationality. In the Promethean state the thin
veil of reasoning that the law normally draws over state action
has been rent and power radiates alone. Unchecked by any countervailing
force it is by virtue of that fact touched with the divine.
From covenant theology also
derives the literalism of the brand of nineteenth century evangelism
- dispensationalist - that Falwell and Roberts practice which
permeates even secular culture. Dispensationalists read the final
book of the Bible, Revelations, as a literal account of a post-war
progression to a world-consuming conflagration, Armageddon. In
doing so, they discount the importance of reason, learning, or
social consensus in their interpretations in favor of what they
see as a literal reading of the Biblical text. Parallel to this
is their reading of the unfolding of human history as also a
literal record where that text transparently reveals itself.
Dispensationalists, who like to make an ought of is, are thus
Hegelians. Like Fukuyama, they too see the winding-down of history,
although in their version it ends in apocalypse.
Fundamentalists lend another
trait to secular culture, a distaste for any mediation between
God and man, whether through priesthoods of men or through the
elaborate rationality of philosophy. This distaste would lead
one to infer that they also have an aversion for the regulations
of contracts and laws. But paradoxically in a popular culture
filled with anti-intellectualism, the written Constitution like
the written scripture holds a privileged position. The paradox
might only be apparent. Just as fundamentalism disdains mediation,
an anti-intellectual culture might find an oral tradition based
on a continuing interpretative dialogue between past and present
actually less attractive than the fixed guidelines of a written
contract, whether made between one nation and another or between
nations and God. In other words, the mechanism of the constitution,
like the text of scripture or the language of law, could actually
become a convenient tool to avoid working out the ongoing difficulties
of the political world and to elude rather than meet its demands.
Politics ultimately demands mastery over reality whereas the
law requires only external conformism to certain specified criteria.
So, the mechanism of the law not only tends to relieve us of
the burden of competence, it ultimately fails to check aggression.
Instead, aggression expresses itself not outside law, but through
it. Scriptural and legal limits come to mark the boundary beyond
which feelings of empathy or compassion need not run. Those not
chosen become, in Kipling,s words, the lesser breeds without
the law. The literalism of the Armageddonists, their faith that
the Biblical text they read translates directly into events unfolding
in history, is bound up completely with this sense they have
of enacting history as subjects and being set apart through history
and through law from those others whose histories and beings
are objects to be written or acted upon.
It is this sanctified contempt
for the other that is at the heart of Abu Ghraib and militates
against any reading of it as a war-crime of errant individuals.
The half-a-dozen reservists are no more than scape-goats in a
program of racial and religious abasement that was conceived
as completely legitimate. The photographs horrify precisely because
they express this sense of legitimacy very much as the post-cards
of the 1920s depicting laughing crowds watching Negroes being
lynched convey their perfect acceptability at the time.
Such sanctified terror is rooted
not only in Zionism then but equally in the sectarian beliefs
of fundamentalist Christians that feed many elements of the Promethean
ideology. From Biblical righteousness, the Promethean sense of
the state as virtue incarnate; from Christian dominionism, the
impetus to expand; from apocalyptic ruminations, the Promethean
obsession with terror. And through all of these runs an unexamined
sense of supreme moral satisfaction, a Puritan certainty about
the nature and precise physical location of evil in the other
that is translated not simply in the messianic language of Americanism
but even in the shibboleths of liberalism. Evil is outside, out
there in the world, radically disordered, deserving of eradication.
To fully understand Abu Ghraib, therefore, we need to shatter
the linguistic policing behind which torture masquerades as "national
security," "necessity," and "protecting our
freedoms"; we need to free ourselves from the control of
the singular language of Babel, the empire of universal law and
reason. We need to comprehend the extent to which the totalizing
discourse of reason itself masks those local meanings and sufferings
in which humanity resides.
When we do so, what appears
behind the mask is a confusion of meanings that evades easy categorization.
A study of hundreds of communications by Bush, Ashcroft, Powell,
and Rumsfeld between September 11, 2001 and spring 2000 found
four characteristics common to them - a set of Manichean distinctions
between good and evil and security and danger; a description
of the war on terror as a "mission"; conflation of
the will of God and the export of freedom and liberty by America;
and claims that dissent is a national and global threat. Quasi-religious
language is deployed here on behalf of exceptionalism but the
exceptionalism is only superficially crafted to appeal to religious
sentiment. Underlying the religious veneer, the language is intensely
inflected with attachment to the soil and fear of its violation
and echoes the Zionist ideology of soil. We find repeated terms
and phrases, such as "homeland" with its distinctly
Germanic flavor and "we fight them there so we don't have
fight them here." Not ethical or spiritual religion, but
a state-religion, a religion of territory and power speaks in
these words.
I have termed this ideology
Promethean for its refusal to submit to objective criteria of
the good or the just while claiming to represent them. Not so
much abrogating law as assuming the function of law-giver, the
new messianism uses the language of law for its content - human
rights, justice, liberty - but its framework is intensely revolutionary.
In public, then, Zionism in America, Christian or Jewish, does
not speak its name but prefers to use the language of secularism
and democracy inspirationally to press its claims. This is understandable.
Overtly religious rhetoric has a poor chance of success in a
country where even Christianity has many faces and where immigration
is encouraged. The self-image of America today is of a melting
pot and direct appeals to racial or religious chauvinism would
shatter this image of multiculturalism.
In any case, those who believe
in the unquestioned "goodness" of American force have
included not only Zionist neo-conservatives (and Max Boot has
admitted that Israel is the non-negotiable heart of neo-conservatism)
but before them Cold War hawks who once saw in the spread of
communism a similar radical threat to the West. What the decoding
of language demonstrates is that despite its religious overtones,
the rhetoric of American empire is fundamentally neither conservative
nor religious in a traditional sense but expressive of an ideology
of power in which religion has been consciously deployed. Subtle
words and phrases appeal to the religious, evoke their support,
play on their sympathies, and yoke the two strains of exceptionalism.
Under the defense of civilization, a war of religion is invoked;
but the rhetoric of religion itself conceals the more familiar
language of territory and resources, the struggle of political
interests.
What interests and for whose
benefit? The Americanist language would suggest American national
interest; the pervasive influence of Zionism would suggest Israeli.
Of course, publicly if not privately, Zionists like to argue
that there is no difference between the two. Ideology which grows
more powerful as the total state accelerates smoothes over these
discrepancies in words, these failures of meaning. It throws
out vague threats to the "national interest" and postures
aggressively behind the official narrative of a global war on
terror by the universal empire. This is the propaganda discourse
of Babel but what does Babel conceal? When the propaganda narrative
of terror is pierced, what lies behind?
Lila Rajiva is a free-lace journalist in Baltimore.
Her new book "the Language of Empire: Abu Ghraib and the
American Media" will be published this spring by Monthly
Review Press. She can be reached at: lrajiva@hotmail.com
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