Citizen G'kar: Musings on Earth

June 02, 2010

Historic UNSC Condemnation of Israel, and of Gaza Blockade; World Body Demands release of Aid Activists, Ships

Juan Cole provides a critically important news report that was absent from TV news. Guess why.

In a rare public denunciation of Israel, the United Nations Security Council on Monday condemned the Israeli raid on the Gaza aid flotilla and deplored the loss of innocent life that attended it. The world body insisted that Israel immediately release the 480 humanitarians it had taken captive, and demanded that it also let their ships go. The UNSC also instructed Israel to lift its blockade of the Gaza Strip, calling the siege “not sustainable.” Although the statement was weaker than the text urged by Turkey and the Arab world, it was brutal compared to the anodyne language usually insisted upon by Washington when it comes to Israel.

This development is head-spinning in its implications. The United States almost never allows UNSC resolutions condemning Israel to go forward (though this text was admittedly a presidential statement rather than a full resolution). But here it is clear that President Barack Obama instructed his ambassador to the UN to join in the condemnation of the Israeli “acts.” Since Turkey is currently a non-permanent member of the UNSC and led the charge on the condemnation of Israel, it is possible that the US felt it had to trade horses with Ankara if it has any chance of still getting a UNSC resolution tightening sanctions on Iran (a step that Turkey opposes, as does Brazil, though neither has a veto). It is also possible that Israel’s rash attack has sabotaged the Obama administration’s push for increased UN sanctions on Iran, hardening opposition to an Israel-driven policy toward Tehran.

The UN Assistant Secretary General for Political Affairs, Argentina’s Oscar Fernandez-Taranco, gave us some idea of the UNSC’s thinking when he called on Israel on Monday to end its “counterproductive” and “unacceptable” blockade of the Gaza Strip. He pointed out that the fiasco around the Israeli commando attack on the civilian aid flotilla would not have occurred had there been no blockade in the first place. The demand that Israel give up the siege of Gaza was repeated by the United Kingdom and by Brazil. (Nick Clegg, the new LibDem deputy prime minister of the UK, has long been a vocal critic of Israeli policies toward the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza.)

As long as Israel, therefore, continues its blockade of the general Gaza population, it is no less in contravention of the United Nations Security Council instructions than Saddam Hussein was with regard to his weapons programs in the early 1990s.

While gathering the details of how some 16 humanitarian aid activists were killed and dozens were wounded by Israeli soldiers is important, above all for the sake of justice toward the idealistic persons mown down, it is far more important that the episode produce an end to the lockdown of the 1.5 million Gazans, who have been placed by the Israeli government in a sort of open-air penitentiary.

Contrary to the assertions of far-right Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, the Palestinians of Gaza, stripped of any citizenship and lacking any basic human rights, face continual shortages of medicine, medical equipment, electricity and even of food. They face crushing poverty and unemployment, along with inadequate hospitals. Many are still homeless after the Israelis destroyed their homes in the Gaza War, and they are being denied cement for rebuilding. They are not allowed to have a harbor or an airport. They are cut off from the market for their goods in Egypt, Jordan and the rest of the Arab world. As Uri Avnery points out, Israeli pledged in the Oslo accords 18 years ago to allow a deep water port for Gaza on the Mediterranean. Instead, it is assaulting even small aid vessels attempting to land at the pitiful excuse for a port.

The blockade is shameful. It is a gross violation of the international law governing the treatment of Occupied populations. And now the Security Council has roundly condemned it and insisted that it be lifted.

The Israeli peace organization, Gush Shalom, demonstrated in front of the detention center where the aid activists were being held..

There are no new details of the Israeli assault on the humanitarian aid flotilla early Monday morning, largely because the 480 eyewitnesses had been sequestered by the Israelis. Some, including an 81-year-old former US ambassador, a Turkish woman with a baby, and a former US navy sailor who had been on the USS Liberty when the Israelis attacked it in 1967, are now trickling home. The whereabouts and condition of many others is unconfirmed, including European parliamentarians, Nobelists, and Swedish mystery writer Henning Mankell (whose anti-imperialist novel The Man from Beijing I just read and enjoyed.)

The incident could have implications for the future relationship of Israel to the European Union. Irish Minister of Foreign Affairs Micheal Martin hinted that Dublin might go so far as to cut expel the Israeli ambassador, thus cutting off diplomatic relations with Tel Aviv. Some 8 Irish citizens are among Israel’s prisoners, and one of these humanitarians, Fiachra O’Luain, is said by his father to have been wounded by Israeli gunplay. Martin thundered, “These citizens did not enter Israel illegally — they were essentially kidnapped from international waters, taken into Israel and are being asked to sign documents saying they entered illegally.”

The other big casualty of the Israeli raid may well be the special relationship between Turkey and Israel, as the BBC says. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan condemned the raid as “state terrorism.”

Thousands of demonstrators also gathered to chant against Israel in Baghdad, inspired by Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Interior Minister Jawad Bulani, serving in the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, said, “We want to send a message to the Palestinians to let them know they are not alone and that the Iraqis are with them . . . What is going on is a vicious crime. The international community must condemn it and take responsible action against them. This is the stand of all Iraqis, officially and publically.”

Historians may look back on the Marmara raid as the moment a new order began emerging in the Middle East, grouping Turkey with Iran, Syria, Iraq and Palestine rather than with Washington and Tel Aviv.

Aljazeera English has video on the world condemnation of the Marmara raid.

The enforced silence of the flotilla activists, in Israeli custody, has allowed Israeli spokesmen to shape the narrative of events for American news media. Former CIA analyst Ray Close blames President Obama for not being tougher with Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu to begin with, arguing that coddling the Likud leader led to this atrocity. As Jonathan Cook points out, the Israeli authorities have still not announced a definitive list of those killed and wounded by their commandos.

In response to Israeli official pronouncements, Amnesty International said, “Israel says its forces acted in self-defence, alleging that they were attacked by protestors, but it begs credibility that the level of lethal force used by Israeli troops could have been justified. It appears to have been out of all proportion to any threat posed.”

Raw video posted to Youtube from the initial phase of the Israeli boarding of the Turkish vessel, Mavi Marmara demonstrates that as the Israeli commandos approached the ship, they were laying down suppressive fire and at that point killed two individuals aboard the ship. Even after the ship ran up a white flag, the Israelis continued to use live ammunition along with stun grenades and tear gas.

See Stephen C. Webster’s analysis of this video of the boarding:

If the crew and passengers of the Mavi Marmara were coming under fire and had taken casualties in the initial phase of the Israeli approach, that horror would help explain why some actively resisted the boarding and that in turn would explain the contextless snippet of video released by the Israeli army of Israeli commandos being fought as they commandeered the vessel. If the passengers thought the Israeli military had murderous intentions toward them, some would obviously attempt to forestall the boarding. It is also possible that there were no deaths on the other ships because they were boarded later and after the Israeli helicopter gunship crews had learned that suppressive fire during the initial approach was unnecessary and counterproductive, and so they ceased that tactic.

It is unclear why the commandos behaved in this way with regard to the Mavi Marmara in the first place, but it is possible that they believed their own propaganda. The Turkish aid ships were supported by a Muslim fundamentalist charity in Turkey, IHH, that has been accused of being sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood and to Hamas, and in Israeli eyes that orientation would make them terrorists. So perhaps the commandos assumed they were boarding a ship full of Hamas operatives. In reality, it was just idealistic humanitarians. But even they could be provoked to active resistance if they thought they were about to be shot down.

It is a sign of to what depths the pride of the Israeli military has fallen that it is complaining of attempts to “lynch” its soldiers (none of whom was killed, while as many as 16 humanitarian aid workers appear to be dead). This is the Israeli army of the 1967 Six Days War and of Entebbe? They were in danger of being lynched as they boarded a small civilian vessel? Of course, they could have avoided this menace by simply not being uninvited on a ship in international waters. And, it is pretty obvious who is actually being lynched– the people of Gaza and anyone who objects to them being half-starved by the Israeli blockade.

June 01, 2010

Turkey Promises to Send Supplies to Gaza With Naval Escort

GAZA CITY, GAZA STRIP - JANUARY 06: Homeless ...

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

This situation worsens by the day.

This post originally appeared on Booman Tribune.
Well, now Israel has done it. They have actually provoked Turkey to the point that they may start a war over this incident massacre:

Turkey has threatened Israel with unprecedented action after Israeli forces attacked an aid vessel, killing 10 peace activists headed to Gaza.Israel said 10 people died while those on the ship said at least 15 were killed.

A shocked world has responded with outrage. Turkey recalled its ambassador to Israel and warned of unprecedented and incalculable reprisals.
Two Turkish activists were reported to be among those killed in the flotilla. Ankara warned that further supply vessels will be sent to Gaza, escorted by the Turkish Navy, a development with unpredictable consequences.
Israel has sounded an alert throughout the country fearing rocket attacks by Hezbollah in Lebanon.
If Turkey is promising to send new supplies with naval escort, then we’re headed for an epic showdown between two of Americas closest allies. I don’t think Obama is getting too much rest and relaxation this Memorial Day.
Meanwhile, the Arab League will meet tomorrow and put immense pressure on Egypt to lift their portion of the Gazan blockade. I can’t imagine that Egypt will refuse. In fact, I think Israel has jeopardized their peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan.
All this, and for what? To keep construction materials from the Gazan people? Israel is not behaving in anything resembling a rational manner. They just lost the only friends they had not named America. And who can help them now but Big Daddy? The problem is that Big Daddy has more to consider than Israeli’s deluded interests. We have to worry about our own image and international relationships.

Israel's Deadly Attack on Peace Activists Provokes International Outrage, Diplomatic Crisis

Israel has shown it's face to the world. The Freedom Flotilla, inspired by Gandhi's non-violent movement, has led to a massacre on the high seas. We will see much posturing and lies in the next few days until finally, the truth comes out. The Turkish government claims all passengers were x-rayed for weapons before boarding.

Here is a truly balanced article, covers the essential truths.

Image via Wikipedia
Days of tension between Israel’s hawkish government and the organizers of the Freedom Flotilla carrying 700 peace activists and 10,000 tons of desperately needed supplies to Gaza culminated in grisly carnage after a deadly pre-dawn attack by Israeli commandos. The operation left between nine and 19 international activists dead and dozens more injured and bleeding on the decks of the civilian vessels.
As Ha’aretz columnist Yossi Melman wrote, “No matter how one looks at the conduct of the Israeli government and the IDF, it is hard to understand how stupid and tragic it was. Time and again, Israel tries to prove that what can't be solved by force can be solved by more force.”
The international backlash against the Netanyahu government has been swift, and it will likely prove deep. Reuters reported that the attacks had “set off a diplomatic furor, drawing criticism from friends and foes alike.” Moscow condemned the attack as a “gross violation” of international law. The Turkish government called it an act of “state terrorism,” and recalled its ambassador to Israel. It joined Greece in canceling joint military exercises planned with the Israeli Defense Forces.
Israeli hawks and their defenders abroad frequently express deep concern about what they view as a campaign of “delegitimization” of the Jewish state. They see the international boycott movement, student divestment campaigns and criticism from human rights groups as grave threats to Israel’s continued support within the international community, especially from the United States and Europe. They fear the potential ramifications of global public opinion turning wholly and irreversibly against them; they see the potential for that scenario to re-define Israel’s most important strategic relationships.
When the UN released the Goldstone Report, which called out both Israel and Hamas for war crimes committed during the 2008 Gaza conflict, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told reporters, "the delegitimization must be delegitimized." So it’s no small irony that the habitual use of lethal force by “Bibi’s” right-wing government -- against not only armed Palestinian resistance groups but also routinely against Palestinian and foreign civilians and peaceful protesters -- has done much more to turn Israel into a ”pariah state” than its critics could have ever hoped to do.
As Steven Walt of Harvard put it:

How could they possibly believe that a deadly assault against a humanitarian mission in international waters would play to their advantage? Israel's government and its hard-line supporters frequently complain about alleged efforts to "delegitimize" the country, but actions like this are the real reason Israel's standing around the world has plummeted to such low levels.
The attack on the Freedom Flotilla might ultimately prove as devastating to Israel’s blanket claim that it acts proportionally and in self-defense as it was brutal for the activists aboard the ships. The troops didn’t have to board the vessels to stop them. In 1988, when the PLO announced that a ship called The Return would embark for Israel filled with Palestinian refugees, Mossad agents sabotaged the craft before anyone boarded, causing extensive damage but no loss of life. As a last resort, military commanders could have used directed fire on the motors of the ships, halting their voyage without bloodshed. (To be clear, the blockade is both ineffective and an example of collective punishment -- I’m not endorsing these actions. The point is that the operation was a tragic example of thoughtless overkill.)
Although it went largely unnoticed in the U.S. media before this weekend’s deadly raid, the approach of the flotilla was a major news story elsewhere in the world. Activists and aid workers had won a victory against the Israeli blockade the instant they set off to deliver their relief supplies. The question was only how significant it would be.
If the Netanyahu government had allowed the vessels to offload their goods, the Freedom Flotilla would have had a modest impact at best. Gazans would have received some supplies, whose delivery might have raised awareness of the desperate crisis they have faced since 2006. Perhaps the New York Times would have devoted a few hundred words to the event in its international section. That’s basically what occurred in 1988, when under Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Israel permitted an aid ship filled with supplies and activists to enter Gaza unchallenged.
But when Israeli commandos dropped from the sky, swarmed the vessels and massacred the unarmed (or lightly armed) passengers, Israel lost a massive battle in its global public relations war, a campaign that’s ultimately based on deflecting criticism of its suppression of the Palestinians with endless claims to the moral high-ground. On the heels of the disastrous invasion of Lebanon in 2006 and the Gaza war in 2008, it may prove to be the greatest defeat in the young country’s history.
A reactionary Israeli government fell into a classic trap, one that was well understood by Gandhi when he fought the all-powerful British Empire for an independent Indian state. As Yosi Melman put it, “The organizers of the flotilla wanted to present the Israel Defense Forces to the world as an army that does not hesitate to use force. The flotilla organizers wanted deaths, casualties, blood and billows of smoke.” Melman added: “Every child knows that the conflict here is one of consciousness, images, emotion and gut-feelings; not one of justice or logic.”
Helena Cobban noted that the humanitarian group had “pursued textbook rules of nonviolent action … they allowed their ships to be inspected by governments before they took them to sea, they continually announced their intention of taking the humanitarian supplies to Gaza, and they worked hard to make their action as visible as possible.”
Cobban continued:

Israel's security forces have become accustomed over many decades to using lethal force against opponents, then claiming it was the opponents who "fired first." They have become accustomed, moreover, to their government and its cheerleaders around the world having such a dominant position in the media that they can hope to have this version of events generally accepted-- or at least, accepted by enough of the people in power around the world that they don't need to worry about the real facts getting out.
Israel’s hard-line government gambled that the usual tactics would prove effective on this occasion. The Guardian reported that “a sophisticated public relations operation was underway” in Israel to influence the international media’s coverage of the carnage. “Spinners and spokesmen from the Israeli military and government departments politely answered questions [from the international media] and offered their own narrative of the day's events,” reported the Guardian, as “a barrage of emails and text message alerts firing into inboxes” provided the official version of events. Here in the U.S., AIPAC, the Israeli right-wing’s premiere Washington lobbying group, shot off dozens of releases to reporters accusing “the terrorist-linked flotilla organizers” of being in league with Al Qaeda.
The Israeli Defense Force immediately expressed its “regret” over the deaths, while claiming that the killing was entirely justified. The Israeli Navy said that its heavily armed commandos were attacked by activists “armed with sticks and knives,” who tried to “lynch” them. Turkish television broadcast footage of some of the passengers hitting soldiers with sticks or pipes. But according to NBC, “a reporter on one of the boats said the Israelis fired” at the unarmed vessel before boarding it. In any event, when a civilian vessel comes under armed attack in international waters during the dead of night, its occupants have the right to defend themselves. When one wounded Greek activist was brought to a hospital for treatment, reporters asked him who had been responsible for his injuries. He replied, simply, “pirates.”
Israeli officials later claimed the activists had pulled out hidden guns when the commandos attacked. It’s an implausible tale. According to the Turkish daily Zaman, “Officials from the Customs Undersecretariat said every passenger was searched before getting on the ship with the help of X-ray machines and metal detectors. Senior officials from the undersecretariat said Israel's allegations were tantamount to ‘complete nonsense.’”
If the Netanyahu government believed the standard claims of self-defense would have their usual salutary effect, it likely made a critical miscalculation. This was not a group of protesters fired upon in the occupied territories. It was an attack on a convoy that NBC reports included 11 Americans -- among them a former ambassador -- as well as 1976 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mairead Corrigan Maguire of Northern Ireland. It took place in international waters, and the ships were sailing under the flag of Turkey, a member of NATO. Israeli officials may claim the flotilla was itself provocative -- and it was certainly intended to be -- but even if one accepts that as a premise to stop it, the massacre nonetheless represents a monstrously disproportionate use of force.
"I condemn the violence, and Israel must explain," said United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. In a joint statement, Robert Serry, U.N. special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, and Filippo Grandi, commissioner general of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency said: "We wish to make clear that such tragedies are entirely avoidable if Israel heeds the repeated calls of the international community to end its counterproductive and unacceptable blockade of Gaza."
Ultimately, defenders of Israel’s right-wing -- I don’t use the term “pro-Israel” -- fear a tipping point in international public opinion more than protests from other governments. Israel has long justified its oppression of the Palestinian population by portraying itself as a beleaguered underdog, surrounded by powerful and hostile enemies. That veil is lifting, even, or especially, among the American Jewish community. A generational divide has opened up as younger Jews, who don’t remember a time when Israel wasn’t a nuclear-armed regional superpower backed by the world’s greatest military force, are “distancing” themselves from the Jewish state. The right-wingers ascendant in Israeli politics are true believers, who think that God is on their side. That might help explain why they appear to be oblivious to the danger this kind of naked violence poses to the very legitimacy they work tirelessly to defend.
Seventy-five years ago Gandhi said that nonviolence is “the greatest force at the disposal of mankind,” and “mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man.” He explained that the power of nonviolent resistance derives from its ability to expose an oppressor’s cruelty to the world and, ultimately, to himself. “Truth is my God,” he said. “Non-violence is the means of realizing Him.”
Commenting on the attack on the Freedom Flotilla in Ha’aretz, Bradley Burston wrote, “We were determined to avoid an honest look at the first Gaza war. Now, in international waters and having opened fire on an international group of humanitarian aid workers and activists, we are fighting and losing the second. For Israel, in the end, this Second Gaza War could be far more costly and painful than the first.”
History will prove him correct, and the most hawkish elements in Israeli society will be directly responsible for her pain. It’s a self-inflicted wound, with only the assistance of a small group of human rights activists who this past weekend turned their bloody bodies into “the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man.”
Editor's note: Check out AlterNet's Change.org petition urging Obama and Congress to condemn Israel's attack.

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.

© 2010 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/147061/

May 24, 2010

Israel Past Nuclear Alliance with South Africa

Image via Wikipedia

Who do you believe? A respected historian or the Israeli government?

T he Guardian reports on findings of historian Sasha Polakow-Suransky in the South African archives demonstrating that Israel offered Praetoria nuclear weapons in 1975. The documents are detailed in Polakow-Suransky’s book, The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa. The relevant memos and minutes are reproduced by The Guardian here.

The White South African government appears to have wanted to buy Israeli nuclear-tipped missiles for potential use against Black African neighbors such as Angola, Botswana, Zambia and (at certain points) Mozambique– countries against which the rogue regime often launched cross-border raids.

It is worth remembering what kind of pariah, racist and repressive regime Apartheid South Africa really was. Non-binding UN Security Council resolutions starting in the 1960s discouraged conventional arms sales to the regime, much less nuclear weapons! (The UN-imposed arms sale ban became mandatory on member states in 1977, shortly after the Israeli offer had been made).

April 23, 2010

Israel Continues to Colonize East Jerusalem and Steal Land

Are Israeli's like Nazi's? No, they are like South Africans of British descent practicing Apartheid. Once the South Africans became world pariahs, the finally gave up the abhorrent practice of separation of the races.

The new Israeli policy of deporting Palestinians from the West Bank on arbitrary grounds has kicked in with Ahmad Sabah, who has just been deported to Gaza and separated from his family in the West Bank. The measure contravenes the Geneva Convention of 1949 on the treatment of occupied populations, and it also goes contrary to the undertakings Israel made toward the Palestine Authority in the course of the Oslo peace negotiations.

The episode underlines the ways in which their forced statelessness leaves Palestinians (almost uniquely among major world nationalities) completely vulnerable to loss of the most basic human rights. That he was forcibly moved to Gaza by the Israelis suggests that many of those singled out for potential deportation from the West Bank may be moved to the small slum along the Mediterranean, which the Israelis have cut off from its traditional markets and which they keep under a blockade of the civilian population (a war crime). The Israeli establishment has decided not to try to colonize Gaza, and its isolation and hopelessness make it an attractive place for them to begin exiling West Bank residents, thus making more room for Israeli colonists.

The new policy, which is illegal six ways to Sunday in international law, is the brainchild of the government of far rightwing Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu.

April 14, 2010

Jordan condemns Israel over West Bank deportation order

Ethnic cleansing is alive and well in Israel.

Image via Wikipedia

Jordan condemned Israel on Wednesday over an Israel Defense Forces order facilitating the deportation of tens of thousands of Palestinian from the West Bank.

The order, though in existence since 1969, was recently discussed in a Haaretz article.

According to the report, a military order aimed at preventing infiltration was to come into force, enabling the deportation of tens of thousands of Palestinians from the West Bank, or their indictment on charges carrying prison terms of up to seven years. Under the order, tens of thousands of Palestinians will automatically become criminal offenders liable to be severely punished.

March 30, 2010

Character Test and Healthcare Reform

The Republican lie machine goes on and on, exploiting short memories, fear, and racism. What is the real opposition to healthcare reform? It's all about their long standing policy against Social Security and any other form of social insurance.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

One of the side benefits of health reform is that it has acted as a character test. If, for example, you thought of Mitt Romney as a person of character, his desperate attempts to disavow what is essentially his own policy proposal have cured you of that affliction. And as Menzie Chinn points out, Robert Samuelson’s hysterical reaction to what is, when all is said and done, a fairly modest — and paid for! — expansion of social insurance tells what what really lies behind his constant harping on the long-run fiscal issue.

Menzie has a nice chart comparing four policies and their impact on the budget: the two big Bush tax cuts, the Iraq war, and the health reform:

It’s curious, then, that Samuelson and others are driven wild only by the last of these. But Dan Gross explained it all a while back:
it’s about a strain of intellectual Toryism bedeviled by the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be getting social insurance.
All that high-minded talk about fiscal responsibility is just a cover for this deeper-seated concern.

March 25, 2010

A Grassroots Effort for Clean ElectionsTaking Money Out of Politics

There is a way to roll back the damage done by the Supreme Court that has opened the flood gates for corporate money in campaigns. Grassroots citizen financial support in limited amounts, leveraging public funds for campaigns. It's working so well there is REAL bipartisan support in Maine for making it national.

While Alison Smith was raising her kids in a rural Connecticut town, a developer arrived one Thanksgiving weekend, when no one was around, and cut a canal to drain the water from a large marsh that adjoined her backyard. “He was slimy and greedy,” she says, “doing things on the sly. He filled in the land and built new houses. Gradually it dawned on me that we had wetland regulations, that he’d broken the rules, and that no one was doing anything about it. So I went to a town meeting of a couple hundred people, and waited for someone to say something. Nobody did. So even though I didn’t know that much about the issues, I voiced my opinions as best I could, red-faced, hesitant, and embarrassed. And I found that all these other people were thinking the same thing. They’d say it to each other, but not in public. It was really hard for me to speak out, but it was also really neat.”

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Shortly afterward, a neighbor suggested that she join the League of Women Voters. “I told her I wasn’t much of a joiner, but she kept asking me to different meetings and said I could bring my three-year-old daughter.” Gradually Alison got involved, working mostly on wetland problems and recycling programs. “I was hesitant at first. I don’t have a college degree. I’m more of a behind-the-scenes person. But I’ve always felt like someone who cares, even if I didn’t always know what to do about it.”

When Alison moved to Maine, she joined the League’s Portland affiliate, focusing on clean-air issues and transportation alternatives. She helped organize a diverse group of stakeholders to pass a new state law on waste-oil recycling. “The more I did, the more confident I became. The more I felt I had something to contribute.” By the fall of 1995, when she was asked to collect signatures to get a new campaign reform measure on the ballot, Alison jumped at the chance.

“We’ve become so used to being disgusted with elections and politicians,” she said. “We assume that almost anyone who gets in will be corrupt. But the decisions they make in our name matter hugely, often leaving us with even less power. I didn’t know whether the initiative would pass, but I didn’t want cynicism to rule my life. I’d like to see politics bring out the best in us, not the worst. I get tired when people complain all the time but never do anything to change things.”

Maine’s Clean Elections Act offered candidates for state office an alternative to the degrading and often corrupting process of financing their campaigns. Under its provisions, they could choose a Clean Election Option, pledging not to take private funding or spend their own money (apart from modest initial seed funds), and raising a designated number of five-dollar contributions in their district to demonstrate their grassroots support. In return, they would receive enough public money to mount a full-scale campaign; if privately funded opponents or outside political committees out-spent them, they’d get enough additional money to stay competitive. The initiative also included other reforms, including tightened limits on individual and corporate spending.

In a single day, 1,100 volunteers qualified the measure by staffing tables outside polling stations. “I just sat at a table with a sign saying ‘Do you want to take big money out of politics?’” recalls Alison. “Almost everyone who came over responded and signed.”

The campaign worked closely with members of an allied research project that publicized in-state contributions from such sources as the tobacco and trucking industries. It was especially effective to invite the press to film a $100-a-plate event that industry lobbyists held for the chair of the banking and insurance committee in the state legislature. These stories, says Alison, “helped us talk about the issue not only in speculative terms, but in terms of how wealthy interests were buying and selling our government. People felt they didn’t have to accept this as the way things always had to be.”

As she got more deeply involved, Alison met with newspaper editorial boards and spoke wherever anyone would have her. “I felt nervous when the League asked me to do new things like speak at press conferences. ‘Why on earth would they want me to do it,’ I asked, ‘instead of some expert?’ But I also found that as an ordinary person I had more credibility than the political professionals. The more I talked with people, the more I began to understand the issues. When people asked why I was involved, I’d tell them about the cynicism that seems to be destroying the very core of our democracy. I’d repeat over and over how if we could just break the links between money and politics, we’d begin to have a solution.”

The initiative passed with 56 percent of the vote, and it changed Maine’s politics. One Republican legislator said that before the Act’s passage, he always had to listen to his donors first; now he was finally free to vote on his and his constituents’ beliefs. By 2008, three quarters of the candidates in the state were participating. It made it easier for the legislature to pass bills like one that sharply dropped the price of prescription drugs. Although the Clean Elections Act couldn’t legally affect federal races, its popularity helped persuade Maine’s two Republican U.S. senators to buck party leadership and back national campaign finance reform efforts. Citizen efforts have since led to public financing of major state offices in Arizona, Connecticut, and Vermont, as well as public financing of selected offices in New Mexico and North Carolina, and a legislative pilot project in New Jersey. An Arizona state legislator I met had been a high school teacher whose students urged him to run; since he knew no one with money, he said, he wouldn’t have even tried in the absence of the clean election system.

Since the Maine initiative’s success, Alison has chaired the League’s national committee on campaign finance reform and continues to advise other states and national efforts on the value of the Clean Elections model. The impact she helped make also changed Alison personally. “It gave me a sense that I really can do something just by showing up to further a cause — this fundamental cause of democracy that affects everything I care about, so my kids won’t grow up in a cynical world.”

Paul Loeb Taking Money Out of Politics: A Grassroots Effort for Clean ElectionsTaking Money Out of Politics: A Grassroots Effort for Clean Elections

Adapted from the wholly updated new edition of “Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times” by Paul Rogat Loeb (St Martin’s Press, publication date April 5, 2010, $16.99 paperback). With over 100,000 copies in print, Soul has become a classic guide to involvement in social change. Howard Zinn calls it “wonderful…rich with specific experience.” Alice Walker says, “The voices Loeb finds demonstrate that courage can be another name for love.” Bill McKibben calls it “a powerful inspiration to citizens acting for environmental sanity.”

Paul Rogat Loeb

Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times, whose wholly updated new edition will be released March 30, of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association, and of Generation at the Crossroads: Apathy and Action on the American Campus. See www.soulofacitizen.org To receive his articles directly email sympa@lists.groundwire.org with the subject line: subscribe paulloeb-articles.

March 24, 2010

Netanyahu Humiliates Obama with another E. Jerusalem Housing Expansion

Netanyahu clearly intends to embarrass Obama for taking a confrontation strategy with Israeli policy. Yet clearly, it is LONG over due that the big bully in the Middle East needs to be slapped down hard.

Informed Comment

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Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu sets the tone for Israeli policy-- one that is earning him few friends in the West. Three embarrassments broke for him on Tuesday. First, yet another housing expansion in East Jerusalem was announced while he was meeting President Obama. Then, the cover story of Israeli troops accused of firing live ammunition at Palestinian protesters began to unravel. Then British Foreign Minister David Miliband unceremoniously tossed the Mossad London station chief out of the country for counterfeiting British passports, to be used in an Israeli assassination of a Palestinian in Dubai recently. Netanyahu personally ordered that hit, and is responsible for the forging of real peoples' passports and their use to commit a murder. Netanyahu is the one behind these acts of arrogance, and they are emblematic of his mean brand of politics.

The far rightwing government of Binyamin Netanyahu humiliates American officials every time it meets with them. Netanyahu met Obama in Washington on Tuesday, and like clockwork Israel embarrassed Obama by announcing that same day it was going ahead with a building project (funded by an American millionaire) in East Jerusalem that the Obama administration had strictly told the Israelis to halt. What I don't understand is why the Palestinians cannot sue over this issue in American courts. If the administration's stance is that East Jerusalem does not belong to Israel, and the US is signatory to the Fourth Geneva Convention, then why couldn't Palestinians with standing sue in the US when their property is usurped by an American millionaire?

Israel will investigate the shooting deaths of two Palestinian youth who were protesting (not rioting as AP puts it) against Israeli theft of water from the village well. Israeli troops claimed they were using rubber bullets, but Palestinians charge it was actually live ammunition.

Aljazeera English has the scoop, with live video of Israeli troops firing on the Palestinian youths, with what certainly sounds like live ammunition.

March 19, 2010

New Packaging for Imprisonment Without Trial?

Obama has been little different from Herr Bush, changing his tune after he's been elected.

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The bill is only 12 pages long, but that is plenty of room to grant the president the power to order the arrest, interrogation, and imprisonment of anyone -- including a U.S. citizen -- indefinitely, on the sole suspicion that he or she is affiliated with terrorism, and on the president's sole authority as commander in chief.

The Act begins with the following (convoluted) requirement:

Whenever within the United States, its territories, and possessions, or outside the territorial limits of the United States, an individual is captured or otherwise comes into the custody or under the effective control of the United States who is suspected of engaging in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners through an act of terrorism, or by other means in violation of the laws of war, or of purposely and materially supporting such hostilities, and who may be an unprivileged enemy belligerent, the individual shall be placed in military custody for purposes of initial interrogation and determination of status in accordance with the provisions of this Act.

...Now, however, as president, Obama has helped pave the way for such radical legislative efforts as the one introduced by McCain and Lieberman, by embracing -- and re-branding -- the military commissions he once opposed.

"Belligerents" are the new "Combatants"

Three years after Obama eloquently opposed the Military Commissions Act, the now-president signed a Military Commissions Act of his own, as part of the 2010 Defense Authorization Bill. The law, which sought to overhaul the discredited Bush-era military commissions for "alien enemy combatants," introduced what is apparently turning out to be an important new term to the counterterror lexicon: Unprivileged Enemy Belligerent, defined as "an individual who: 1) has engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners; or 2) has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners."

Months before, in March of 2009, the Obama administration announced that it was phasing out the term "alien enemy combatant," even as it held on to the authority to hold terror suspects indefinitely. "Unprivileged Enemy Belligerent," then, was its replacement.

As Human Rights Watch attorney Joanne Mariner wrote last fall, "this is a cosmetic change, not a real improvement, which mirrors the administration's decision to drop the enemy combatant formula in habeas litigation at Guantanamo Bay."

March 11, 2010

The New Jim Crow

The truth about racism in America is hidden in poverty, drug laws, and behind bars. Yes, Jim Crow is alive and well in America.

The Nation

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Ever since Barack Obama lifted his right hand and took his oath of office, pledging to serve the United States as its forty-fourth president, ordinary people and their leaders around the globe have been celebrating our nation's "triumph over race." Obama's election has been touted as the final nail in the coffin of Jim Crow, the bookend placed on the history of racial caste in America.

Obama's mere presence in the Oval Office is offered as proof that "the land of the free" has finally made good on its promise of equality. There's an implicit yet undeniable message embedded in his appearance on the world stage: this is what freedom looks like; this is what democracy can do for you. If you are poor, marginalized, or relegated to an inferior caste, there is hope for you. Trust us. Trust our rules, laws, customs, and wars. You, too, can get to the promised land.

Perhaps greater lies have been told in the past century, but they can be counted on one hand. Racial caste is alive and well in America.

Most people don't like it when I say this. It makes them angry. In the 'era of colorblindness' there's a nearly fanatical desire to cling to the myth that we as a nation have 'moved beyond' race. Here are a few facts that run counter to that triumphant racial narrative:

• There are more African-Americans under correctional control today--in prison or jail, on probation or parole--than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.

• As of 2004, more African-American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.

• A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. The recent disintegration of the African-American family is due in large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers.

• If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African-American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life. (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80 percent.) These men are part of a growing undercaste--not class, caste--permanently relegated, by law, to a second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era."

There is, of course, a colorblind explanation for all this: crime rates. Our prison population has exploded from about 300,000 to more than 2 million in a few short decades, it is said, because of rampant crime. We're told that the reason so many black and brown men find themselves behind bars and ushered into a permanent, second-class status is because they happen to be the bad guys.

The uncomfortable truth, however, is that crime rates do not explain the sudden and dramatic mass incarceration of African-Americans during the past thirty years. Crime rates have fluctuated over the last few decades--they are currently at historical lows--but imprisonment rates have consistently soared. Quintupled, in fact. And the vast majority of that increase is due to the War on Drugs. Drug offenses alone account for about two-thirds of the increase in the federal inmate population, and more than half of the increase in the state prison population.

The drug war has been brutal--complete with SWAT teams, tanks, bazookas, grenade launchers and sweeps of entire neighborhoods--but those who live in white communities have little clue to the devastation wrought. This war has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies consistently show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates. In fact, some studies indicate that white youth are significantly more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than black youth. Any notion that drug use among African-Americans is more severe or dangerous is belied by the data. White youth, for example, have about three times the number of drug-related visits to the emergency room as their African-American counterparts.

That is not what you would guess, though, when entering our nation's prisons and jails, overflowing as they are with black and brown drug offenders. In some states, African-Americans comprise 80 percent-90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison.

This is the point at which I am typically interrupted and reminded that black men have higher rates of violent crime. That's why the drug war is waged in poor communities of color and not middle-class suburbs. Drug warriors are trying to get rid of those drug kingpins and violent offenders who make ghetto communities a living hell. It has nothing to do with race; it's all about violent crime.

Again, not so. President Ronald Reagan officially declared the current drug war in 1982, when drug crime was declining, not rising. From the outset, the war had little to do with drug crime and nearly everything to do with racial politics. The drug war was part of a grand and highly successful Republican Party strategy of using racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare to attract poor and working class white voters who were resentful of, and threatened by, desegregation, busing, and affirmative action. In the words of H.R. Haldeman, President Richard Nixon's White House chief of staff: "[T]he whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to."

A few years after the drug war was announced, crack cocaine hit the streets of inner-city communities. The Reagan administration seized on this development with glee, hiring staff who were to be responsible for publicizing inner-city crack babies, crack mothers, crack whores and drug-related violence. The goal was to make inner-city crack abuse and violence a media sensation, bolstering public support for the drug war which, it was hoped, would lead Congress to devote millions of dollars in additional funding to it.

The plan worked like a charm. For more than a decade, black drug dealers and users would be regulars in newspaper stories and would saturate the evening TV news. Congress and state legislatures nationwide would devote billions of dollars to the drug war and pass harsh mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes--sentences longer than murderers receive in many countries.

Democrats began competing with Republicans to prove that they could be even tougher on the dark-skinned pariahs. In President Bill Clinton's boastful words, "I can be nicked a lot, but no one can say I'm soft on crime." The facts bear him out. Clinton's "tough on crime" policies resulted in the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history. But Clinton was not satisfied with exploding prison populations. He and the "New Democrats" championed legislation banning drug felons from public housing (no matter how minor the offense) and denying them basic public benefits, including food stamps, for life. Discrimination in virtually every aspect of political, economic and social life is now perfectly legal, if you've been labeled a felon.

Facing Facts

But what about all those violent criminals and drug kingpins? Isn't the drug war waged in ghetto communities because that's where the violent offenders can be found? The answer is yes... in made-for-TV movies. In real life, the answer is no.

The drug war has never been focused on rooting out drug kingpins or violent offenders. Federal funding flows to those agencies that increase dramatically the volume of drug arrests, not the agencies most successful in bringing down the bosses. What gets rewarded in this war is sheer numbers of drug arrests. To make matters worse, federal drug forfeiture laws allow state and local law enforcement agencies to keep for their own use 80 percent of the cash, cars and homes seized from drug suspects, thus granting law enforcement a direct monetary interest in the profitability of the drug market.

The results have been predictable: people of color rounded up en masse for relatively minor, nonviolent drug offenses. In 2005, four out of five drug arrests were for possession, only one out of five for sales. Most people in state prison have no history of violence or even of significant selling activity. In fact, during the 1990s--the period of the most dramatic expansion of the drug war--nearly 80 percent of the increase in drug arrests was for marijuana possession, a drug generally considered less harmful than alcohol or tobacco and at least as prevalent in middle-class white communities as in the inner city.

In this way, a new racial undercaste has been created in an astonishingly short period of time--a new Jim Crow system. Millions of people of color are now saddled with criminal records and legally denied the very rights that their parents and grandparents fought for and, in some cases, died for.

Affirmative action, though, has put a happy face on this racial reality. Seeing black people graduate from Harvard and Yale and become CEOs or corporate lawyers--not to mention president of the United States--causes us all to marvel at what a long way we've come.

Recent data shows, though, that much of black progress is a myth. In many respects, African-Americans are doing no better than they were when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and uprisings swept inner cities across America. Nearly a quarter of African-Americans live below the poverty line today, approximately the same percentage as in 1968. The black child poverty rate is actually higher now than it was then. Unemployment rates in black communities rival those in Third World countries. And that's with affirmative action!

When we pull back the curtain and take a look at what our "colorblind" society creates without affirmative action, we see a familiar social, political, and economic structure--the structure of racial caste. The entrance into this new caste system can be found at the prison gate.

This is not Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream. This is not the promised land. The cyclical rebirth of caste in America is a recurring racial nightmare.