you have been writing really good pieces lately. in fact, you always write good pieces. but, when it comes to voting your ideas, you seem to fly south. you tell us that third parties have no power, and then quote debs when it suits your purposes. there are many of you, millions in fact, that are to the left of the democratic party, and yet, you vote democrat every 4 years. you tell us that third parties have no power, and then go and prove it by not supporting them. and once you have helped a democrat get elected, you then go back to criticizing him. but you can't have it both ways. with your vote, you help elect war criminals. you can cop out and say the other party is worse, but that doesn't do much for the bombed, does it? what is the point of a left that supports the system? your words are wasted, overpowered by your deeds of complicity and cowardice. you bitch about the bombing of afghanistan, but before doing so, you vote for a candidate who clearly stated that he would carry on that very bombing. you make a fine movie about the brutality of war, and then become a delegate for a candidate who said that he would "never hesitate to use military force." progressives, both black and white, who do great anti-racist work 364 days of the year, wept tears of joy for a candidate who only speaks of race when it allows him to condemn black men on father's day. certain un-wise fellows even looked in on their sleeping children as they shed quiet tears, seemingly forgetting that the man they were crying over said not a word about katrina, jena 6, police brutality, unequal drug laws, segregated schools and housing, and racial health inequities. progressive educators gathered their students into auditoriums to watch the inaugural, as the bombs fell in distant places.
we should be building a movement. instead, we write good pieces, and then vote for a fellow who opposes everything we write about. but what of it, as long as he is half kenyan? with a left like this, who needs a right? we celebrate diversity, as diverse people the world over are destroyed by a system we are unable or unwilling to oppose. we don't use racial slurs, as iraq is decimated. we marvel at the first lady, as black infants in detroit and dc die at a faster rate than they do in many impoverished countries. the nba celebrates mlk day, without ever mentioning his ideas, and then reminds us that the game is sponsored by the marines. beyonce makes 80 million dollars, as the unemployment rate for black men in several major cities is 50%
solomon, lindorff, zinn, and others...are you still excited by obama's victory? do you feel that you wasted your time telling us all on the left to not waste our votes on a third party, now that it is quite clear that it is you who has wasted your vote? what can you point to that justifies your craven acceptance of the democratic nominee? has the military budget decreased? have we begun to move away from corporate capitalism? have we pulled out of iraq and afghanistan? have we stopped bombing pakistan? have we ended the embargo against cuba? have we stopped funding israel? has their been any mention of racism, and how it can be dealt with?
in the meantime, we wait for a true left, a left that fights the system, not one that lines up every 4 years and fights to uphold it. we need to move beyond the current structures of power. one day, perhaps, people will look back and laugh at us for feeling ourselves to be a left.
what have we done to justify the label? maybe there is still time, though i'm not sure. one thing i know, a good start would be building our own movements, our own media, our own learning centers, our own political parties. let us not stand in line in 2012, and drive around with obama bumper stickers on our cars.
and if we do so, let us have the decency to not call ourselves progressives.
debs and che and emma and malcolm and fred hampton and dave gilbert and so many more need to have their legacies carried on.
i'm sorry, solomon, lindorff, et al, but you ain't getting it done.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
how
art pepper could steal tv's on foot, high out of his mind on heroin, and then walk into a record studio and record classic albums for double scale, about 80 bucks back in the 50's. this is how smack up was recorded. bird could show up unannounced at a gig with a big band, and, with no rehearsal time, play a plastic alto and sound better than anyone on earth, as he did at a concert in dc back in 53.
did you know that the sidemen on kind of blue, the most famous jazz record of all time, made 66 bucks for a day of recording? beyonce probably makes more in a second. it was never about money or fame for the greats. it was about the music. they played because they needed to. it didn't matter whether they were high or broke. stan getz could walk into a store and rob it, he could wake up from a drug induced nightmare and in a mad state, attack the nearest person, and yet still walk into a recording studio and play with the most beautiful tone on earth. when zoot was asked how he played so well when he was loaded, he responded that he practices when he's loaded. geme ammons used to make weekend trips from chicago into van gelder's jersey studio to make jam sessions that to this day have no equal. he too, was one high dude, as a quick glance of his boss tenor cover makes clear.
but, in the end, none of that matters. only the music matters. they were amazing men, and hence, they did amazing things. yusef would gather his quintet into his car, and drive from detroit to that very same van gelder studio for marathon sessions, a few new york gigs, and then gather the forces and return home. and this he did sober. either way, the music lives, if only known to a few. sonny rollins used to bemoan the fact that "nothing's happening" after every take in the studio, but he was off base. these giants always made it happen, and their offerings are as fresh now as when they first came out.
i, for on, am honored to be on the trail, waiting and looking for the next obscure classic to fall into my hands.
it won't be long.
did you know that the sidemen on kind of blue, the most famous jazz record of all time, made 66 bucks for a day of recording? beyonce probably makes more in a second. it was never about money or fame for the greats. it was about the music. they played because they needed to. it didn't matter whether they were high or broke. stan getz could walk into a store and rob it, he could wake up from a drug induced nightmare and in a mad state, attack the nearest person, and yet still walk into a recording studio and play with the most beautiful tone on earth. when zoot was asked how he played so well when he was loaded, he responded that he practices when he's loaded. geme ammons used to make weekend trips from chicago into van gelder's jersey studio to make jam sessions that to this day have no equal. he too, was one high dude, as a quick glance of his boss tenor cover makes clear.
but, in the end, none of that matters. only the music matters. they were amazing men, and hence, they did amazing things. yusef would gather his quintet into his car, and drive from detroit to that very same van gelder studio for marathon sessions, a few new york gigs, and then gather the forces and return home. and this he did sober. either way, the music lives, if only known to a few. sonny rollins used to bemoan the fact that "nothing's happening" after every take in the studio, but he was off base. these giants always made it happen, and their offerings are as fresh now as when they first came out.
i, for on, am honored to be on the trail, waiting and looking for the next obscure classic to fall into my hands.
it won't be long.
Friday, April 10, 2009
on the street where you live
“More of the Same” at the New York Times
April 10, 2009 By Paul Street
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The New York Times should take a look in the national and institutional mirror before it charges foreign governments or anyone else with confusing "change" with "more of the same."
"Change Means More of the Same, With Control at the Top"
Last Monday's Times contains an article with an ironic title: "In Cuba, Change Means More of the Same, With Control at the Top." This "news" item reports that "rather than dismantling Cuba's socialist framework," Cuba's President Raul Castro "seems to be trying to make it work more efficiently." Castro, the Times reports, seeks to keep power concentrated "at the top." [1]
Well, okay, but what is U.S. President Barack Obama - Mr. "Change" himself and heralded as such by the Times' editorial board and many of its top columnists [2]- trying to accomplish other than to make the American corporate profits system "work more efficiently" without "dismantling the [capitalist] framework" and with power (and wealth) still concentrated "at the top"?
As the Times acknowledged two Sundays ago in an article titled "English-Speaking Capitalism on Trial," Obama and his neoliberal partner Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister, have "focused on ways of revitalizing the [existing] system, often to the exasperation of those among their supporters who would favor more radical measures. Even as both men have embarked on enormous increases in public-sector spending," Times correspondents John Burns and Landon Thomas noted, "they have maintained that the solutions to the crisis lie in reawakening the markets and recapitalizing the banks rather than tearing at the system's foundations. And both, when they respond to private anger at the private sector, have seemed more geared to managing anger than stoking it." [3]
Behind the slogan of "change we can believe in," it's all about "more of the same." Obama's neoliberal economic "solutions" seek to prop up the existing rotten U.S. financial hierarchy by granting yet massive taxpayer giveaways to the Wall Street perpetrators who started the mess in the first place. As the prolific Marxist geographer David Harvey recently noted on "Democracy Now," "what [the Obama team is] trying to do is to reinvent the same system" - to "reconstitute the same sort of capitalism we have had over and over again over the last thirty years in a slightly more regulated, benevolent form" that doesn't "challenge the fundamentals" [4].
With some dazzling additions meant to create the illusion of private sector sacrifice and contribution, "Wall Street Barry" Obama's bailout scheme is largely inherited from George W. Bush. It advances a false belief deeply entrenched in dominant elitist U.S. economic doctrine: that an economic order "run by private shareholders and managed by private institutions" (Obama Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's statement on his concept of the best possible financial system) can and will return "to normal" ("three percent growth") in a modest period of time [5].
Along the way, it works to reinforce the same old skewed U.S. capital "compensation" system that allows mansion-dwelling Wall Street executive to "earn" more than a thousand times the income of the nation's supposedly "grossly overpaid" union autoworkers. By subsidizing the purchase of Wall Street's toxic assets, it allows the "too-big [and powerful]-to-fail" banks to massively cut the losses they incurred through their own greed and foolishness. The plan amounts to having government (the same as the people "in a functioning democracy," as Noam Chomsky says) "directly pick up their bad bets. In addition," liberal economist Dean Baker notes, "some investors will be able to take advantage of the taxpayers' generosity to make large sums on assets that they might have purchased even without the subsidy. We may see some of the hedge and equity fund folks clear hundreds of millions or even billions at the taxpayers' expense." [6]
It's not for nothing that Obama received a record-setting $38 million from "FIRE" (the financial, real estate, and insurance industries) sector in the last election cycle, including close to $1 million from Goldman Sachs alone [7]. "It's not always clear what Obama's financial backers want," Ken Silverstein noted in the fall of 2006, "but it seems safe to conclude that his campaign contributors are not interested merely in clean government and political reform [8] - a reasonable judgment given well-known facts on the purposes behind election finance at the upper levels [9].
"On condition of anonymity," Silverstein reported, "one Washington lobbyist I spoke with was willing to point out the obvious: that big donors would not be helping out Obama if they didn't see him as a ‘player.' The lobbyist added: ‘What's the dollar value of a starry-eyed idealist?'" [10]
Maybe the John Burns and Landon Thomas article mentioned above should have been titled, "In the United States and England, Change Means More of the Same, With Control at the Top."
"Time is Running Short"
Then there's the New York ("All the News That's Fit to Print") Times itself, quite a top-down organization it in its own right. Two "news" items the Times saw "fit to print" last Monday suggest its continuing determination to play the role of apologist and propagandist for the White House's efforts to undermine international law and to engage in aggressive warfare (the "supreme international crime" under international law) - the same basic role it played in the lead up to illegal U.S. actions against (for just a small number of examples) Vietnam (1964), Chile (1970-73), Nicaragua (1980s), Serbia (1999), Venezuela (2002), Afghanistan (2001), and Iraq (1990-91 and 2002-2003) [11].
The same Times issue with the aforementioned Cuba article contained a report from Pakistan calling three recent suicide attacks in that country "a sign that the Pakistani Taliban are overwhelming the nation's security forces." [12] A separate front-page Times "new analysis" in the same issue argued ominously that "Time is Running Short as U.S. Pressures a Reluctant Pakistan" to undertake a serious effort to counter "the threat from Al Qaeda and the Taliban." [13] With these two "news" items, the Times enlisted in the classic propagandistic work of imperial "threat inflation," helping advance the new president's dangerous and crackpot determination to expand the level and scope of imperial violence in Southwest Asia.
Dominos Redux
As the Times has failed to report, Obama has also bought into a recycled version of Cold War "domino theory." The Cold War edition of the theory was advanced by U.S. foreign policy elites to claim that their criminal assaults on small peasant nations like Vietnam and Laos were required to stop an alleged (actually quite mythical) "international communist conspiracy." In Obama's "updated, al Qaida version" of the domino thesis, leading Middle Eastern historian Juan Cole notes, "the Taliban might take Kuna Province, and then all of Afghanistan, and might again host al-Qaida, and might then threaten the shores of the United States." [14]
Pakistan is added on to Afghanistan for Obama like Cambodia was added on to its neighbor Vietnam by President Richard Nixon. Obama ominously proclaims that "The future of Afghanistan is inextricably linked to the future of its neighbor, Pakistan. Make no mistake: Al Qaida and its extremist allies are a cancer that risks killing Pakistan from within" [15]. But, as Cole rightly observes, Obama's call to arms is nor more credible than Dick Cheney and John McCain's raving about the danger of an "al-Qaida victory in Iraq":
"This latter-day domino theory of al-Qaida takeover in South Asia is just as implausible as its earlier iteration in Southeast Asia (ask Thailand or the Philippines)...There are very few al-Qaida fighters based in Afghanistan proper. What is being called the ‘Taliban' is mostly not Taliban at all...The groups being branded ‘Taliban' only have substantial influence in 8 to 10 percent of Afghanistan, and only 4 percent of Afghans say they support them...Moreover, with regard to Pakistan, there is no danger of militants based in the remote Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) taking over that country or ‘killing' it...The Kabul government is not on the verge of falling to the Taliban...And there is no prospect of ‘al Quaida' reestablishing bases in Afghanistan from which it could attack the United States...As for a threat to Pakistan, the FATA areas are smaller than Connecticut, with a total population of a little over three million, while Pakistan itself is bigger than Texas, with a population more than half that of the entire United States. A few thousand Pashtun tribesmen cannot take over Pakistan, not can they ‘kill' it. The Pakistani public just forced a military dictator out of office and forced the reinstatement of the Supreme Court, which oversees secular law. Over three quarters of Pakistanis said in a poll last summer that they had an unfavorable view of the Taliban, and a recent poll found that 90 percent of them worried about terrorism." [16]
If anything, Cole notes, the greatest thing working on the weak Pakistani Taliban's behalf is the occurrence of U.S. Predator drone strikes on Pakistani territory. "The danger is that that the U.S. strikes may make the radicals seem victims of Western imperialism and so sympathetic to the Pakistani public." Even the imperialist New York Times Magazine writer James Traub noted last Sunday that "American policy has arguably made the situation worse, for [Obama's] Predator-drone attacks along the border, though effective, drive the Taliban eastward, deeper into Pakistan. And the strategy has been only reinforcing hostility to the United States among ordinary Pakistanis" [17].
Consistent with the longstanding record of the Times [18], Traub's misgivings have nothing to with international law and the little problem of civilian casualties (Obama's drone attacks have shed the blood of innocents). They are only about the problem of increased hostility to the supposedly noble and benevolent U.S. empire, whose colonial presence in the region Traub reflexively accepts (in accord with the standard U.S. media posture) as naturally legitimate since, after all, We Rightly Own the World.
It's Time for Iraqis "To Take Responsibility for Their Country and Sovereignty"
Speaking of illegal wars for which the Times did critical advance public relations work, a Times article in today's edition (I am writing on Wednesday, April 8, 2009) reports that "Obama, in a Visit to Iraq, Pledges to End the War." According to Times correspondents Steven Lee Meyers and Helene Cooper, reporting from wonderfully named "Camp Victory, Iraq," Obama "told a cheering crowd of American troops that it was time for Iraqis ‘to take responsibility for their country and sovereignty.'" Further: "Obama praised the troops for their accomplishments in a war he did not, as a candidate, support. ‘You have given Iraqis the opportunity to stand on its own as a democratic country,' Obama said." [19]
Perpetuating the "fairly tale" (Bill Clinton got this right) notion of Obama as anti-war candidate and senator, Meyers and Cooper deleted the interesting facts that Obama funded the criminal invasion of Iraq without conditions during his first two years in the U.S. Senate. They omitted Obama's intervention for pro- and against anti-war Democrats during the 2006 Democratic congressional primaries and his recurrent statements on behalf of responsibly sustaining the occupation of Iraq before such elite bodies as the Council and Foreign Relations and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. [20]
They also failed to note that Obama's Iraq "withdrawal" plan is a deeply deceptive exercise in imperial doublespeak. As the Times itself reported last February: "The plan would maintain relatively high troop levels through Iraq's parliamentary election, to be held in December, before beginning in earnest to meet the August 2010 for removing combat troops [Obama's campaign pledge date, P.S.]. Even after August 2010, as many as 50,000 of the 142,000 troops how in Iraq would remain, including some combat units reassigned as ‘Advisory Training Brigades' or ‘Advisory Assistance Brigade,' the administration and Pentagon officials said." [21]
As the antiwar author and activist Anthony Arnove recently noted, moreover, Obama's "withdrawal" plan "says nothing about the private contractors and mercenaries that are an essential part of the occupation of Iraq and whose numbers may even be increased to cover functions previously provided by active-duty troops. And it will leave in place the world's largest foreign embassy, as well as the largest CIA foreign station, in Baghdad." [22] We could also add that the U.S will continue to maintain critical control over Iraqi skies and a significant naval and air presence "over the ["sovereign" nation of Iraq's near] horizon"[s].
Meyers and Cooper had nothing to say about these pronounced limits to Obama's "pledge to end the war" (even as the president jacks up the war on Afghanistan-Pakistan). Naturally enough, they also had nothing to say about the profoundly offensive and provocative nature of Obama's statement about Iraqis needing to step up the plate and "take responsibility" for the "democracy" and "sovereignty" the noble United States has so benevolently granted them. The president's "Camp Victory" comment was truly disgusting more than six years into a blatantly illegal, mass-murderous ("Operation Iraqi Freedom" has killed more than 1 million Iraqi civilians) and petro-colonial invasion that Obama is finding ways to continue [23] and which has always been and remains very much about the traditional U.S. goal of controlling the Middle East's vast and hyper-strategic energy resources. The doctrinal myth of benevolent U.S. purpose (the export of "democracy" and "freedom") in Iraq - consistent with how Obama explained the U.S. occupation before and throughout the presidential campaign [24] - is nauseating in light of the proto-genocidal nature of the latest U.S. invasion of Mesopotamia, which follows an earlier devastating U.S. attack ("Operation Desert Storm") and more than a decade of U.S.-led "economic sanctions" that killed more than a million Iraqis.
According to the respected journalist Nir Rosen in the December 2007 edition of the mainstream journal Current History, "Iraq has been killed, never to rise again. The American occupation has been more disastrous than that of the Mongols who sacked Baghdad in the thirteenth century. Only fools talk of solutions now. There is no solution. The only hope is that perhaps the damage can be contained." [25]
One wonders what Rosen would have had to say about the following comment offered by candidate Obama to autoworkers assembled at the General Motors plant in Janesville, Wisconsin on February 13, 2008, just before that state's Democratic primary: "It's time to stop spending billions of dollars a week trying to put Iraq back together and start spending the money putting America back together." [26]
If the Times wants to see "more of the same" in a time of "change," it need look no further than its own power-serving pages and to the White House it purports to check and balance with "objective journalism." Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose: the more things change the more they stay the same.
April 10, 2009 By Paul Street
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The New York Times should take a look in the national and institutional mirror before it charges foreign governments or anyone else with confusing "change" with "more of the same."
"Change Means More of the Same, With Control at the Top"
Last Monday's Times contains an article with an ironic title: "In Cuba, Change Means More of the Same, With Control at the Top." This "news" item reports that "rather than dismantling Cuba's socialist framework," Cuba's President Raul Castro "seems to be trying to make it work more efficiently." Castro, the Times reports, seeks to keep power concentrated "at the top." [1]
Well, okay, but what is U.S. President Barack Obama - Mr. "Change" himself and heralded as such by the Times' editorial board and many of its top columnists [2]- trying to accomplish other than to make the American corporate profits system "work more efficiently" without "dismantling the [capitalist] framework" and with power (and wealth) still concentrated "at the top"?
As the Times acknowledged two Sundays ago in an article titled "English-Speaking Capitalism on Trial," Obama and his neoliberal partner Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister, have "focused on ways of revitalizing the [existing] system, often to the exasperation of those among their supporters who would favor more radical measures. Even as both men have embarked on enormous increases in public-sector spending," Times correspondents John Burns and Landon Thomas noted, "they have maintained that the solutions to the crisis lie in reawakening the markets and recapitalizing the banks rather than tearing at the system's foundations. And both, when they respond to private anger at the private sector, have seemed more geared to managing anger than stoking it." [3]
Behind the slogan of "change we can believe in," it's all about "more of the same." Obama's neoliberal economic "solutions" seek to prop up the existing rotten U.S. financial hierarchy by granting yet massive taxpayer giveaways to the Wall Street perpetrators who started the mess in the first place. As the prolific Marxist geographer David Harvey recently noted on "Democracy Now," "what [the Obama team is] trying to do is to reinvent the same system" - to "reconstitute the same sort of capitalism we have had over and over again over the last thirty years in a slightly more regulated, benevolent form" that doesn't "challenge the fundamentals" [4].
With some dazzling additions meant to create the illusion of private sector sacrifice and contribution, "Wall Street Barry" Obama's bailout scheme is largely inherited from George W. Bush. It advances a false belief deeply entrenched in dominant elitist U.S. economic doctrine: that an economic order "run by private shareholders and managed by private institutions" (Obama Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's statement on his concept of the best possible financial system) can and will return "to normal" ("three percent growth") in a modest period of time [5].
Along the way, it works to reinforce the same old skewed U.S. capital "compensation" system that allows mansion-dwelling Wall Street executive to "earn" more than a thousand times the income of the nation's supposedly "grossly overpaid" union autoworkers. By subsidizing the purchase of Wall Street's toxic assets, it allows the "too-big [and powerful]-to-fail" banks to massively cut the losses they incurred through their own greed and foolishness. The plan amounts to having government (the same as the people "in a functioning democracy," as Noam Chomsky says) "directly pick up their bad bets. In addition," liberal economist Dean Baker notes, "some investors will be able to take advantage of the taxpayers' generosity to make large sums on assets that they might have purchased even without the subsidy. We may see some of the hedge and equity fund folks clear hundreds of millions or even billions at the taxpayers' expense." [6]
It's not for nothing that Obama received a record-setting $38 million from "FIRE" (the financial, real estate, and insurance industries) sector in the last election cycle, including close to $1 million from Goldman Sachs alone [7]. "It's not always clear what Obama's financial backers want," Ken Silverstein noted in the fall of 2006, "but it seems safe to conclude that his campaign contributors are not interested merely in clean government and political reform [8] - a reasonable judgment given well-known facts on the purposes behind election finance at the upper levels [9].
"On condition of anonymity," Silverstein reported, "one Washington lobbyist I spoke with was willing to point out the obvious: that big donors would not be helping out Obama if they didn't see him as a ‘player.' The lobbyist added: ‘What's the dollar value of a starry-eyed idealist?'" [10]
Maybe the John Burns and Landon Thomas article mentioned above should have been titled, "In the United States and England, Change Means More of the Same, With Control at the Top."
"Time is Running Short"
Then there's the New York ("All the News That's Fit to Print") Times itself, quite a top-down organization it in its own right. Two "news" items the Times saw "fit to print" last Monday suggest its continuing determination to play the role of apologist and propagandist for the White House's efforts to undermine international law and to engage in aggressive warfare (the "supreme international crime" under international law) - the same basic role it played in the lead up to illegal U.S. actions against (for just a small number of examples) Vietnam (1964), Chile (1970-73), Nicaragua (1980s), Serbia (1999), Venezuela (2002), Afghanistan (2001), and Iraq (1990-91 and 2002-2003) [11].
The same Times issue with the aforementioned Cuba article contained a report from Pakistan calling three recent suicide attacks in that country "a sign that the Pakistani Taliban are overwhelming the nation's security forces." [12] A separate front-page Times "new analysis" in the same issue argued ominously that "Time is Running Short as U.S. Pressures a Reluctant Pakistan" to undertake a serious effort to counter "the threat from Al Qaeda and the Taliban." [13] With these two "news" items, the Times enlisted in the classic propagandistic work of imperial "threat inflation," helping advance the new president's dangerous and crackpot determination to expand the level and scope of imperial violence in Southwest Asia.
Dominos Redux
As the Times has failed to report, Obama has also bought into a recycled version of Cold War "domino theory." The Cold War edition of the theory was advanced by U.S. foreign policy elites to claim that their criminal assaults on small peasant nations like Vietnam and Laos were required to stop an alleged (actually quite mythical) "international communist conspiracy." In Obama's "updated, al Qaida version" of the domino thesis, leading Middle Eastern historian Juan Cole notes, "the Taliban might take Kuna Province, and then all of Afghanistan, and might again host al-Qaida, and might then threaten the shores of the United States." [14]
Pakistan is added on to Afghanistan for Obama like Cambodia was added on to its neighbor Vietnam by President Richard Nixon. Obama ominously proclaims that "The future of Afghanistan is inextricably linked to the future of its neighbor, Pakistan. Make no mistake: Al Qaida and its extremist allies are a cancer that risks killing Pakistan from within" [15]. But, as Cole rightly observes, Obama's call to arms is nor more credible than Dick Cheney and John McCain's raving about the danger of an "al-Qaida victory in Iraq":
"This latter-day domino theory of al-Qaida takeover in South Asia is just as implausible as its earlier iteration in Southeast Asia (ask Thailand or the Philippines)...There are very few al-Qaida fighters based in Afghanistan proper. What is being called the ‘Taliban' is mostly not Taliban at all...The groups being branded ‘Taliban' only have substantial influence in 8 to 10 percent of Afghanistan, and only 4 percent of Afghans say they support them...Moreover, with regard to Pakistan, there is no danger of militants based in the remote Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) taking over that country or ‘killing' it...The Kabul government is not on the verge of falling to the Taliban...And there is no prospect of ‘al Quaida' reestablishing bases in Afghanistan from which it could attack the United States...As for a threat to Pakistan, the FATA areas are smaller than Connecticut, with a total population of a little over three million, while Pakistan itself is bigger than Texas, with a population more than half that of the entire United States. A few thousand Pashtun tribesmen cannot take over Pakistan, not can they ‘kill' it. The Pakistani public just forced a military dictator out of office and forced the reinstatement of the Supreme Court, which oversees secular law. Over three quarters of Pakistanis said in a poll last summer that they had an unfavorable view of the Taliban, and a recent poll found that 90 percent of them worried about terrorism." [16]
If anything, Cole notes, the greatest thing working on the weak Pakistani Taliban's behalf is the occurrence of U.S. Predator drone strikes on Pakistani territory. "The danger is that that the U.S. strikes may make the radicals seem victims of Western imperialism and so sympathetic to the Pakistani public." Even the imperialist New York Times Magazine writer James Traub noted last Sunday that "American policy has arguably made the situation worse, for [Obama's] Predator-drone attacks along the border, though effective, drive the Taliban eastward, deeper into Pakistan. And the strategy has been only reinforcing hostility to the United States among ordinary Pakistanis" [17].
Consistent with the longstanding record of the Times [18], Traub's misgivings have nothing to with international law and the little problem of civilian casualties (Obama's drone attacks have shed the blood of innocents). They are only about the problem of increased hostility to the supposedly noble and benevolent U.S. empire, whose colonial presence in the region Traub reflexively accepts (in accord with the standard U.S. media posture) as naturally legitimate since, after all, We Rightly Own the World.
It's Time for Iraqis "To Take Responsibility for Their Country and Sovereignty"
Speaking of illegal wars for which the Times did critical advance public relations work, a Times article in today's edition (I am writing on Wednesday, April 8, 2009) reports that "Obama, in a Visit to Iraq, Pledges to End the War." According to Times correspondents Steven Lee Meyers and Helene Cooper, reporting from wonderfully named "Camp Victory, Iraq," Obama "told a cheering crowd of American troops that it was time for Iraqis ‘to take responsibility for their country and sovereignty.'" Further: "Obama praised the troops for their accomplishments in a war he did not, as a candidate, support. ‘You have given Iraqis the opportunity to stand on its own as a democratic country,' Obama said." [19]
Perpetuating the "fairly tale" (Bill Clinton got this right) notion of Obama as anti-war candidate and senator, Meyers and Cooper deleted the interesting facts that Obama funded the criminal invasion of Iraq without conditions during his first two years in the U.S. Senate. They omitted Obama's intervention for pro- and against anti-war Democrats during the 2006 Democratic congressional primaries and his recurrent statements on behalf of responsibly sustaining the occupation of Iraq before such elite bodies as the Council and Foreign Relations and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. [20]
They also failed to note that Obama's Iraq "withdrawal" plan is a deeply deceptive exercise in imperial doublespeak. As the Times itself reported last February: "The plan would maintain relatively high troop levels through Iraq's parliamentary election, to be held in December, before beginning in earnest to meet the August 2010 for removing combat troops [Obama's campaign pledge date, P.S.]. Even after August 2010, as many as 50,000 of the 142,000 troops how in Iraq would remain, including some combat units reassigned as ‘Advisory Training Brigades' or ‘Advisory Assistance Brigade,' the administration and Pentagon officials said." [21]
As the antiwar author and activist Anthony Arnove recently noted, moreover, Obama's "withdrawal" plan "says nothing about the private contractors and mercenaries that are an essential part of the occupation of Iraq and whose numbers may even be increased to cover functions previously provided by active-duty troops. And it will leave in place the world's largest foreign embassy, as well as the largest CIA foreign station, in Baghdad." [22] We could also add that the U.S will continue to maintain critical control over Iraqi skies and a significant naval and air presence "over the ["sovereign" nation of Iraq's near] horizon"[s].
Meyers and Cooper had nothing to say about these pronounced limits to Obama's "pledge to end the war" (even as the president jacks up the war on Afghanistan-Pakistan). Naturally enough, they also had nothing to say about the profoundly offensive and provocative nature of Obama's statement about Iraqis needing to step up the plate and "take responsibility" for the "democracy" and "sovereignty" the noble United States has so benevolently granted them. The president's "Camp Victory" comment was truly disgusting more than six years into a blatantly illegal, mass-murderous ("Operation Iraqi Freedom" has killed more than 1 million Iraqi civilians) and petro-colonial invasion that Obama is finding ways to continue [23] and which has always been and remains very much about the traditional U.S. goal of controlling the Middle East's vast and hyper-strategic energy resources. The doctrinal myth of benevolent U.S. purpose (the export of "democracy" and "freedom") in Iraq - consistent with how Obama explained the U.S. occupation before and throughout the presidential campaign [24] - is nauseating in light of the proto-genocidal nature of the latest U.S. invasion of Mesopotamia, which follows an earlier devastating U.S. attack ("Operation Desert Storm") and more than a decade of U.S.-led "economic sanctions" that killed more than a million Iraqis.
According to the respected journalist Nir Rosen in the December 2007 edition of the mainstream journal Current History, "Iraq has been killed, never to rise again. The American occupation has been more disastrous than that of the Mongols who sacked Baghdad in the thirteenth century. Only fools talk of solutions now. There is no solution. The only hope is that perhaps the damage can be contained." [25]
One wonders what Rosen would have had to say about the following comment offered by candidate Obama to autoworkers assembled at the General Motors plant in Janesville, Wisconsin on February 13, 2008, just before that state's Democratic primary: "It's time to stop spending billions of dollars a week trying to put Iraq back together and start spending the money putting America back together." [26]
If the Times wants to see "more of the same" in a time of "change," it need look no further than its own power-serving pages and to the White House it purports to check and balance with "objective journalism." Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose: the more things change the more they stay the same.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
today on the gig
the history department showed students a film on the situation in darfur. yes, people are dying in darfur, but we aren't the ones doing the killing. what kind of an education is it that only teaches the crimes of others? as young americans attending a well off, "quality" public school, shouldn't these students be watching films on what the u.s. has done to the rest of the world? who at the school is reading "hiroshima" or "johnny got his gun?" what teacher is showing their students "hearts and minds?" who has taught dahr jamail's "beyond the green zone?" or blum's "rogue state?" who has learned of israel's brutality in lebanon, gaza, the west bank, and jenin? those same "liberals" who shed tears over darfur would be up in arms if someone had the audacity to tell the truth about israel. so, no students will be baking goods to raise money for the wounded and widowed and orphaned in gaza, but they will gladly wear their "stop genocide in sudan" and "free tibet" shirts. as always, the limits of liberalism hit me like a joe frazier left hook. in "liberal" brookline, our young are taught about genocide, but not in places like vietnam, guatemala, east timor, and palestine. nor, for that matter, will they learn much of the genocide practiced right here against black and indigenous people. we would rather teach them about something they can't change, and something they don't need to apologize for, unlike the destruction in iraq and afghanistan.
we play at compassion, but we don't really give a shit. we play it safe, always remembering to focus on the crimes committed elsewhere. meanwhile, bush writes books, and clinton does charitable work. kissinger is a respected statesman, and political exiles from haiti and cuba live lives of comfort and wealth on our shores, despite being guilty of crimes our students would have been shown movies on if the crimes had not been supported by our government
yes, i suppose i do work at a good school.
but good for who?
we play at compassion, but we don't really give a shit. we play it safe, always remembering to focus on the crimes committed elsewhere. meanwhile, bush writes books, and clinton does charitable work. kissinger is a respected statesman, and political exiles from haiti and cuba live lives of comfort and wealth on our shores, despite being guilty of crimes our students would have been shown movies on if the crimes had not been supported by our government
yes, i suppose i do work at a good school.
but good for who?
mickey z's idea of an ideal society
A culture guided by an unwavering principle of justice for all living things. A culture that wittily embraces the subversive pleasure of critical, independent thought. A culture with far more questions than answers...and all those answers remain permanently open to debate (and maybe even laughter).
LA Hospital Admits to “Dumping” Homeless, Mentally Ill
In California, a Los Angeles area psychiatric hospital has admitted to abandoning more than 150 mentally disabled homeless patients in dangerous neighborhoods over a two-year period. College Hospital will pay a $1.6 million penalty under a settlement with city attorneys. So-called “hospital dumping” is believed to be a widespread practice in the United States.
i suppose this needs no comment. isn't it something how those who are supposed to protect us often endanger us? philly police used to pick up gang members from one part of town and drop them off in rival territory.
well, the art of "dumping" continues.
In California, a Los Angeles area psychiatric hospital has admitted to abandoning more than 150 mentally disabled homeless patients in dangerous neighborhoods over a two-year period. College Hospital will pay a $1.6 million penalty under a settlement with city attorneys. So-called “hospital dumping” is believed to be a widespread practice in the United States.
i suppose this needs no comment. isn't it something how those who are supposed to protect us often endanger us? philly police used to pick up gang members from one part of town and drop them off in rival territory.
well, the art of "dumping" continues.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
the agony of de-feet
Bush and Al-Zaidi
If the Shoe Fits
By Rev. WILLIAM E. ALBERTS
Many Americans suffer from the cancer of ethnocentrism. An extreme “love of God and country” that breeds feelings of superiority and entitlement and arrogance, and has accommodated and blessed horrible war crimes committed by political leaders in our name. Mainstream media and religious leaders are also implicated here. Instead of confronting the ethnocentric-energized imperialism undermining the moral and democratic fabric of our country, they have, more often than not, redefined this cancer to justify, and protect, their own positions as guardians and chaplains of the status quo. Journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi, who threw his shoes at former President Bush, provides a powerful commentary on the “spreading of freedom and democracy”-laced imperialism that Bush could not dodge. The shoe thrower also graphically expressed the world-wide condemnation of and anger at the “God bless America”-camouflaged sickness, personified by Bush, endangering the soul and security of America.
It was last December at a news conference in Iraq. President Bush was making his final “unannounced” visit to Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone—the American-made “bubble of democracy” in the heart of the city. This special secretive trip was to be a crowning moment for the self-proclaimed “war president.” He had “stayed the course” of a falsely based, UN-condemned “illegal” pre-emptive war against non-threatening Iraq for six years. In spite of millions of Iraqi, and tens of thousands of American lives lost and ruined and uprooted in the wake of his administration’s war crimes. Bush was there for vindication. Standing next to American-vetted Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. About to celebrate his war trophy of a “free and democratic Iraq.” And televised for the world to see. But instead of being hailed with a war trophy, shoes were hurled at his face. He ducked the shoes but not their impact.
Journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi gave air to the smothered feelings of most people throughout Iraq and the world. He threw the first shoe, shouting, “This is a gift form the Iraqis; this is the farewell kiss, you dog!” Then the other shoe: “This is for the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq.” (The New York Times, Dec. 15, 2008). At long last a journalist who dared to speak truth to power about America’s imperialistic war crimes committed against Iraq.
At his recent trial, journalist al-Zaidi testified very clearly that the shoe fit former President Bush. Quoted as being “provoked” by “the former American leader’s ‘bloodless and soulless smile’ and his joking banter (italics added),” al Zaidi stated,
I could only see Bush and feel the blood of the innocents flow under his feet, as he was smiling that smile—as if he had come to bid farewell to Iraq and with the last support and more than 1 million martyrs. . . . At that moment, I felt this is the man who killed our nation . . . the main murderer and the main person responsible for killing our nation. . . . I was expressing my inner feelings and those of all the Iraqi people from east to west and north to south and the feelings of hatred they hold for him.
Journalist al-Zaidi continued to bear witness to the shoes fitting President Bush. His reported courtroom testimony continued: “As Bush listed the gains made in Iraq during the mid-December news conference, al-Zaidi said he was thinking about the millions of civilians who had been killed, widowed or displaced. He talked about the sanctitiy of mosques being violated, the rape of women and daily humiliations.” The report them quoted him again:
I don’t know what accomplishments he was talking about. The accomplishments I could see were the more than 1 million martyrs and a sea of blood . . . There are more than 5 million Iraqi orphans because of the occupation. . . . More than a million widows and more than 3 million displaced because of the occupation. (“Iraqi shoe thrower: Bush’s ‘soulless smile’ set me off,” CNN.com/world, Feb. 19, 2009)
“The greatest nation in the world’s” ethnocentric-driven war crimes are read between the lines of an Associated Press story on journalist al-Zaidi’s trial:
On Thursday, a court sentenced him to three years in prison on an assault conviction. Zaidi had pleaded not guilty and said his action was prompted by anger over Bush’s claims of victory in a war that has devastated this country. (“Shoe hurler’s release urged,” Los Angeles Times, Baghdad, Mar. 14, 2009)
President Bush is not the only one who dodged journalist al-Zaidi’s shoes. Many in America’s mainstream media bobbed and weaved in distancing themselves from the powerful commentary being acted out by one of their own. A Washington Post story evidently could not bring itself to give voice to the real outrage screaming to be heard. The story reported, “A court convicted an Iraqi-journalist who hurled his shoes at President George W. Bush of assaulting a foreign leader and sentenced him to three years in prison.” (“Iraqi Shoe-Thrower Gets Three Years,” by Anthony Shadid, Mar. 13, 2009) The real story gasping for air: the “foreign leader” had assaulted the Iraqi journalist’s country with weapons of mass destruction.
Continuing their role as guardians of America’s ethnocentric-dominated status quo, many in mainstream media dodged the real story of pursuing whether the shoe fits. While numerous news stories on journalist al-Zaidi’s trial appeared, few, if any, opinion writers took the opportunity offered by this uniquely defining moment to notice the Republican elephant in that Iraqi courtroom: the “foreign leader” with the “ ‘bloodless and soulless smile’ and his joking banter,” who “had come to bid farewell to Iraq. . . . talk[ing] about . . . accomplishments. . . the main murderer of the millions of civilians who had been killed, widowed or displaced.”
Instead of focusing on “the main person responsible for killing Iraq,” The New York Times, America’s newspaper of record, trivialized this historic confrontation in a story titled, “One Good Way to Make Female Hearts Flutter in Iraq: Throw a Shoe.” It begins, “What does it take for an Iraqi woman to fall in love with a man?” The story line continues: “In parks and dress shops, in university halls and on picnics Iraqi women are still smitten—three months and one new American president later—by the shoe thrower, Muntader al-Zaidi” (By Abeer Mohammed and Alissa J. Rubin, Mar. 14, 2009). The story was about hearts “flutter[ing]” not stopping or grieving or failing or hardening.
Another New York Times story elicited and devoted several paragraphs to what journalists thought about the sentencing of one of their own. “Among journalists,” the piece reported, “opinion was divided about whether the sentencing was fair.” (“Iraqi Shoe Thrower Gets Three Years,” by Riyadh Mohammed and Anwar J. Ali, Mar. 12, 2009). Where were these journalists from? Not from The New York Times or the Washington Post or The Boston Globe. They were Iraqi journalists. Two of whom “asked that their names not be used because of the delicacy of the case with the government.” (Ibid.) “The delicacy of the case with the [US] government” is believed to be the very reason no names and opinions of any prominent American journalists appeared in the survey.
An ABC story dodged the moral force of journalist al-Zaidi’s soleful act in a story called “Iraq Shoe-Thrower Sentence and Other Public Figures Punked, Egged and Handcuffed.” The story asked, “Shoe-Throwing a New Trend?” It answered with examples, including that of “Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao” who “was the target of a similar offense during a visit to Britain geared toward improving trade between Britain and China.” (By Lindsey Ellerson, Aadel Rashid and Brian Canova, Mar. 12, 2009) The story did not include the application of an obvious implication: the many times America’s most recognized print and electronic journalists sat through all those news conferences, and kept their shoes on, as President Bush repeatedly lied America into and continued to justify his administration’s ongoing criminal war.
Mainstream media also dodged America’s devastation of Iraq by touting the “new direction” in which it is “headed.” ABC World News ducked America’s war crimes by presenting “a weeklong series ‘Iraq: Where Things Stand,’ . . . in a progress report on the six-year anniversary of Operation Iraqi Freedom’s beginning.” (“ABC’s McCarthy Begins Series for Iraq Invasion Anniversary, Sees ‘Optimism,’” by Brad Wilmouth, NewsBusters.com, Mar. 16, 2009) According to ABC’s report, “Things stand” very well: “Markets without bombs. Hummers without guns. Ice cream after dark. Busy streets without fear. Six years after the war started, more Iraqis say the economy, rather than security, is the biggest concern in their lives.” More televised veneer is presented to hide America’s war crimes: “Snapshots of a city reborn. Speed. Light. Style. This is Baghdad today. Where car bombs have given way to car racing. Where a once looted museum has been restored and reopened. And where young women, who were forced to cover their heads, can again wear the clothes that they like.” (Mar. 15 and Mar. 17, 2009).
It is not about “women, who were forced to cover their heads,” but about American “shock and awe” bombs that reigned down on the heads of women—and children and men and schools and mosques and life-sustaining infrastructure. It is about “an estimated 740,000 widows in Iraq,” who, according to an Oxfam International survey, “are the forgotten victims of Iraq.” (“Study: Iraqi widows struggle in new roles as breadwinners,” Baghdad, Iraq, CNN.com/world, Mar. 7, 2009). It is not about “ice cream after dark” but about orphans being afraid of the dark. It is about widowed mothers who “are being forced to make tough choices, such as whether to pay for their children to go to school and receive health care, or to pay for private power and water services.” (Ibid.) It is about the self-image of children, and the role models of their fathers and mothers and others being undermined by the armed and overpowering presence of American soldiers in their midst.
It is not about “markets without bombs,” but about beggars at the markets. A New York Times story reports, “As the number of widows has swelled during six years of war, their presence on city streets begging for food or as potential recruits by insurgents has been a vexing symbol of the breakdown of Iraqi’s self-sufficiency.” (“Iraq’s War Widows Face Dire Need With Little Aid,” by Timothy Williams, Feb. 22, 2009).
Former President Bush’s final “unannounced” visit to the American-made “bubble of democracy” in Baghdad’s Green Zone is so telling about the shoe fitting. Every one of his trips to Iraq was “unannounced” secretive, a “surprise” visit. The reason is obvious to any editor or journalist who really wants to get the real story of American imperialism first and straight. If Bush showed his face anywhere unprotected outside of the Green Zone’s “democratic bubble,” his babble about “spreading freedom and democracy,” and his life, would be punctured. It is not about “spreading democracy” but about spreading America’s domination and corporate interests, such as those of big oil companies and the military industrial complex. “Spreading freedom and democracy” in the name of “God and country” is the tried and true ethnocentric way to manipulate mothers and fathers into offering up their sons and daughters on the altar of American imperialism.
A revealing commentary on America’s dominant press is that one has to read the real story of if the shoe fits in foreign media. One would rarely find the following editorial opinions (published in BBC NEWS, Dec. 16, 2008) echoed inAmerica’s so-called major free press:
Iraqi journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi’s shoes have made history. The shoe he threw at Bush will always haunt [the president] even after he leaves the White House, and will upset him whenever he remembers the incident. This is the end of all tyrants who shed the people’s blood and despise human rights in order to achieve their arrogant aspirations. (MUSIB NUAIMI IN IRAN’S ARABIC-LANGUAGE AL-VEFAGH)
This is a farewell suitable for a war criminal and terrorist who led the world towards moral degeneration, terrorism and violence for eight years. The scene of the shoe being thrown is the only one that is suitable for US President George Bush. This is a free Iraqi expressing the feelings of the Iraqi people. (MUSTAFA AL-SAWWAF IN GAZA’S FILASTIN)
Muntadar al-Zaidi’s pair of shoes is the symbol of infinite hatred, of not only Iraqi people but also the people of the whole world against America’s president because of his arrogant atrocities. (EDITORIAL IN IRAN’S IRAN)
This terrible insult, which was richly deserved fully deserved by the lying war-criminal president, puts more pressure on the US president-elect to extricate his country from its entanglement in world affairs. (GEORGE HADDAD IN JORDAN’S AL-DUSTUR)
The overwhelming Arab solidarity with the journalist and the fact that he was turned into a hero overnight have proved the extent of the misleading advertising carried out by the US media and the Iraqi officials, who have always been presenting a false picture of the “New Iraq.” (EDITORIAL IN UK-BASED AL-QUDS AL-ARABI)
Like the dominant press, most mainline American religious leaders have also dodged if the shoe fits. Many bought into the religious card President Bush played in carrying out and covering up his administration’s war crimes. He robed himself in prayer and piety to justify his illegal invasion of Iraq: “I pray daily,” he said at his news conference two weeks before beginning his war of choice. “I pray for guidance and wisdom and strength. . . . I pray for peace. I pray for peace.” (The New York Times, Mar. 7, 2003). He continued to hide his hideous crimes against humanity by repeatedly declaring, “Freedom is not America’s gift to the world, it is God’s gift to every man and woman in the world.” (“Acceptance Speech to Republican Convention Delegates,” The New York Times, Sept. 3, 2004)
It would seem that religious leaders especially would be more than outraged for allowing former President Bush to prostitute their beliefs in love of neighbor and peace, to spread war and death and misery and hatred of America. America’s religious leaders should at last step forward and demand the prosecution of Bush and former Vice-President Cheney, and their accomplices for committing war crimes in the name of their “God and country.” And United Methodists should lead the way as Bush and Cheney are professing Methodists.
How morally outrageous! And dangerous! A journalist gets 3 years in prison for throwing his shoes at a war criminal. And the war criminal goes free, is harbored in America, and receives a $7 million dollar book contract.
America’s ethnocentric-fueled war crimes will not go away, no matter what “new direction” Iraq may take. The crimes will continue to fester and foster hatred of America, and produce more horrible 9/11’s until political, journalistic and religious leaders help Americans to engage in long overdue national soul-searching.
America’s future lies in a free press, committed to pursuing the real story wherever the shoe may fit. America’s future lies not in “God bless America” but in America being a blessing to all of its citizens. The future lies not in America being “the greatest nation in the world,” but in the world being the greatest place for everyone to live.
Free journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi! Prosecute former President George W. Bush! Create “a more perfect union!”
Rev. William E. Alberts, Ph.D. is a hospital chaplain, and a diplomate in the College of Pastoral Supervision and Psychotherapy. Both a Unitarian Universalist and a United Methodist minister, he has written research reports, essays and articles on racism, war, politics and religion. He can be reached at william.alberts@bmc.org.
If the Shoe Fits
By Rev. WILLIAM E. ALBERTS
Many Americans suffer from the cancer of ethnocentrism. An extreme “love of God and country” that breeds feelings of superiority and entitlement and arrogance, and has accommodated and blessed horrible war crimes committed by political leaders in our name. Mainstream media and religious leaders are also implicated here. Instead of confronting the ethnocentric-energized imperialism undermining the moral and democratic fabric of our country, they have, more often than not, redefined this cancer to justify, and protect, their own positions as guardians and chaplains of the status quo. Journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi, who threw his shoes at former President Bush, provides a powerful commentary on the “spreading of freedom and democracy”-laced imperialism that Bush could not dodge. The shoe thrower also graphically expressed the world-wide condemnation of and anger at the “God bless America”-camouflaged sickness, personified by Bush, endangering the soul and security of America.
It was last December at a news conference in Iraq. President Bush was making his final “unannounced” visit to Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone—the American-made “bubble of democracy” in the heart of the city. This special secretive trip was to be a crowning moment for the self-proclaimed “war president.” He had “stayed the course” of a falsely based, UN-condemned “illegal” pre-emptive war against non-threatening Iraq for six years. In spite of millions of Iraqi, and tens of thousands of American lives lost and ruined and uprooted in the wake of his administration’s war crimes. Bush was there for vindication. Standing next to American-vetted Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. About to celebrate his war trophy of a “free and democratic Iraq.” And televised for the world to see. But instead of being hailed with a war trophy, shoes were hurled at his face. He ducked the shoes but not their impact.
Journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi gave air to the smothered feelings of most people throughout Iraq and the world. He threw the first shoe, shouting, “This is a gift form the Iraqis; this is the farewell kiss, you dog!” Then the other shoe: “This is for the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq.” (The New York Times, Dec. 15, 2008). At long last a journalist who dared to speak truth to power about America’s imperialistic war crimes committed against Iraq.
At his recent trial, journalist al-Zaidi testified very clearly that the shoe fit former President Bush. Quoted as being “provoked” by “the former American leader’s ‘bloodless and soulless smile’ and his joking banter (italics added),” al Zaidi stated,
I could only see Bush and feel the blood of the innocents flow under his feet, as he was smiling that smile—as if he had come to bid farewell to Iraq and with the last support and more than 1 million martyrs. . . . At that moment, I felt this is the man who killed our nation . . . the main murderer and the main person responsible for killing our nation. . . . I was expressing my inner feelings and those of all the Iraqi people from east to west and north to south and the feelings of hatred they hold for him.
Journalist al-Zaidi continued to bear witness to the shoes fitting President Bush. His reported courtroom testimony continued: “As Bush listed the gains made in Iraq during the mid-December news conference, al-Zaidi said he was thinking about the millions of civilians who had been killed, widowed or displaced. He talked about the sanctitiy of mosques being violated, the rape of women and daily humiliations.” The report them quoted him again:
I don’t know what accomplishments he was talking about. The accomplishments I could see were the more than 1 million martyrs and a sea of blood . . . There are more than 5 million Iraqi orphans because of the occupation. . . . More than a million widows and more than 3 million displaced because of the occupation. (“Iraqi shoe thrower: Bush’s ‘soulless smile’ set me off,” CNN.com/world, Feb. 19, 2009)
“The greatest nation in the world’s” ethnocentric-driven war crimes are read between the lines of an Associated Press story on journalist al-Zaidi’s trial:
On Thursday, a court sentenced him to three years in prison on an assault conviction. Zaidi had pleaded not guilty and said his action was prompted by anger over Bush’s claims of victory in a war that has devastated this country. (“Shoe hurler’s release urged,” Los Angeles Times, Baghdad, Mar. 14, 2009)
President Bush is not the only one who dodged journalist al-Zaidi’s shoes. Many in America’s mainstream media bobbed and weaved in distancing themselves from the powerful commentary being acted out by one of their own. A Washington Post story evidently could not bring itself to give voice to the real outrage screaming to be heard. The story reported, “A court convicted an Iraqi-journalist who hurled his shoes at President George W. Bush of assaulting a foreign leader and sentenced him to three years in prison.” (“Iraqi Shoe-Thrower Gets Three Years,” by Anthony Shadid, Mar. 13, 2009) The real story gasping for air: the “foreign leader” had assaulted the Iraqi journalist’s country with weapons of mass destruction.
Continuing their role as guardians of America’s ethnocentric-dominated status quo, many in mainstream media dodged the real story of pursuing whether the shoe fits. While numerous news stories on journalist al-Zaidi’s trial appeared, few, if any, opinion writers took the opportunity offered by this uniquely defining moment to notice the Republican elephant in that Iraqi courtroom: the “foreign leader” with the “ ‘bloodless and soulless smile’ and his joking banter,” who “had come to bid farewell to Iraq. . . . talk[ing] about . . . accomplishments. . . the main murderer of the millions of civilians who had been killed, widowed or displaced.”
Instead of focusing on “the main person responsible for killing Iraq,” The New York Times, America’s newspaper of record, trivialized this historic confrontation in a story titled, “One Good Way to Make Female Hearts Flutter in Iraq: Throw a Shoe.” It begins, “What does it take for an Iraqi woman to fall in love with a man?” The story line continues: “In parks and dress shops, in university halls and on picnics Iraqi women are still smitten—three months and one new American president later—by the shoe thrower, Muntader al-Zaidi” (By Abeer Mohammed and Alissa J. Rubin, Mar. 14, 2009). The story was about hearts “flutter[ing]” not stopping or grieving or failing or hardening.
Another New York Times story elicited and devoted several paragraphs to what journalists thought about the sentencing of one of their own. “Among journalists,” the piece reported, “opinion was divided about whether the sentencing was fair.” (“Iraqi Shoe Thrower Gets Three Years,” by Riyadh Mohammed and Anwar J. Ali, Mar. 12, 2009). Where were these journalists from? Not from The New York Times or the Washington Post or The Boston Globe. They were Iraqi journalists. Two of whom “asked that their names not be used because of the delicacy of the case with the government.” (Ibid.) “The delicacy of the case with the [US] government” is believed to be the very reason no names and opinions of any prominent American journalists appeared in the survey.
An ABC story dodged the moral force of journalist al-Zaidi’s soleful act in a story called “Iraq Shoe-Thrower Sentence and Other Public Figures Punked, Egged and Handcuffed.” The story asked, “Shoe-Throwing a New Trend?” It answered with examples, including that of “Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao” who “was the target of a similar offense during a visit to Britain geared toward improving trade between Britain and China.” (By Lindsey Ellerson, Aadel Rashid and Brian Canova, Mar. 12, 2009) The story did not include the application of an obvious implication: the many times America’s most recognized print and electronic journalists sat through all those news conferences, and kept their shoes on, as President Bush repeatedly lied America into and continued to justify his administration’s ongoing criminal war.
Mainstream media also dodged America’s devastation of Iraq by touting the “new direction” in which it is “headed.” ABC World News ducked America’s war crimes by presenting “a weeklong series ‘Iraq: Where Things Stand,’ . . . in a progress report on the six-year anniversary of Operation Iraqi Freedom’s beginning.” (“ABC’s McCarthy Begins Series for Iraq Invasion Anniversary, Sees ‘Optimism,’” by Brad Wilmouth, NewsBusters.com, Mar. 16, 2009) According to ABC’s report, “Things stand” very well: “Markets without bombs. Hummers without guns. Ice cream after dark. Busy streets without fear. Six years after the war started, more Iraqis say the economy, rather than security, is the biggest concern in their lives.” More televised veneer is presented to hide America’s war crimes: “Snapshots of a city reborn. Speed. Light. Style. This is Baghdad today. Where car bombs have given way to car racing. Where a once looted museum has been restored and reopened. And where young women, who were forced to cover their heads, can again wear the clothes that they like.” (Mar. 15 and Mar. 17, 2009).
It is not about “women, who were forced to cover their heads,” but about American “shock and awe” bombs that reigned down on the heads of women—and children and men and schools and mosques and life-sustaining infrastructure. It is about “an estimated 740,000 widows in Iraq,” who, according to an Oxfam International survey, “are the forgotten victims of Iraq.” (“Study: Iraqi widows struggle in new roles as breadwinners,” Baghdad, Iraq, CNN.com/world, Mar. 7, 2009). It is not about “ice cream after dark” but about orphans being afraid of the dark. It is about widowed mothers who “are being forced to make tough choices, such as whether to pay for their children to go to school and receive health care, or to pay for private power and water services.” (Ibid.) It is about the self-image of children, and the role models of their fathers and mothers and others being undermined by the armed and overpowering presence of American soldiers in their midst.
It is not about “markets without bombs,” but about beggars at the markets. A New York Times story reports, “As the number of widows has swelled during six years of war, their presence on city streets begging for food or as potential recruits by insurgents has been a vexing symbol of the breakdown of Iraqi’s self-sufficiency.” (“Iraq’s War Widows Face Dire Need With Little Aid,” by Timothy Williams, Feb. 22, 2009).
Former President Bush’s final “unannounced” visit to the American-made “bubble of democracy” in Baghdad’s Green Zone is so telling about the shoe fitting. Every one of his trips to Iraq was “unannounced” secretive, a “surprise” visit. The reason is obvious to any editor or journalist who really wants to get the real story of American imperialism first and straight. If Bush showed his face anywhere unprotected outside of the Green Zone’s “democratic bubble,” his babble about “spreading freedom and democracy,” and his life, would be punctured. It is not about “spreading democracy” but about spreading America’s domination and corporate interests, such as those of big oil companies and the military industrial complex. “Spreading freedom and democracy” in the name of “God and country” is the tried and true ethnocentric way to manipulate mothers and fathers into offering up their sons and daughters on the altar of American imperialism.
A revealing commentary on America’s dominant press is that one has to read the real story of if the shoe fits in foreign media. One would rarely find the following editorial opinions (published in BBC NEWS, Dec. 16, 2008) echoed inAmerica’s so-called major free press:
Iraqi journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi’s shoes have made history. The shoe he threw at Bush will always haunt [the president] even after he leaves the White House, and will upset him whenever he remembers the incident. This is the end of all tyrants who shed the people’s blood and despise human rights in order to achieve their arrogant aspirations. (MUSIB NUAIMI IN IRAN’S ARABIC-LANGUAGE AL-VEFAGH)
This is a farewell suitable for a war criminal and terrorist who led the world towards moral degeneration, terrorism and violence for eight years. The scene of the shoe being thrown is the only one that is suitable for US President George Bush. This is a free Iraqi expressing the feelings of the Iraqi people. (MUSTAFA AL-SAWWAF IN GAZA’S FILASTIN)
Muntadar al-Zaidi’s pair of shoes is the symbol of infinite hatred, of not only Iraqi people but also the people of the whole world against America’s president because of his arrogant atrocities. (EDITORIAL IN IRAN’S IRAN)
This terrible insult, which was richly deserved fully deserved by the lying war-criminal president, puts more pressure on the US president-elect to extricate his country from its entanglement in world affairs. (GEORGE HADDAD IN JORDAN’S AL-DUSTUR)
The overwhelming Arab solidarity with the journalist and the fact that he was turned into a hero overnight have proved the extent of the misleading advertising carried out by the US media and the Iraqi officials, who have always been presenting a false picture of the “New Iraq.” (EDITORIAL IN UK-BASED AL-QUDS AL-ARABI)
Like the dominant press, most mainline American religious leaders have also dodged if the shoe fits. Many bought into the religious card President Bush played in carrying out and covering up his administration’s war crimes. He robed himself in prayer and piety to justify his illegal invasion of Iraq: “I pray daily,” he said at his news conference two weeks before beginning his war of choice. “I pray for guidance and wisdom and strength. . . . I pray for peace. I pray for peace.” (The New York Times, Mar. 7, 2003). He continued to hide his hideous crimes against humanity by repeatedly declaring, “Freedom is not America’s gift to the world, it is God’s gift to every man and woman in the world.” (“Acceptance Speech to Republican Convention Delegates,” The New York Times, Sept. 3, 2004)
It would seem that religious leaders especially would be more than outraged for allowing former President Bush to prostitute their beliefs in love of neighbor and peace, to spread war and death and misery and hatred of America. America’s religious leaders should at last step forward and demand the prosecution of Bush and former Vice-President Cheney, and their accomplices for committing war crimes in the name of their “God and country.” And United Methodists should lead the way as Bush and Cheney are professing Methodists.
How morally outrageous! And dangerous! A journalist gets 3 years in prison for throwing his shoes at a war criminal. And the war criminal goes free, is harbored in America, and receives a $7 million dollar book contract.
America’s ethnocentric-fueled war crimes will not go away, no matter what “new direction” Iraq may take. The crimes will continue to fester and foster hatred of America, and produce more horrible 9/11’s until political, journalistic and religious leaders help Americans to engage in long overdue national soul-searching.
America’s future lies in a free press, committed to pursuing the real story wherever the shoe may fit. America’s future lies not in “God bless America” but in America being a blessing to all of its citizens. The future lies not in America being “the greatest nation in the world,” but in the world being the greatest place for everyone to live.
Free journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi! Prosecute former President George W. Bush! Create “a more perfect union!”
Rev. William E. Alberts, Ph.D. is a hospital chaplain, and a diplomate in the College of Pastoral Supervision and Psychotherapy. Both a Unitarian Universalist and a United Methodist minister, he has written research reports, essays and articles on racism, war, politics and religion. He can be reached at william.alberts@bmc.org.
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