Thieves' Charade

A shameful spectacle is infolding in the Middle East and Washington. Much lauded by the press, President Obama's round of peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians is near collapse. The issue is simple, these surrender negotiations whereby the United States is trying to force the Palestinians to accept a neutered microstate in a tiny portion of historic Palestine in return for eternal gratitude to the U.S. and the abandonment of international law and any Palestinian aspirations for justice and civil rights, are being jettisoned by the Israeli refusal to stop stealing more land from the people it already enslaves in a vice-like Apartheid-style grip. President Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are making truly embarrassing entreaties to Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu, offering lavish arms deals with thrown-in free jet fighters and all sorts of other perks to Israel not for peace, but just to extend the "settlement" construction moratorium for a few months. Netanyahu and his racist foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman can't be bothered watching America crawl around at his feet, they're discussing instituting new loyalty oaths for Israeli citizens--including non-Jewish ones like the Palestinian Arabs who remained within Israel's pre-1967 borders as second-class citizens--demanding recognition of Israel as a Jewish entity. Lieberman would rather expel all Arabs from all of Greater Israel, but hey, what are you gonna do. Lieberman is all about population transfers, codeword for the ethnic cleansing of as much historic Palestine as he can reach.

Meanwhile the accommodationist Fatah/PLO leader Abu Mazen is meeting with Arab leaders in Libya trying to strike the right militant posture while avoiding doing anything that might actually either help the Palestinians nor jeopardize the relationships of the corrupt Arab regimes with the United States. Israel and the U.S. have so poisoned this whole process that the alleged defiance of the Palestinians and Arab leaders is not about substantive issues like the rights of Palestinians to determine their own future or about land or about refugees or about justice or about occupation but about begging the thieves to take a brief pause in their thieving. And meanwhile Mazen's corrupt rump Palestinian Authority has already cut loose the people of Hamas-ruled Gaza, turning a blind eye to Israel's blockade and repression. There's speculation that whatever deal Mazen the U.S. and Israel are cooking up it won't apply to Gaza at all.

Abu Mazen took a mildly principled stand at the beginning of the negotiations that if Israel let its construction moratorium lapse, the Palestinians would walk out. The moratorium lapsed weeks ago and while nobody's talking, nobody's walking out either. This is not a negotiation it's a route, with Israel leading the charge. Whatever comes out of this thieves' charade is most certainly not going to be actual peace.

Obama spoke at the United Nations General Assembly session and devoted a large portion of his speech to his peace efforts. "When we come back here next year, we can have an agreement that will lead to a new member of the United Nations -- an independent, sovereign state of Palestine, living in peace with Israel." But what he is talking about in such exalted terms isn't an independent sovereign state according to the definitions anybody would recognize. It's a rump demilitarized fragment of an already small country with its best land, its resources, and its capital city clawed away by the Zionist state.

Here's the harsh truth. There can be no real peace while the State of Israel exists. It is a fundamental injustice in the landscape of the Middle East. Let it be said, it is not the presence of Jewish people in historic Palestine that is the problem, it is the presence of a racist, colonialist state. It is this state with its loyalty oaths, with its ethnic cleansing, with its brutality, with its racist laws, with its core rejection of secular law, with its murderous intent against its neighbors, that must go. As long as it stays there will be injustice. The dismantling of the state of Israel in favor of a democratic, secular nation where people of all faiths and ethnicities live together under the rule of law would be a blow against not only the colonialist holdover of Zionism but against the authoritarianism and corruption of neighboring countries like Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia, and crucially, against terrorism; removing the emotional resonance that allows reactionary terrorists to capitalize on injustice for their own anti-democratic ends.

Obama is still giving lip service to the cause of peace and justice for Palestinians, but ironically he redefines peace and justice to be near meaningless. The two-state solution is no longer a solution, but a posture that allows the Israeli State, the PLO leadership, the Arab regimes, and the U.S. all to pursue their own ends while solving absolutely nothing at all.

It's time for the charade to end.

(Top photo shows an IDF soldier confronting a demonstrator during protests this July over ethnic evictions in Israel from Yossi Gurvitz' blog "Wish You Orwell." I saw it first on the excellent information/opinion site on the Middle East Mondoweiss.)

Freedom Fighter Marilyn Buck Dies Shortly After Parole

I was trying to decide whether to write about the parole recently granted to Marilyn Buck, an American revolutionary imprisoned since the 1980s. I am saddened to report that according to The Rag Blog, Buck passed away this morning in New York from cancer.

Marilyn Buck was arrested in the mid-1980s for her role in the notorious Nyack Brinks robbery that spelled the end of the road for a particular wing of the American left. Buck was alleged to have been a member of the May 19th Communist Organization, a group with roots in the Weatherman faction of Students for a Democratic Society. May 19th was the East Coast faction of a tendency that on the West Coast formed the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee. It straddled the lines of legality, supporting an network of leftists and revolutionaries driven underground by the government repression of the 1960s and 1970s counter intelligence program COINTELPRO. Buck is said to have taken part in the liberation of Assata Shakur from prison: a truly heroic and selfless act. I disagreed with many of the politics and actions of May 19th, but this was a woman who walked every moment of her talk. I remember those 1980s days of defeat and demoralization in the face of the Reagan juggernaut. I remember the witchhunt the media and the government undertook to paint these people as common criminals or terrorists. But Buck's life is enduring testament to the struggle for freedom not the mistakes of a particular group.

Buck was granted parole just a few weeks ago knowing that the cancer for which she had received inadequate care while in prison was likely incurable.

Here's "Rescue the Word," a poem she wrote in 1992, from the Friends of Marilyn Buck website:

sacred words are in danger
fugitives, they seek cover
bury themselves alive
shamed by the profane
purposes they are forced to serve
dressed in lily-white lies
words are in danger
english only vows
to tear out tongues
exiled witnesses
to collective memory and homeland ties
sacred words are in danger
trapped, they hang on billboards
judas-goats to conjure deception
sing them shout them
teach them
wear them
around your neck
amulets against amnesia

Ibaye. Presente!

There are a shocking number of political prisoners in American jails. They range from leftists like Buck to African-American and Native American revolutionaries, and Cuban fighters against terrorism. Here is a somewhat dated list.

Enhanced Contradiction

One nation has used nuclear weapons, incinerating thousands in the blink of an eye. And if it is Japan, Germany, and Russia who have the reputation for being the bad guys of the last century, going around and attacking other nations unprovoked and then brutally occupying them, one might want to maintain some perspective and remember who carpet bombed North Vietnam for much of the 1960s and 1970s, who invaded the Dominican Republic in 1965, who invaded Grenada in 1983, and who invaded Iraq in 2003--all more or less if not unprovoked, unthreatened in any real way. And one might want to remember who was behind a multitude of coups and proxy wars in Guatemala in 1954 and the 1980s, Nicaragua in the 1980s, El Salvador in the 1980s, Cuba in 1961, Congo in the 1960s, Iran in 1953, Afghanistan in the 1980s.

What I grew up hearing called "Chinese water torture" (thanks to the Korean war) turns out to have its roots in the Spanish Inquisition, practice at the hands of Japanese militarism, and perfection with hoods and boards at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, is now called "water boarding" with its subtle suggestion of leisure-time recreation. And in the nation that most excels in double plus good euphemistical new-speak water-boarding turns out to be only one of the many prescribed practices of "enhanced interrogation" spelled out in recipe books issued by our former president George Bush's ironically-named justice department.

President Obama has, to his vast credit, opened some of the books on these deplorable inhumanities, shedding a little light on the Bush/Cheney doctrine of bureaucratic inhumanity that lead to our modern day gestapo-esque reality of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Baghram, and CIA black site prisons.

So now we all know, crimes were committed. What will we do about that? Well, apparently not very much, including not even clearly saying it won't happen again. Here's the rub. In his eternal optimism--and I don't actually mean that to sound so harsh--Obama knows that just under half the country doesn't have much of a problem with these crimes. It must be said that half the country doesn't seem to have much of a problem with the rest of us being enslaved to insurance companies, credit card companies, banks, soul-lessly greedy corporations, corrupt politicians, or religious fundamentalists either.

So how does the agenda of change which half the country DID vote for a few long months ago proceed? How now when the mildewing morality of a nation which claims to be free and progressive is revealed to be rotten with stinking and exposed corruption and hypocrisy is Obama to proceed?

President Obama is at one of many crossroads. He, who now controls the predator drones that kill innocent and guilty alike without trial or appeal, who now must choose secrecy or openness, who now holds the keys to the torture cells still stocked with people of unjudged innocence, who now claims to steer the ship of state, can choose not to fight this battle. Having defeated that other half of the country in his election he now hopes to unite us and heal us.

But what if it is not possible to heal that contradiction between the nation that murders at will (and the half of the population that unquestionably supported the actions of Bush and his predecessors in tradition) and the nation that claims to stand for a higher vision?

I want universal healthcare. I want marriage equality. I want economic justice. I want green energy. I want all the promises that Obama has made. But if all of these things are going to be battles, then let the battle be joined now over torture, where the morality is clear. If Obama is going to need more allies in the fight for a new more humane future, let him win them by repudiating completely the past and dismantling its machinery of murder. That intolerant, militaristic, backward, corrupt less-than-half of America is not monolithic. Let them be called out.

The United States has done terrible terrible things. They didn't start with Bush and they didn't end with him leaving office. We will win nothing if at every step we allow the forces of reaction to call the tune, to threaten, merely by their presence, to derail the cause of justice.

The previous administration must be held accountable, and responsible, for its crimes. Whether its judges or bureaucrats or interrogators or George Bush himself, the guilty must be punished. President Obama is wrong to reject that path.

OJ Redux

So OJ Simpson is back in trouble with the law, in a story both grotesque and pathetic.

Injustice happens every day. Usually it's rich white guys who get off and black people who suffer at the hands of a vindictive and unbalanced criminal justice system. 5 minutes later nobody gives a damn. A rich black guy gets off and white people can't get over it for what? 15 years? The guy's at least a creep but you know what? Get over it. There are more important criminals out there.

Did OJ get away with murder? I have no idea: I wasn't there and neither were 215 million other white Americans. But listen to a conversation among white people about OJ and all of a sudden it's the crime of the century and proof of some fundamental criminality of black people and their tribal juries. It's grotesque proof that racism is alive, well, and still the key issue in American society.

OJ? Who cares. A full pardon for Assata Shakur. Freedom for Leonard Peltier. Justice for Amadou Diallo.

is Paris burning?

Ah, some small justice in this world. Back to jail.

And now we return to our regularly scheduled programming.

attack of the air-headed skanks

I read an excellent article on The Huffington Post by Marty Kaplan about America and its news: how the majority of passive, entertainment-seeking Americans surely know everything about Paris Hilton but nothing about developments in Iraq that spell continued disaster for both Iraq and the U.S. and more importantly anyone there who might get in the way of a bullet or a bomb. Choosing mostly not to watch network TV and never to watch network TV news, I was somewhat isolated when golddigging air-headed skank Anna Nicole Smith met Glory. Sure, it was amusing internet blog fodder, but it's starting to no longer be funny.

So WTF? What's up with Britney Spears? When I worked for the music biz I used to see all her publicity photos. The earliest ones were the choicest: her handlers decide that this marginally-talented young teen could cultivate a fuck-me daddy persona completely inappropriate for her age and a hair short of child pornography. She becomes a mega-star for mobs of teenage girls desperately training at the Academy of Narcissism. Despite the money and the handlers she ends up acting like a white trash crack whore and melting down in a very public way. What did anyone expect? And America is entertained.

So WTF? What's up with Lindsay Lohan? An actually talented child actress apparently given too much independence much too soon imploding in an orgy of self-destructive addiction and attention-seeking. What did anyone expect? And America is enthralled.

So WTF? What's up with Jessica Simpson? She wonders if chicken of the sea is actually chicken, and people actually pay money for her records and movies?

So WTF? What's up with entitled heiresses like Nicole Ritchie with no apparent talents or social value and we need to be obsessed with her vomiting? And America eats it up.

So WTF with Angelina Jolie and Madonna and the baby-buying sprees in Africa? I actually love Madonna's music but really, is this a sick joke?

So WTF? What is up with Paris Hilton? An unattractive and spoiled debutante and dilettante, a true graduate of the Academy of Narcissism, breaks the law and begs not be sent to jail, where she is sentenced for 45 days. AND SHE SERVES THREE. Unimaginably wealthy, a convicted criminal, and she is then commuted to serving the rest of her sentence under mansion-arrest?

Really, so WTF! Prisoners serving 20 years only to have DNA evidence reveal their innocence? Political prisoners like the Cuban Five and Leonard Peltier and Mumia? People doing years for simple marijuana busts? Random middle-easterners caught up in Guantanamo and held incognito for 5 years? And Paris Hilton serves three days? And that's what America tunes into?

Something is not right. Assata Shakur for president. Cindy Sheehan for secretary of defense. Ariana Huffington for secretary of state. Angela Davis for elder states(wo)man. Lynne Stewart for attorney general. Sonia Sanchez for press secretary. Nikki Giovanni for secretary of education. These are beautiful important women we should pay attention to.

Forget the skanks. And Paris Hilton? Maybe there's a free cell in Abu Ghraib.

lying sacks of sh*t

so I don't have a lot to say on this subject, except the obvious. george bush expects people to believe that his agents will testify on the fired federal attorneys issue only behind closed doors, not under oath, and with no record. such utter contempt for the american people. he belongs in jail, as does alberto gonzalez, karl rove, harriet myers, dick cheney, and his entire administration. after they rot in american jail for a while then they can be sent to the hague for prosecution as war criminals. enough!