Convergence: Occupy & Anti-Pinkwashing Movements, March 3 NYC

In a striking convergence of movements, NYC Queers Against Israeli Apartheid are marking Israeli Apartheid Week with an occupation of the New York City Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered Community Center. As I have reported here several times, the NYC gay center has banned any discussion of solidarity with queer Palestinians, and banned any group intending to do so from using its meeting rooms, betraying the sense of openness and inclusion on which the Center was founded decades ago. It's clear that a handful of wealthy contributors and influential politicians are bound and determined to decide what part of the gay community is welcome at the Center, and the well-paid staff of the Center have heeded their master's voices.

The March 3 action is being called to end these policies of censorship. The action's demands include: End the ban on Palestine solidarity organizing at the Center; Open the Center to all who respect its stated mission; and Open the Center's board meetings and decision-making process to the community. As a fact sheet for NYC-QAIA says: The Center's “haven” then is for Zionist, not Arab, Muslim or especially Palestinian, queers as the ban brands anyone who even discusses the racism and violence of the Israeli government as a terrorist sympathizer, and a threat to the safety of “good” and “normal” queers. The Center’s Board has hidden behind closed-door meetings, flatly ignored calls, letters and requests to dialogue, and has refused to come forth with a promised policy on who can rent rooms at the center. They have failed the diverse LGBTQ communities and must be held accountable. A year has passed and it’s time to renew our action."

NYC-QAIA argues that here is a microcosm of society as a whole: the 1% are trying to use their wealth and power to silence the 99%.



It seems appropriate then that NYC-QAIA would apply the direct action tactics of the Occupy movement. I urge support of this protest!

The attempt by the State of Israel and its supporters to use pinkwashing to leverage support for Zionism in the gay community continues. Articles in the media lauding Israel for being some kind of "gay haven" bear the unmistakable stamp of official Israeli government manufacture. Take for instance this Associated Press article from January 24, 2012 syndicated widely including by the New York Times (though since scrubbed from the NYT site): "Tel Aviv Emerges as Top Gay Tourist Destination." While dropping tidbits of supposed balance, the article maintains an overall laudatory tone to Israel. But careful readers will not be fooled. Check out this sentence: "Omer Gershon, 37, a veteran of the Tel Aviv gay club scene, said tourists are drawn to the city's "crazy" night life." Wait, just a veteran of the Tel Aviv club scene? Flashback to last year: Omer Gershon was the paid agent of the Israeli government propaganda ministry who last year made a video under an assumed name falsely claiming that he had been the victim of alleged anti-gay attitudes of the Peace flotilla. His video was exposed as being a clumsy bit of pinkwashing propaganda. That the same name turns up in a "news article" as just another gay Israeli shows that it's just another clumsy lie dictated by Israeli government disinformation agencies. And it's outrageous that it was presented by AP as news. The only question is whether its author "Aron Heller" is a dupe or a paid employee of the Israeli government.

To counter all the nonsense hasbara propaganda being so clumsily disseminated, the first-ever U.S. LGBTQ delegation to Palestine went on a fact-finding mission to Palestine in January. They documented the systematic apartheid-style repression of the Palestinian people, and issued a strongly worded statement, which includes a section against Pinkwashing: "We call out and reject the state of Israel’s practice of pinkwashing, that is, a well-funded, cynical publicity campaign marketing a purportedly gay-friendly Israel to an international audience so as to distract attention from the devastating human rights abuses it commits on a daily basis against the Palestinian people. Key to Israel’s pinkwashing campaign is the manipulative and false labeling of Israeli culture as gay-friendly and Palestinian culture as homophobic. It is our view that comparisons of this sort are both inaccurate – homophobia and transphobia are to be found throughout Palestinian and Israeli society – and that this is beside the point: Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine cannot be somehow justified or excused by its purportedly tolerant treatment of some sectors of its own population. We stand in solidarity with Palestinian queer organizations like Al Qaws and Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (PQBDS) whose work continues to impact queer Palestinians and all Palestinians....

"We stand in solidarity with queer Palestinian activists who are working to end the occupation, and also with Israeli activists, both queer and others, who are resisting the occupation that is being maintained and extended in their name....

"We name the complicity of the United States in this human rights catastrophe and call on our government to end its participation in an unjust regime that places it and us on the wrong side of peace and justice." Read the whole statement; it's crystal clear and inspiring.

This convergence of movements is auspicious. We are indeed all together. If you're in NYC, see you on March 3rd!

Look Who's About to Trash the Bill of RIghts (Hint: Not a Republican)

I have major bones to pick with the New York Times, often. But in a series of blogposts today editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal nails the deadly danger behind the National Defense Authorization Act, passing in stealth under cover of more visible bills on the economy:

"For a while, the administration encouraged people to think that President Obama would take a stand against the unnecessary and very dangerous provisions that Congress jammed into the annual National Defense Authorization Act. He threatened to veto the whole bill in order to block new rules that would mandate the military custody of most terrorist suspects, and officially sanction their indefinite detention, without due process. Yesterday, the president backed down, completely." — 'The Sound of One President Caving'

"The first [issue] is whether certain provisions in the law give the president and the Pentagon the power to detain American citizens in a military facility, possibly for life, without a trial. Lawyers I talked to today said that the bill is pure mush in a lot of areas, including this one. The bill does not require military custody for American citizens suspected of membership with Al Qaeda or an allied group, as it more or less does for foreigners. (Note, by the way, that this is all about suspicion, not proof.) But neither does it prohibit military trial or detention of American citizens. It’s stunning that the president is willing to sign a bill that might effectively turn the right of habeas corpus into a mere privilege — even for citizens." —'More Rubble from the Military Detention Cave-in'

When this bill is signed into law, if you don't like this blogpost, all you have to do is accuse me of being an ally of Al-Qaeda and I can be locked away, forever, with no right to defend myself or even ask why. I disappear, legally, and utterly without recourse. If you doubt whether Mr. Obama's government would do such a thing, I think you're quite possibly being very naive. Do remember the late American citizens Mr. Al-Awlaki and son. But even if you think Obama wouldn't do such a thing, what about President Gingrich? President Bachmann? President Romney?

It's been nice knowing you all.

"Pinkwashing" Called Out in the NY Times

It's not the kind of thing you usually see in The New York Times. While the Times has a "liberal" reputation, its position on Israel is quite fundamentally compromised (see the Angry Arab for near daily demolitions of the Times's anti-Palestinian racism). But there it is, an Op-Ed piece entitled "Israel and 'Pinkwashing.'" I'm proud to say that the author of this piece, Sarah Schulman, is a friend of mine, somebody I actually went to college with many years ago. She's been active as a writer, academic, and lesbian activist for three decades, and getting this piece in the Times is a real achievement not only for defenders of Palestinians but for lesbian and gay activists in general.

Schulman skillfully ties the Israeli attempt to make gays complicit with the repressive policies of the State of Israel to the European-American Islamophobic movement that is racist to the core:

"These depictions of immigrants — usually Muslims of Arab, South Asian, Turkish or African origin — as “homophobic fanatics” opportunistically ignore the existence of Muslim gays and their allies within their communities. They also render invisible the role that fundamentalist Christians, the Roman Catholic Church and Orthodox Jews play in perpetuating fear and even hatred of gays. And that cynical message has now spread from its roots in European xenophobia to become a potent tool in the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict." Read the whole piece. Congrats, Sarah.

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In related news, New York City Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (NYC QAIA) continues to be excluded from using the meeting rooms at New York City's LGBT Community Center. It's been conducting its business for months now at sit-ins in the Center's lobby. Veteran gay activist Steve Ault, both a member of QAIA and a founder of the LGBT Center, tried to meet with Center Board Members but was rudely disinvited from any board discussion. NYC QAIA has now issued an excellent identity statement:

New York City Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (NYC-
QAIA) is a group of queer activists who support Palestinians’
right to self-determination, and challenge Israel’s occupation
of the West Bank and East Jerusalem as well as the military
blockade of Gaza. We endorse Palestinian civil society’s call
for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel,
and the call by Palestinian queer groups to end the
occupation as a critical step for securing Palestinian human
rights as well as furthering the movement for Palestinian
queer rights.*

NYC-QAIA also calls for an immediate end to Israel’s siege of
Gaza and the collective punishment of its people, which are
clear and widely recognized violations of international law.
NYC-QAIA opposes the continued construction of illegal
settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the
demolition of Palestinian homes. NYC-QAIA calls for the
release of all political prisoners in Israeli jails. Lastly, given
that Israel’s brutal treatment of Palestinians depends so
heavily upon our own government’s support, NYC-QAIA
demands an end to U.S. military and financial aid to Israel.

PALESTINE IS A QUEER ISSUE.

As queers, NYC-QAIA recognizes the myriad ways in which
various forms of oppression — including colonialism, racism,
homophobia and transgenderphobia — are deeply entwined.
As queers, we refuse to accept state violence against
ourselves or others. As gay rights gain support in the US and
Israel, the Israeli government and its defenders have
increasingly co-opted the rhetoric of gay rights to veil Israel’s
racist, colonialist state violence—and this pinkwashing we
also adamantly refuse to accept.

To those who claim Israel is a haven for queers, NYC-QAIA
replies: queer rights in Israel have not been granted by a
benevolent government—they were demanded, fought for,
and to some extent, won. Because Apartheid Israel applies
different rules and laws to Jews, non-Jews and particularly
Palestinians, those minimal rights do not universally apply to
queer Palestinians, nor to queer Israelis of any ethnic group
who build families with Palestinians, nor to queers who
support BDS and oppose Israel’s crimes against Palestinians,
nor to many others. The presence or absence of the same
minimal rights in Palestine is not comparable; apartheid and
occupation strip Palestinian queers of the basic human rights
that have permitted queers in Israel to make their small
gains. Apartheid is the issue.

NYC-QAIA does not speak on behalf of Palestinians — we
stand in solidarity with Palestinians in their struggle. NYC-
QAIA does not support any formal political entity and we do
not all necessarily stand behind a one- or two-state solution.
We reject outright all systems of domination and hate,
including Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. Despite what our
detractors claim, we are not self-hating queers. And the
many Jewish members of NYC-QAIA are not self-loathing
Jews but rather Jews who refuse to support an apartheid
state.

NYC QAIA meets at the LGBT Community Center. We're currently forced to hold our meetings as sit-ins in the lobby: at the behest of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hatemongers, the Center refuses to rent meeting space to anti-apartheid queers. But the Center is wrong to deny safe space to Arab queers, Muslim queers & other queers it deems “controversial.” And the Center is wrong to censor queer political organizing. So NYC QAIA is holding the space. Occupy!

*The BDS document and its original signers are posted at
www.bdsmovement.net. For more information, see the websites
of Palestinian Queers for BDS, Aswat, and al-Qaws.

NYC QAIA sits-in at the Center alternate Tuesdays, next meeting December 6. They're working on getting a blog up, I will update here when that blog is made public.

For past Cahokian articles on Pinkwashing, click here. I also recommend another activist friend's article "Scott Piro, Queer Support for Israel & the Pinkwashing Scam" by Pauline Park, at her blog on gender rights.

UPDATE: Check out Sarah's "Documentary Guide to Pinkwashing" on PrettyQueer.com. Essential!

Sunday Reading: The "Lives" Parody

I'm not a journalist. I write for self-expression, or fun, or sanity, or to give myself the illusion of power in a powerless world. It can be a kind of desktop activism, and a spiritual exercise. I've rarely been paid for my writing, though I certainly would relish the opportunity to be paid for expressing myself. Anyone who reads this blog knows I'm not shy about expressing my opinion. But I also just like the beauty of words, the turn of a phrase. I'm happy with our twenty-first century internet overstimulation. I read things that stimulate my mind and imagination, and things that I wish I'd written, that I wish I'd had the clarity to express.

I grew up with the tradition that Sunday was a day to luxuriate in reading, starting with an excursion out the door to buy the Sunday Times. There's a weekly column on the last page of the New York Times Sunday Magazine called "Lives." For years this column has annoyed the hell out of me. I'm not sure what the column is supposed to achieve each week, but it's usually a first-person nostalgic journey through someone's difficult life learning experience. Except that by the time you're finished reading the short page-long story, you're left with a vague distaste for the story's writer and a sense that you've read something strangely inappropriate that you wished you hadn't. "Lives" columns usually don't have happy endings, and while that might mirror the episodic disappointments present in anybody's real life, the cliche-ridden predictability of these stories is a marvel. I was talking with friends about the column and we realized we all often turned to the "Lives" column first just for a kind of sardonic laugh.

Here's a couple typically bleak recent excerpts:

"After all, my life as I know it began 23 years ago, when, in a freakish accident, I was hit in the head by a ceiling fan in our home in Fort Worth, Tex...." — Sept. 16

"The house keys are peeled from a ring. Sometimes they thank me. Sometimes they cry....At least I don’t make them turn out the lights one last time as they leave. That’s my job." — Sept. 23

"And then a few months ago, his mother called. She said her son had taught his last class of the semester, cashed his paycheck and padlocked himself in a hotel room with an ample supply of crack, heroin and alcohol. An autopsy confirmed he died of an overdose." — Sept. 9

"George dares me to send this former classmate a friend request on Facebook, “for closure,” and I do. I am almost giddy... A day goes by. No response. Then a week. Then another week. I quietly delete the request. And there I am again, the 12-year-old girl who can’t look herself in the mirror." — July 29

You get the idea. There are familiar patterns: a random multiculturalism, the illusive nature of hope, the ever-presence of random tragedy, a sense of oversharing navel gazing that has nevertheless failed to make its author more self-aware. After laughing at a few columns with friends, we weren't convinced that someone wasn't pulling a fast one by submitting parodies to print. We thought, what if we wrote actual parodies of a Sunday Magazine "Lives Column"? And so that is what I've done. With my profound apologies I offer it up for your Sunday edification. Please note this is a work of deeply off-color fiction.

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LIVES

My parents quickly warmed to my choice of brides.

Soon after I introduced them to Susan, they opened their lives to her. My mother and Susan would go shopping together at the mall; they’d luncheon during the week when I was at work.

I was first taken aback at this added dimension of intimacy. Susan seemed to enjoy my parents’ company more than I did, sometimes.

Of course Mom and Dad had to tell Susan all the family stories. No childhood embarrassment was taboo. The time I had almost ran over the neighbor’s cat with my first hand-me down car. And there were the tales of Frankie, the twin who was lost one sad winter to a case of pneumonia none of us understood until it was too late.

“Oh Frankie was a special little boy, Susan,” my mother regaled late one warm summer evening. We were in the screened-in porch. “He used to pick dandelions from the front lawn and hand them to me in the kitchen. He’d hang on to my apron and say ‘I love you mommy’ and I’d tell him he was my special sailor boy.” My mom pushed back a tear.

“It was funny, Susan, your George here,” she pointed at me, mom did, “he was a nice boy, but not giving and generous like Frankie. Oh heavens, I remember when we were toilet training those boys…”

“Mom, must you?” I tried to interject, tried to salvage some of my own dignity.

“Oh hush, George.” She laughed as a memory surfaced. “Anyway one day little Frankie came out of the bathroom with his hands outstretched, full of a mess, saying ‘Mommy look what I made all by myself! Am I a good little boy? Mommy’” Mom and Dad both chuckled in the memory. Dad turned away as the chuckle turned into a little sob. “Oh yes, Frankie, I told him, you’re a good little boy. Mommy’s little sailor. But let’s go wash our hands now baby. Oh that child, he sure tried hard. Not like our little George here. Isn’t that right George?”

Mom gave my ear a good tug and walked in to the kitchen to refill her tumbler of wine.

Susan and I were married later that year. It was a beautiful time. Sadly Dad passed on the very next year; I got promoted at work and we decided to start a family. Mom wasn’t handling the loss of Dad too well so Susan and I talked it over and decided we would invite Mom to move in with us. Susan was pregnant and Mom could help with our new arrival. Susan’s parents has returned to their native Malaysia and I knew she could use the help and support.

Neither of us realized what kind of state Mom was really in. She had taken to drinking just a little bit too much, too often. And at first we were able to dismiss her sudden lapses of memory as quaint senior moments but it soon became clear things were not all right at all.

One day I came home from work and she called out to me “Oh, Frankie! Where have you been!” she grabbed the sides of my head and embraced me tightly. “Mom, it’s me, George…Frankie’s gone, don’t you remember?” The blissful look on her face soured immediately.

“Oh George…it’s only you. Leave me alone.”

“Can’t you see your mother’s tired, George? Leave her alone.” I was surprised at Susan interjecting like that. We went to bed tense, a wooden silence between us for the first time.

The policemen who rang the doorbell the next evening said that they didn’t have a chance in that downpour, the semi was coming too fast, the driving rain causing a chain of events nobody shorter than God could have prevented. Susan was gone. Mom, who had been driving her home from a baby shower, was in ICU.

I rushed to the hospital. Mom was hooked up to tubes and machines. Groggily, she looked my way. “Frankie? Frankie!” Awareness straightened the smile on her face. “Oh, George. Only you. Where’s my little sailor boy Frankie?” Dried blood caked the weak hand she lifted up from the bed questioningly.

I went into the small hospital bathroom. I strained, I reached back, and filled my hands with love for my mother.

“Mommy? Mommy do you love me?” I raised my hands to her as I came out of the bathroom, dripping, reeking. She smiled.

“Yes Frankie. My perfect little boy.”

What Is Yesterday's Media Racism Tomorrow?

Inspired by a post on the "We Are Respectable Negroes" blog, a favorite, I decided to search for a few choice keywords on the vast archives of the New York Times. To explicate the irony of its own name, WARN was looking for historical uses of the phrase "respectable negroes." I wondered what other keywords might be searched. I chose the racist epithet "darkies." Having recently returned from a holiday in Bermuda, one of the 1,390 search results caught my horrified attention. From the April 8, 1883 issue of the New York Times: (You can lick on the graphic above to read the whole thing)

"SURPLUS WHISKY.
BERMUDA DARKIES FATTEN ON THE GENUINE AMERICAN BLUE GRASS

The steam-ship Orinoco came in last Sunday, bringing a large number of passengers and valuable cargo from Bermuda. This is the season when Bermuda vegetables are beginning to ripen, and when they bring the highest prices in the New York market...."

The article goes on to explain how this ship did not contain onions and potatoes, but barrels of whiskey. An early form of tax sheltering, whiskey was taken to Bermuda, and then reimported, saving duties and presumably interstate taxes. But oh the wry nags at the NY Times have "humor" on their minds in this tale of complicated corruption:

"Among the 8,000 or more colored persons in Bermuda, there are several who have a liking for strong drink, and who are particularly fond of American whisky. When the officer on duty [at the port of Hamilton] is at the other end of the town such unrighteous persons have only to conceal themselves among the barrels of whisky, produce a gimlet and a straw, and operate. In this way Bermuda darkies have been known to intoxicate themselves so thoroughly in 10 minutes that it took them a fortnight to straighten out. Whisky sucked out of a barrel through a straw would not ordinarily be considered an enticing beverage, but to the Bermuda colored mind, it touches the right spot. This gimlet and straw act has come to be so well understood on the balmy islands that when one of the dusky bacchanals remains sober longer than seems natural it is said of him that 'he's lost his gimlet.'"....

Perhaps this was a normal display of white editorial racism in 1883. It probably was. But it should serve as a cautionary tale about time, context, and the mutability of point of view. When today's media, even today's New York Times, the avowed American flagship of mainstream liberal journalism of record, wax wryly or even authoritatively on the politics or cultural affairs of others outside its own narrow frame of reference, how much horror-provoking nonsense are they recording for future generations of students of media?

I think particularly of the attitude of American media to the Palestinian people. How quick the media are, even liberal media like The Times, to follow up the word "Palestinian" with "terrorism." How quick they are to establish that the editorial point of view, the us talking about them is you know, Americans and Israelis together. How quick is the media to line up behind conventional wisdom and popular sentiment. How horrifying in a town where a recent special congressional election having nothing actually to do with Israel was won on the basis of which candidate was more slavishly devoted to ensuring total obedience to Israel in foreign policy, to the point where the winning Republican had an Israeli flag on the dais behind him at his election night victory rally. The media could know better, if it chose to, right now, not in 130 years.

Hopefully The Times is embarrassed by its casually repeated use of the word "darkies" (much less "dusky bacchanals') a century ago. Though I did not note an apology for said usage. Let's just say that in the future more embarrassment, more apologies, need to be forthcoming. And a little sooner.

Egypt's Mubarak Clinging to Power ... and American Lifeline

Today besieged Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak returned to the airwaves and said he would step down....after serving out the remainder of his "term" until new elections are held in September. This closely matches a "suggestion" made to Mubarak by a diplomat sent by Secretary Clinton and President Obama.

But what is really happening? I noticed something fascinating about the coverage of this turn of events. Note the New York Times page above, "Mubarak Won't Seek New Term" with the almost after-thought subhead of "Opposition Demands He Leave Sooner." Now compare this to the front page of the Al Jazeera English webpage, the Qatar-based newspaper that helped ignite the wave of unrest sweeping the Middle East:


"Defiant Mubarak vows to finish term." What a difference of emphasis! So who's right? Is the NYT insinuating that diplomacy is successful -- or are they expressing the ambivalence of a historically pro-Israel newspaper which is fearful of an Egypt breaking free into uncharted territory? And Al Jazeera -- sensationalist? Or are they being more truthful, calling Mubarak's maneuver a last-ditch attempt to cling to keep his own ruling clique in power?

President Obama spoke today after Mubarak: "Third, we have spoken out on behalf of the need for change. After his speech tonight, I spoke directly to President Mubarak. He recognizes that the status quo is not sustainable and that a change must take place. Indeed, all of us who are privileged to serve in positions of political power do so at the will of our people....Now, it is not the role of any other country to determine Egypt’s leaders. Only the Egyptian people can do that. What is clear -- and what I indicated tonight to President Mubarak -- is my belief that an orderly transition must be meaningful, it must be peaceful, and it must begin now."

As'ad abu Khalil of the Angry Arab News Service is having none of this: "As soon as I saw the defiant tone and substance of Mubarak's speech, I realized that he is not speaking for himself but for the US/Israeli sponsors. Israel erred before the Arab people by exposing her intense panic and fear from the prospect of an Arab democracy next door. Of course, Obama would take note and he consulted with his key adviser on the Middle East, Netanyahu. I just read the speech by Obama: it confirmed my suspicion, that basically Mubarak was permitted by the US to do with the Egyptian people as he would like... The speech by Obama was a not-so-coded language that let Mubarak do what he wish: the talk about transition means that he was basically told to stay in power, because Israel really freaked out at the prospect of Egypt without Mubarak."

So Obama says he abhors violence, and that the upcoming elections should be free and fair. But does this mean anything at all if Mubarak is allowed to remain at the helm for the next seven months? What does it mean that American aid will continue to flow to the military machines of the region: to Egypt, to Israel, to Jordan, to Saudi Arabia, to Yemen. The trail of money and weapons is visible to all: it's certainly visible to the protesters in Egypt. Isn't it hollow of Obama to say he abhors violence if he continued to fuel the threat of violent repression against the region's protesters?

According to AP, Mubarak's "speech was immediately derided by protesters in Cairo's Tahrir Square. Watching on a giant TV, protesters booed and waved their shoes over their heads at his image in a sign of contempt. "Go, go, go! We are not leaving until he leaves," they chanted. So maybe there's the answer.

[By the way I have alluded to the role of Israel in all this. From an article by Reuters about the reaction of the Israeli media to the Egyptian events: "One comment by Aviad Pohoryles in the daily Maariv was entitled "A Bullet in the Back from Uncle Sam." It accused Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of pursuing a naive, smug, and insular diplomacy heedless of the risks. Who is advising them, he asked, "to fuel the mob raging in the streets of Egypt and to demand the head of the person who five minutes ago was the bold ally of the president ... an almost lone voice of sanity in a Middle East?" That's pretty clear!]

It might not be clear who will emerge out of the protests to challenge Mubarak for leadership -- but it's certainly clear that the tightrope being walked by the U.S. is getting thinner and thinner.

In Defense of a Little Ignorance

Yesterday the headlines and my friends' Facebook links were filled with reports of a Pew poll that suggested while Americans might be very religious, their knowledge of religions, even the ones they follow, isn't very deep. Since atheists scored highest on the poll, the New York Times asked the president of American Atheists why this is. He's quoted as smugly responding, “Atheism is an effect of that knowledge, not a lack of knowledge. I gave a Bible to my daughter. That’s how you make atheists.”

I came to religion late in life; well by late I mean while an adult not a child. I had been raised without religion. I knew that my mother had a certain attachment to Catholicism and its ideals, and especially to Jesus, but that she loathed the church establishment itself, and she chose to raise me without any formal religious indoctrination besides letting me play with the creche figurines on Christmas. When I eventually felt a spiritual pull, being an intellectual person I certainly did a lot of reading about religion and made a thorough investigation of the paths I found myself walking down.

I read a lot of books on Neo-Paganism and later, Santeria. I learned all sorts of arcane details, historical tidbits, and history buff that I am, I ate that all up with relish. But what I credit my actual spiritual awakening to was not what I read in books. It was not the intellectual knowledge I was absorbing but the act of having my eyes, my heart, my mind, my soul, if you will, opened up to religious experience. All the books were enlightening and entertaining and all, but they ultimately meant little without the transformational way I came to experience the presence of God, of a deity immanent in nature around us, of spirits, of natural spiritual energies, of powers and happenings outside the mundanity of life and the linear trail of the intellect. I gained knowledge of my faith not by reading about it but by practicing it.



I'm glad I undertook an intellectual investigation and glad I studied the details I did. But that stuff was not necessary to experience the blessings of religion that came to unfold in my life. The most transformational experiences I had--a few while a Neo-Pagan and then ultimately the week-long initiation ceremony into Santeria and the year in white as an Iyawo that followed--were emotional and spiritual experiences that words, that intellect, can't adequately describe. I mean, I could tell you what happened, but that wouldn't be the same thing as allowing you to experience it. I didn't choose a religion because of what I read about it, I choose a religion because of how its practices made me feel. One could have these experiences without reading about them or their origins first.

When I write about my religion I do so to attempt to share an experience, or to offer some information that makes the experience of, say, listening to Afro-Latin jazz more rewarding. But I'm not exactly trying to convince you, dear reader, that I'm right. My faith comes from a personal revelation that changed my worldview and colors every experience in my life. If you haven't had the same experience as me I can neither judge, criticize nor condemn you. And while knowledge of the kings of medieval Yorubaland (today's Nigeria) is an interesting cultural and historical footnote to Santeria it's knowledge that is ultimately irrelevant to practicing the religion and being lucky enough to receive the blessings of the Orishas.

So for once I'm going to defend that majority of religious Americans who don't know all these historical details of Joseph Smith, Martin Luther or Maimonides. These facts could sure enrich the lives of American Christians and Jews as all history enriches our lives and makes us smarter, but they're not details necessary to love God, or to live a good life. And contrary to what the quoted atheist says, a person who feels the spirit can love the blessings of the Bible's Psalms without embracing the admonitions of Leviticus...even I the non-Christian recognize this.

Which is likely to make non-Muslim Americans more tolerant of Muslims, American or not: a history lesson about Muhammad and seventh-century Arabia? Or some emotional understanding of the spiritual humility Muslim believers feel before God? What if people of different religions focused not on the historical record that has divided us into different armed camps but on the common shared drive to find spiritual reverence and meaning in everyday life?



As I see it religions are man-made creations: attempts by different cultures to come up with the best way to experience and love God and the mysteries of life. Between crusades, inquisitions, suicide bombings, ethnic cleansings, 100-year-wars, armadas, slaveocracies and serfdoms people have done some terrible things in the name of those religions: in my opinion misunderstanding those religions. Obviously learning about all those terrible things is an important part of building a better world: I heartily endorse learning.

But there's nothing wrong with knowing only that God is real; that the world around us is alive with spirit; and that each of us has a choice to live our lives righteously, respecting and loving each other as we love ourselves. And so if the Pew poll suggests atheists know more about religion than religious people, so what. It's left out the most important thing that atheists cannot know: what it feels like to believe in God.

(The illustrations above are frames from the Classics Illustrated comic-book version of "The Conquest of Mexico." That's Aztec emperor Moctecuzoma lamenting the bad attitude toward his religion expressed by the Spanish conquistadores.)

Israel and the Language of Acquiescence

When is the news no longer news but something else? Consider an article that appeared in the New York Times on Wednesday. Here's how it begins:

"Student Injury at Protest Leads to Battle in Israel
By ISABEL KERSHNER

JERUSALEM — A macabre legal wrangle is under way over who should pay the hospital bill for an American art student who lost an eye after being struck by a tear-gas canister fired by an Israeli border police officer at a Palestinian-led protest in the West Bank.

The student, Emily Henochowicz, 21, was injured on May 31 after she joined Palestinian and foreign activists protesting that morning’s deadly raid by Israeli naval commandos on a Turkish boat trying to breach the blockade of Gaza. Israeli security forces fired tear gas to disperse the demonstration after a few Palestinian youths threw rocks...."

Now here's what happened. The Israeli security forces shot Emily Henochowicz in the head with a tear-gas canister at a demonstration. She was carrying flags at the demonstration and was not throwing stones at anybody. The Israeli military blinded a young American woman by shooting her in the eye. Let's say that again: The Israeli military shot Ms. Henochowicz in the head, blinding her in one eye. The headline calls this a "student injury." That first paragraph uses a bizarrely ungainly sentence with multiple passive constructions to say a chain of three things just happened to Ms. Henochowicz, completely distancing the horror that was done to Ms. Henochowicz by the Israelis. The action in the second paragraph, again passively asserting that she "was injured," is that Ms. Henochowicz joined a demonstration...that the Israeli border police needed to disperse because Palestinians were throwing rocks. Ms. Henochowicz, it seems, has brought this injury upon herself because she joined a demonstration. It's so neat, right? You almost don't see it happening.

Israel and its armed security forces are thus absolved of responsibility. What I would like to know is why is the New York Times' Isabel Kershner writing such hasbara , the necessary official Israeli (propaganda) explanation of how reality is insufficient to describe what happened.

So it's bad enough that this story is about how the Israeli government refuses to pay Ms. Henochowicz's medical bills because it claims she was "injured" (not wounded? Not shot in the head by a police officer?) of her own free will by joining civil unrest, but the article itself begins by insinuating that premise through linguisitic slight of hand.

Let me repeat the facts in case they're still not clear: Armed Israelis shot Ms. Henochowicz in the head with a teargas canister, blinding her in one eye. Do you remember when you were small and you knocked something precious off the table, causing it to break? "I didn't do it!" You cried out. "It fell!" Chances are your own linguistic slight of hand made your parents rather angry. Chances are you were punished for, well, failing to take responsibility for your actions; in effect for lying. THIS is what the New York Times is doing here.

It's what small children say when accused of doing something bad. Not "I did it," but "It happened." But this is not what reputable newspapers say. This is not what independent media says. This is, on the contrary, how propaganda excuses the repressive force of the State of Israel.

Emily Henochowicz, a visual artist, returned from Israel and maintains a blog called Thirsty Pixels. Her self-portrait above is from her blog.

North Korean Anti-American Art Makes the Headlines

The above North Korean poster reads "We Will Smash You with a Single Blow if You Attack." It was photographed by a Chinese businessman, and reported on the website of Radio Free Asia last week. The RFA article speculated that the poster, whose publication date is unknown, might be an attempt by the North Korean government to brag about sinking the Cheonan, the South Korean warship sunk by an explosion this March. The sinking of the South Korean warship has been blamed by the South Koreans and their U.S. sponsors on the DPRK, and was responsible for marked worsening of relations between the two countries.

Somewhat lazily, the article was hastily rewritten by The New York Times the day after it appeared on the RFA site, with the same idle speculation that the poster was a cloaked claim of responsibility. The Times article was then promoted by gossip website Gawker. The Times article repeated completely unsubstantiated claims the North Koreans "secretly" awarded medals to the crew of a North Korean submarine after the sinking of the Cheonan.

Though the Times does say that North Korea vehemently denies sinking the Cheonan, it leaves it there. It does not mention the speculation that the Cheonan was sunk by an American mine either intentionally placed or left over from recent military maneuvers. This alternative speculation is documented on NewAmerican Media, and by an unofficial North Korean spokesperson in the Asia Times online. It doesn't seem to me any more of an outrageous conspiracy theory than the one that has North Koreans torpedoing random South Korean warships and then secretly rewarding the devilish underwater crew.

It seems bizarre given the volume of quite violently imagined North Korean propaganda--many pieces shown here on The Cahokian--to suggest without any actual evidence that the DPRK is admitting in a public piece of propaganda something it in general denies. Given the number of American, South Korean (and Japanese?) weapons pointed at North Korea, it's completely understandable, on the other hand, that the DPRK would use a propaganda medium to announce its intentions to retaliate for any attack.

The question needs to be asked why, if the New York Times is reporting completely unsubstantiated speculation, it's not covering both sides of this coin?

Airplane Hijacking, Freedom Fighters, and the New York Times

Last week the New York Times printed a remarkable OpEd piece by Gal Beckerman of the Jewish Daily Forward entitled "Hijacking Their Way Out of Tyranny." The article recounts the planned 1970 hijacking of a small Soviet airplane by a group of dissident Jews in Leningrad. Arrested before they could seize their intended plane, the hijackers hoped to fly the plane to Sweden and then emigrate to Israel. Led by one Yosef Mendelevich, the hijackers hoped that successfull or not, their action "would make their demand for free emigration impossible to ignore." Eventually the attempt by the Soviet state to prosecute the hijackers rebounded, and a massive movement for Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union was born. Furthermore, as the piece puts it, "The bravery of the hijacking plotters also ignited a movement in the United States that would lead Congress, a few years later, to pass the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which withheld preferred trading status from the Soviet Union until it allowed tens of thousands of Jews to emigrate...As a result, not only were hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews able to build new lives, but forces were set in motion that would bring down the Berlin Wall and, eventually, an empire — a world-shaking transformation born from the hopes once placed on a small airplane that never even left the ground."

I am fascinated that the New York Times ran this piece, because it calls to mind other freedom-fighting airplane hijackers who the New York Times would never acknowledge in a similar way. Long before airplane hijacking came to imply the indiscriminate murder of civilians or the smashing of airplanes into office buildings, airplane hijacking was used as a desperate symbolic measure by Palestinian freedom fighters, who just like these desperate oppressed Soviet Jews, hoped it would call attention to the plight of hundreds of thousands of oppressed people and snowball into events that would bring down a state that was the instrument of that oppression.

Leila Khaled was--and is--a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the left-wing faction of the Palestinian movement led by George Habash that accused the mainstream Fatah movement of Yassir Arafat of accommodation to Israel. That's her on the Palestinian wall stencil above. She led a spectacular hijacking of a TWA jet in 1969, blowing up the plane in Syria after the passengers were safely taken off. She was captured in 1970 while attempting to hijack a second plane as part of the "Black September" campaign. Released in a prisoner exchange in 1971, Leila Khaled became a spokeswoman for the Palestinian cause in later years in Jordan. The PFLP soon set aside the tactic of airplane hijackings; Khaled and the PFLP always maintained that their intention was never to harm innocent civilians in their actions, though it does seem like some actions the PFLP had connection to did unfortunately cross that line.

Now as someone who has flown in airplanes let me state clearly I hope never to be hijacked. I think it's wrong, murderous intent or propaganda-only intent, to make innocent people suffer, even if not fatally, for the faults of evil and corrupt governments. I don't think hijacking airplanes was the finest hour of the PFLP or of Palestinian freedom fighters in general. And if the PFLP didn't intend to hurt civilians, clearly those who carried on the hijacking tradition after them have had no such qualms; 9/11 RIP. But Leila Khaled was not a terrorist, only a Palestinian born in a city to which she is unable to return, and neither was Yosef Mendelevich, trapped in a country where anti-semitism ran rampant. We need not associate Ms. Khaled with 9/11 any more than the New York Times associates Mendelevich with 9/11.

Clearly, the attempted seizure of this Soviet airplane in 1970 by Jewish dissidents was inspired by the seizures of airplanes by Palestinian dissidents. We shall be quietly waiting for the Times editorial board to thank Leila Khaled for freeing Soviet Jewry. And when the struggle for justice in Palestine is finally won, and the Apartheid State of Israel is swept aside like the Apartheid State of South Africa before it, and all the citizens of Palestine are living together in multicultural secular democracy, we look forward to reading, in a reevaluation of Leila Khaled's hijacking, "not only were hundreds of thousands of Palestinians able to build new lives, but forces were set in motion that would bring down the Separation Wall and, eventually, a State — a world-shaking transformation born from hopes the once placed on a small airplane."

(Above photo of wall stencil in Bethlehem snagged from tsweden's flickr)

Why I love the Angry Arab

"I have never chewed qat. But I was thinking: if I had a choice of chewing qat with Thomas Friedman, or chewing my shoes by myself, I would go with the shoe, any day."
--Angry Arab News Service, Feb 10, 2010 referencing the wealthy narcissist and NYT columnist Friedman's recent visit to Yemen

The savagery of white people

Apropos of the opinion of current American pundits on Haiti and the dark destiny these enlightened thinkers suggest it has brought on itself, I found this short book review from the New York Times of a mere 100 years ago:

"While the negro of our Southern States has been exploited almost ad nauseum in story and in song, his brother of the West Indian Islands awaits an interpreter. In 'The Story of Quamin' Mrs. May Harvey Drummond essays this office, furnishing an interesting explanatory preface to the nine tales which make up her volume. There is internal evidence that she is accurate in the presentation of her subject, but she lacks the art that made Uncle Remus take instant and strong hold even upon those to whom his race is a sealed book....the closing paragraph of her preface furnishes, however, food for thought: 'As a rule, the Jamaican negroes are much better behaved than their brethren in the United States, and outrages such as lynching and burning at the stake are unheard of in Jamaica for the reason that the crimes leading to these methods of punshment never occur in the British West Indies: in fact the negroes of these islands know that the British law recgnizes no difference between the Gorvernor himself and the humblest black man, and this knowledge makes them not only law-abiding citizens, but loyal subjects of the British Crown." (September 3, 1911)

So David Brooks is in grand tradition in his twisted racist logic.

Haitian Earthquake Brings Conservatives Together in Orgy of Racism and Ignorance

"Why is Haiti so poor? ... Haiti, like most of the world’s poorest nations, suffers from a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences. There is the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile." -- David Brooks, OpEd column in The New York Times, Jan 14 2010.

"[Something] happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. [The Haitians] were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III and whatever, and they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, 'We will serve you if you will get us free from the French.' True story. And so, the devil said, 'OK, it's a deal.' You know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other." -- televangelist Pat Robertson, on TV, Jan 13 2010.

You know Pat Robertson. He's one of those long-running peddlers of hatred and intolerance masquerading as a spiritual leader on the television. He routinely blames people he hates for natural disasters. AIDS, Hurricane Katrina, you name it. So it's no big surprise that he would blame the Haitian earthquake on voodoo, repeating an old slander of racist Euro-American slaveholders against the world's first black republic.

You know David Brooks. He's the moderate, "thinking man's conservative," a self-styled intellectual who regularly publishes an OpEd column in the New York Times. And what do you know, here he's spewing the same racist filth about Haiti and voodoo as Pat Robertson. Oh, it's tidied up. Surely Brooks knows the history better than Robertson. Surely Brooks knows it was Napoleon Bonaparte himself not Napoleon III who the Haitian slaves displaced when they broke the chains of slaveholding colonialism more than two centuries ago.

"Voodoo" or "vodoun" is not some quaint socially regressive superstitious practice. It's an authentic religion, carried in the bellies of slave ships, from West Africa to the New World. Like its sister religion Santeria, Vodoun is a nature religion, combining ancestor reverence, channeling the spiritual powers of nature and respect for an all-powerful God. Can you imagine the scandal if a New York Times columnist blamed the catastrophic history of Europe on "the influence of Judaism which spreads the message of passivity and obedience"?

Vodoun is an uplifting path; it links its practitioners to the mysteries of the universe and transcends the tragedy of the middle passage. It will also, no doubt, help its believers to transcend the tragedy that has now befallen the island of Haiti with this powerful earthquake, and give them succor in rebuilding their lives and their nation. It should come as no surprise to any student of religion that among Haitian practitioners of Vodoun there have been both saints and rogues.

So now you know David Brooks and Pat Robertson: it turns out they are brothers under the skin, sharing the bond of intolerance and racism and white superiority. And sharing utter narcissicm in displaying their ignorant prejudices at the worst possible moment.

Ayibobo! Peace and blessings to the people and spirits of Haiti.

The face of racism

This picture was in the Times today. It shows an Israeli "settler" casually assaulting a Palestinian woman in Hebron, on the West Bank. It reminds me of those pictures from the 1950s and 1960s of white crackers casually spitting on black civil rights marchers in the south. Simply horrifying.