|
July 10, 2002
Dave Marsh
The Return
of CREEP:
Record Cartel Accounting
Bernard Weiner
Hope and
Despair in
the Body Politic
Gary Leupp
European
Worries and
Bush's Terror War
July 9, 2002
St. Clair / Cockburn
The Atomic
Clock is Ticking:
All Roads Lead to Yucca Mtn.
Jack McCarthy
Florida:
a Terrorist Sanctuary for Bush's Bloody Pals?
Robert Fisk
How a Saudi
Billionaire
Does Beirut
Stanton and Madsen
God, Incorporated
Kurt Nimmo
IDF, Gangbanging
with Tanks
Bill Christison
Disastrous
Foreign Policies
of the US Part 3:
What Can We Do About It?
July 8, 2002
Rick Mercier
Yucca
Mountain Bound
Lev Grinberg
The
BUSHARON Global War
Tariq Ali
How Bush
Used 9/11 to Remap the World
Lori Allen
The Tugs
of War:
Palestinian Life Under Curfew
July 7, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
White
House Crooks
July 6, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Loose
Lips:
Liberty, Democracy & Bush
Michael Neumann
What's
So Bad About Israel?
Steve Baughman
Ashcroft's
Vendetta:
Lynching John Lindh
July 5, 2002
Ahmad Faruqui
Bush Freezes Peace Process
Todd May
Independence
and Terrorism
Rahul Mahajan
Why I
Won't Celebrate the Fourth of July This Year
July 4, 2002
S. Brian Willson
What
the Flag Means to Me
Philip Farruggio
Independence Day and
the Working Poor
Tom Gorman
The Uncommon
Pledge
of Allegiance
Chris Floyd
Jungle
Fever:
Bush's Bolivian Mercenaries
July 3, 2002
Francis Boyle
The Death
of the Oslo Accords
Mokhiber / Weissman
Cracking
Down on Corp. Crime
Robert Jensen
Lynne
Cheney's Primer
Behzad Yaghmaian
An Alternative
to the G-8s Africa Initiative
Toward a Global AIDS Fund and a Living Wage
John Borowski
Public
Schools Under Seige
Norman Madarasz
Brazil,
the Workers' Party and the Financial Times
July 2, 2002
Leah Wells
The Wedding
Was a Bomb
CounterPunch Wire
Trial of
the SOA 37
Edward Hammond
Bombing
the Mind:
The Pentagon's Drug Warfare
Sam Bahour
Ramallah
Occupied:
Uninvited Guests Become Neighbors
July 1, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Brazil's
Triumph
June 28/30, 2002
Kathleen Christison
The True Story of Resolution
242 or How the US Sold Out
the Palestinians
Cockburn / St. Clair
Death,
Juries and Scalia
Tarif Abboushi
Bush's
Double Standard
on Israel
N.D. Jayaprakash
Seething
with Rage:
The Palestinian Saga
Michael Yates
Taking
the Pledge:
Teachers and the Flag
Stephen Zunes
Bush's
Speech a Setback
for Peace
Walt Brasch
The Pledge
v. The Constitution
Cockburn / St. Clair
Strikers
as Terrorists?
Tom Ridge Calls Longshoremen
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
INSIDE
EXCLUSIVE
TO
COUNTERPUNCH
SUBSCRIBERS
Published March 15, 2002
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
Buy
This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
|
July
10, 2002
Ain't That America
A Strange
Kind of Freedom
by Robert Fisk
Inside the First Congregational Church of Berkeley,
the Californian audience had been struck silent. Dennis Bernstein,
the Jewish host of KPFA Radio's Flashpoint current affairs programme,
was reading some recent e-mails that he had received from Israel's
supporters in America. Each one left the people in the church--Muslims,
Jews, Christians--in a state of shock. "You mother-fucking-asshole-self-hating
Jewish piece of shit. Hitler killed the wrong Jews. He should
have killed your parents, so a piece of Jewish shit like you
would not have been born. God willing, Arab terrorists will cut
you to pieces Daniel Pearl-style, AMEN!!!"
Bernstein's sin was to have covered the
story of Israel's invasion of Jenin in April and to have interviewed
journalists who investigated the killings that took place there--including
Phil Reeves and Justin Huggler of The Independent--for his Flashpoint
programme. Bernstein's grandfather was a revered Orthodox Rabbi
of international prominence but neither his family history nor
his origins spared him. "Read this and weep, you mother-fucker
self-hating Jew boy!!!" another e-mail told Bernstein. "God
willing a Palestinian will murder you, rape your wife and slash
your kids' throats." Yet another: "I hope that you,
Barbara Lubin and all other Jewish Marxist Communist traitors
anti-American cop haters will die a violent and cruel death just
like the victims of suicide bombers in Israel." Lubin is
also Jewish, the executive director of the Middle East Children's
Alliance, a one-time committed Zionist but now one of Israel's
fiercest critics. Her e-mails are even worse.
Indeed, you have to come to America to
realise just how brave this small but vocal Jewish community
is. Bernstein is the first to acknowledge that a combination
of Israeli lobbyists and conservative Christian fundamentalists
have in effect censored all free discussion of Israel and the
Middle East out of the public domain in the US. "Everyone
else is terrified," Bernstein says. "The only ones
who begin to open their mouths are the Jews in this country.
You know, as a kid, I sent money to plant trees in Israel. But
now we are horrified by a government representing a country that
we grew up loving and cherishing. Israel's defenders have a special
vengeance for Jews who don't fall in line behind Sharon's scorched-earth
policy because they give the lie to the charge that Israel's
critics are simply anti-Semite."
Adam Shapiro is among those who have
paid a price for their beliefs. He is a Jew engaged to an American-born
Palestinian, a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement
who was trapped in Yasser Arafat's headquarters in the spring
while administering medical aid. After telling CNN that the Sharon
government was acting like "terrorists" while receiving
$3bn a year in US military aid, Shapiro and his family were savaged
in the New York Post. The paper slandered Shapiro as the "Jewish
Taliban" and demeaned his family as "traitors".
Israeli supporters publicised his family's address and his parents
were forced to flee their Brooklyn home and seek police protection.
Shapiro's father, a New York public high-school teacher and a
part-time Yeshiva (Jewish day school) teacher, was fired from
his job. His brother receives regular death threats.
Israel's supporters have no qualms about
their alliance with the Christian right. Indeed, the fundamentalists
can campaign on their own in Israel's favour, as I discovered
for myself at Stanford recently when I was about to give a lecture
on the media and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, part of a
series of talks arranged largely by Jewish Americans. A right-wing
Christian "Free Republic" outfit posted my name on
its website, and described me as a "PLO butt-kisser"
and asked its supporters to "freep" my lecture. A few
demonstrators turned up outside the First United Methodist Church
in Sacramento where I was to speak, waving American and Israeli
flags. "Jew haters!" they screamed at the organisers,
a dark irony since these were non-Jews shrieking their abuse
at Jews.
They were also handing out crudely printed
flyers. "Nothing to worry about, Bob," one of my Jewish
hosts remarked. "They can't even spell your name right."
True. But also false. "Stop the Lies!" the leaflet
read. "There was no massacre in Jenin. Fiske [sic] is paid
big bucks to spin [lie] for the Arabs..." But the real lie
was in that last sentence. I never take any payment for lectures--so
that no one can ever claim that I'm paid to give the views of
others. But the truth didn't matter to these people. Nor did
the content of my talk--which began, by chance, with the words
"There was no massacre"--in which I described Arafat
as a "corrupt, vain little despot" and suicide bombings
as "a fearful, evil weapon". None of this was relevant.
The aim was to shut me up.
Dennis Bernstein sums it up quite simply:
"Any US journalist, columnist, editor, college professor,
student-activist, public official or clergy member who dares
to speak critically of Israel or accurately report the brutalities
of its illegal occupation will be vilified as an anti-Semite."
In fact, no sooner had Bernstein made these remarks than pro-Israeli
groups initiated an extraordinary campaign against some of the
most pro-Israeli newspapers in America, all claiming that The
New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle
were biased in their coverage of the Middle-East conflict. Just
how The New York Times--which boasts William Safire and Charles
Krauthammer, those giants of pro-Israeli bias, among its writers--could
be anti-Israeli is difficult to see, although it is just possible
that, amid its reports on Israel's destruction in the West Bank
and Gaza, some mildly critical comments found their way into
print. The New York Times, for example, did report that Israeli
soldiers used civilians as human shields--though only in the
very last paragraph of a dispatch from Jenin.
None the less, the campaign of boycotts
and e-mails got under way. More than 1,000 readers suspended
their subscriptions to the Los Angeles Times, while a blizzard
of e-mails told pro-Israeli readers to cancel their subscription
to The New York Times for a day. On the East Coast, at least
one local radio station has lost $1m from a Jewish philanthropist
while other stations attempting to cover the Middle East with
some degree of fairness are said to have lost even more. When
the San Francisco Chronicle published a four-page guide to the
conflict, its editors had to meet a 14-member delegation of local
Jewish groups to discuss their grievances.
According to Michael Futterman, who chairs
the Middle East strategy committee of 80 Bay Area synagogues,
Jewish anger hit "boiling point" when the Chronicle
failed to cover a pro-Israeli rally in San Francisco. Needless
to say, the Chronicle's "Readers' Representative",
Dick Rogers, published a grovelling, self-flagellating apology.
"The paper didn't have a word on the pro-Israel rally,"
he wrote. "This wasn't fair and balanced coverage."
Another objection came from a Jewish reader who objected to the
word "terror" being placed within inverted commas in
a Chronicle headline that read "Sharon says 'terror' justifies
assault". The reader's point? The Chronicle's reporting
"harmonises well with Palestinian propaganda, which tries
to divert attention from the terrorist campaign against Israel
(which enjoys almost unanimous support among Palestinians, all
the way from Yasser Arafat to the 10-year-old who dreams of blowing
himself up one day) and instead describes Israel's military moves
as groundless, evil bullying tactics."
And so it goes on. On a radio show with
me in Berkeley, the Chronicle's foreign editor, Andrew Ross,
tried to laugh off the influence of the pro-Israeli lobby--"the
famous lobby", he called it with that deference that is
half way between acknowledgement and fear--but the Israeli Consul
General Yossi Amrani had no hesitation in campaigning against
the Chronicle, describing a paper largely docile in its reporting
of the Middle East as "a professionally and politically
biased, pro-Palestinian newspaper".
The Chronicle's four-page pull-out on
the Middle East was, in fact, a soft sell. Its headline--"The
Current Strife Between The Israelis And The Palestinians Is A
Battle For Control Of Land"--missed the obvious point: that
one of the two groups that were "battling for control of
the land"--the Palestinians--had been occupied by Israel
for 35 years.
The most astonishing--and least covered--story
is in fact the alliance of Israeli lobbyists and Christian Zionist
fundamentalists, a coalition that began in 1978 with the publication
of a Likud plan to encourage fundamentalist churches to give
their support to Israel. By 1980, there was an "International
Christian Embassy" in Jerusalem; and in 1985, a Christian
Zionist lobby emerged at a "National Prayer Breakfast for
Israel" whose principal speaker was Benjamin Netanyahu,
who was to become Israeli prime minister. "A sense of history,
poetry and morality imbued the Christian Zionists who, more than
a century ago, began to write, plan and organise for Israel's
restoration," Netanyahu told his audience. The so-called
National Unity Coalition for Israel became a lobbying arm of
Christian Zionism with contacts in Congress and neo-conservative
think-tanks in Washington.
In May this year, the Israeli embassy
in Washington, no less, arranged a prayer breakfast for Christian
Zionists. Present were Alonzo Short, a member of the board of
"Promise Keepers", and Michael Little who is president
of the "Christian Broadcasting Network". Event hosts
were listed as including those dour old Christian conservatives
Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who once financed a rogue television
station in southern Lebanon which threatened Muslim villagers
and broadcast tirades by Major Saad Haddad, Israel's stooge militia
leader in Lebanon. In Tennessee, Jewish officials invited hundreds
of Christians to join Jewish crowds at a pro-Israel solidarity
rally in Memphis.
On the face of it, this coalition seems
natural. The Jewish Anti-Defamation League felt able to run an
ad that included an article by a former Christian coalition executive
director Ralph Reed, headlined "We People of Faith Stand
Firmly With Israel". Christians, Reed claimed, supported
Israel because of "their humanitarian impulse to help and
protect Jews, a shared strategic interest in democracy in the
Middle East and a spiritual connection to Israel".
But, of course, a fundamental problem--fundamental
in every sense of the word--lies behind this strange partnership.
As Uri Avnery, the leader of Gush Shalom, the most courageous
Israeli peace group, pointed out in a typically ferocious essay
last month, there is a darker side to the alliance. "According
to its [Christian Zionist] theological beliefs, the Jews must
congregate in Palestine and establish a Jewish state on all its
territory"--an idea that would obviously appeal to Ariel
Sharon--"so as to make the Second Coming of Jesus Christ
possible." But here comes the bad bit. As Avnery says, "the
evangelists don't like to dwell openly on what comes next: before
the coming [of the Messiah], the Jews must convert to Christianity.
Those who don't will perish in a gigantic holocaust in the battle
of Armageddon. This is basically an anti-Semitic teaching, but
who cares, so long as they support Israel?"
The power of the Israeli lobby in the
United States is debated far more freely in the Israeli press
than in American newspapers or on US tele- vision. There is,
of course, a fine and dangerous line between justified investigation--and
condemnation--of the lobby's power, and the racist Arab claim
that a small cabal of Zionists run the world. Those in America
who share the latter view include a deeply unpleasant organisation
just along the coast from San Francisco at Newport Beach known
as the "Institute for Historical Research". These are
the Holocaust deniers whose annual conference last month included
a lecture on "death sentences imposed by German authorities
against German soldiers... for killing or even mistreating Jews".
Too much of this and you'd have to join the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee--AIPAC--to restore your sanity. But the Israeli
lobby is powerful. In fact, its influence over the US Congress
and Senate calls into question the degree to which the American
legislature has been corrupted by lobby groups. It is to an Israeli
voice--Avnery again--that Americans have to turn to hear just
how mighty the lobby has become. "Its electoral and financial
power casts a long shadow over both houses of the Congress,"
Avnery writes. "Hundreds of Senators and Congressmen were
elected with the help of Jewish contributions. Resistance to
the directives of the Jewish lobby is political suicide. If the
AIPAC were to table a resolution abolishing the Ten Commandments,
80 Senators and 300 Congressmen would sign it at once. This lobby
frightens the media, too, and assures their adherence to Israel."
Avnery could have looked no further than
the Democratic primary in Alabama last month for proof of his
assertion. Earl Hilliard, the five-term incumbent, had committed
the one mortal sin of any American politician: he had expressed
sympathy for the cause of the Palestinians. He had also visited
Libya several years ago. Hilliard's opponent, Artur Davis, turned
into an outspoken supporter of Israel and raised large amounts
of money from the Jewish community, both in Alabama and nationwide.
The Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz noted that among the names of
the first list of contributors to Davis's campaign funds were
"10 Cohens from New York and New Jersey, but before one
gets to the Cohens, there were Abrams, Ackerman, Adler, Amir,
Asher, Baruch, Basok, Berger, Berman, Bergman, Bernstein and
Blumenthal. All from the East Coast, Chicago and Los Angeles.
It's highly unlikely any of them have ever visited Alabama..."
The Jewish newspaper Forward--essential reading for any serious
understanding of the American Jewish community--quoted a Jewish
political activist following the race: "Hilliard has been
a problem in his votes and with guys like that, when there's
any conceivable primary challenge, you take your shot."
Hilliard, of course, lost to Davis, whose campaign funds reached
$781,000.
The AIPAC concentrates on Congress while
the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organisations
(CPMAJO), made up of the heads of 51 Jewish organisations, concentrates
on the executive branch of the US government. Every congressman
knows the names of those critics of Israel who have been undone
by the lobby. Take Senator J William Fulbright, whose 1963 testimony
to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee detailed how five million
tax-deductable dollars from philanthropic Americans had been
sent to Israel and then recycled back to the US for distribution
to organisations seeking to influence public opinion in favour
of Israel; this cost him the chance of being Secretary of State.
He was defeated in the 1974 Democratic primary after pro-Israeli
money poured into the campaign funds of his rival, Governor Dale
Bumpers, following a statement by the AIPAC that Fulbright was
"consistently unkind to Israel and our supporters in this
country". Paul Findley, who spent 22 years as a Republican
congressman from Illinois, found his political career destroyed
after he had campaigned against the Israeli lobby--although,
ironically, his book on the subject, They Dare to Speak Out was
nine weeks on The Washington Post bestseller list, suggesting
that quite a number of Americans want to know why their congressmen
are so pro-Israeli.
Just two months ago, the US House of
Representatives voted 352 to 21 to express its unqualified support
for Israel. The Senate voted 94 to two for the same motion. Even
as they voted, Ariel Sharon's army was continuing its destructive
invasion of the West Bank. "I do not recall any member of
Congress asking me if I was in favour of patting Israel on the
back..." James Abu Rizk, an Arab-American of Lebanese origin,
told the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee afterwards.
"No one else, no average American, has been asked either.
But that is the state of American politics today... The votes
and bows have nothing to do with the legislators' love for Israel.
They have everything to do with the money that is fed into their
campaigns by members of the Israeli lobby. My estimate is that
$6bn flows from the American Treasury to Israel each year."
Within days, 42 US governors turned up in Sacramento to sign
declarations supporting Israel. California governor Gray Davis
and New York governor George Pataki--California has the largest
Jewish population of any state except New York--arranged the
meeting.
Sometimes the support of Israel's loyalists
in Congress turns into farce. Tom Delay--reacting to CNN founder
Ted Turner's criticism of Israel--went so far out of his way
to justify Israeli occupation of the West Bank that he blurted
out on MSNBC television that the Palestinians "should become
citizens" of Israel, an idea unlikely to commend itself
to his friend Ariel Sharon. Texas Republican Richard Armey went
the other way. "I'm content to have Israel grab the entire
West Bank. I happen to believe the Palestinians should leave...
to have those people who have been aggressors against Israel
retired to some other area." Do the people of Texas know
that their representative is supporting "ethnic cleansing"
in the Middle East? Or are they silent because they prefer not
to speak out?
Censorship takes many forms. When Ishai
Sagi and Ram Rahat-Goodman, two Israeli reserve soldiers who
refused to serve in the West Bank or Gaza, were scheduled to
debate their decision at Sacramento's Congregation B'nai Israel
in May, their appearance was cancelled. Steve Meinreith, who
is chairman of the Israel Affairs Committee at B'nai Israel,
remarked bleakly that "intimidation on the part of certain
sectors of the community has deprived the entire community of
hearing a point of view that is being widely debated in Israel.
Some people feel it's too dangerous..."
Does President Bush? His long-awaited
Middle-East speech was Israeli policy from start to finish. A
group of Jewish leaders, including Elie Wiesel and Alan Dershowitz--who
said recently that the idea of executing the families of Palestinian
suicide bombers was a legitimate if flawed attempt at finding
a balance between preventing terrorism and preserving democracy--and
the AIPAC and CPMAJO heads all sent clear word to the President
that no pressure should be put on Israel. Wiesel--whose courage
permeates his books on the Holocaust but who lamentably failed
to condemn the massacre of Palestinian refugees in Beirut in
1982 at the hands of Israel's Lebanese allies, said he felt "sadness",
but his sadness was "with Israel, not against Israel"
because "after all the Israeli soldiers did not kill"--took
out a full page in The New York Times. In this, he urged Bush
to "please remember that Ariel Sharon, a military man who
knows the ugly face of war better than anyone, is ready to make
'painful sacrifices' to end the conflict." Sharon was held
"personally responsible" for the massacre by Israel's
own commission of inquiry--but there was no mention of that from
Wiesel, who told reporters in May that he would like to revoke
Arafat's Nobel prize.
President Bush was not going to oppose
these pressures. His father may well have lost his re-election
because he dared to tell Israel that it must make peace with
the Arabs. Bush is not going to make the same mistake--nor does
brother Jeb want to lose his forthcoming governorship election.
Thus Sharon's delight at the Bush speech, and it was left to
a lonely and brave voice--Mitchell Plitnick of the Jewish Voice
for Peace--to state that "few speeches could be considered
to be as destructive as that of the American President... Few
things are as blinding as unbridled arrogance."
Or as vicious as the messages that still
pour in to Dennis Bernstein and Barbara Lubin, whose Middle East
Children's Alliance, co-ordinating with Israeli peace groups,
is trying to raise money to rebuild the Jenin refugee camp. "I
got a call the other day at 5am," Bernstein told me. "This
guy says to me: 'You got a lot of nerve going and eating at that
Jewish deli.' What comes after that?" Before I left San
Francisco, Lubin showed me her latest e-mails. "Dear Cunt,"
one of them begins, "When we want your opinion you fucking
Nazi cunt, we will have one of your Palestinian buddies fuck
it [sic] of you. I hope that in your next trip to the occupied
territories you are blown to bits by one of your Palestinian
buddies [sic] bombs." Another, equally obscene, adds that
"you should be ashamed of yourself, a so-called Jewish woman
advocating the destruction of Israel".
Less crude language, of course, greeted
President Bush's speech. Pat Robertson thought the Bush address
"brilliant". Senator Charles Schumer, a totally loyal
pro-Israeli Democrat from New York, said that "clearly,
on the politics, this is going to please supporters of Israel
as well as the Christian coalition types". He could say
that again. For who could be more Christian than President George
W Bush?
Today's
Features
Dave Marsh
The Return
of CREEP:
Record Cartel Accounting
Bernard Weiner
Hope and
Despair in
the Body Politic
Gary Leupp
Europeans
and Bush's Terror War
home / subscribe
/ about us
/ books
/ archives
/ search
/ links
/
|