Subject: ON THE WEAKENING MORAL FIBER IN THE WEST.

22 December 2006
Grenoble, France

Dear Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,

The Middle East Crisis Committee at New Haven Connecticut reported recently that "Europe and the US are doing their part, suspending aid programs to the Palestine Authority. Pressure. Pressure. Dov Weinglass a key adviser to Olmert made a joke about it :

The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger."

The Germans tried to use starvation tactics to subdue the French nation into submission during the Second World War. If this strategy works in Gaza, the world will not have seen the end of it.

The long history of Israeli references to the Palestinian people as “cancer”, “lice,” grasshoppers,” and many other designations of subhuman character are increasingly combined with crimes of  violence against the untermenschen, not just words.  Dov Weinglass’s recent joke to reporters about starving the people of Gaza ­we’re just putting them on “a diet” made reporters laugh. Do the citizens of Europe and the United States really want to have anything to do with a government like this? Henry Kissinger instructed the power elite during the Vietnam war:

"It's not a matter of what is true that counts but a matter of what is perceived to be true."

Is this the lesson learned from those years of capitalist warfare?

It should be clear that our Center for the Study of American Institutions and Social Movements (CEIMSA) has taken the ethical position that all hate crimes are unacceptable : killing Armenians in Turkey simply because they were Armenians, killing Jews and Gipsies in Nazi Germany simply because of their ethnic identities,  killing Serbs in Bosnia, killing Tutsis in Rwanda, killing Palestinians in Gaza --each of these crimes are examples of the same pathology, nationalism turning into "ethnic cleansing", and they are equally obscene. The perpetrators of these murders and their indispensable collaborators must be held accountable for their actions. During the Nuremberg war crime trials, the Tribunal declared, in 1950, that :

"Individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience…therefore [individual citizens]
have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring."


The 8 items below address this problem of deadly silence around U.S.-Israeli tyranny in Middle East, a collaboration which portends ill for things to come, and for all of us.

Item A. is a talk by Noam Chomsky recorded on Democracy Now! where he is speaking on the state of World crises, from Bolivia to Baghdad.
Item B. is an article by Robert Fisk on the "Damage Done by Denying the Holocaust".
Item C., from Edward Herman, is an article on the immiseration business in Israel
Item D. is an article from Jamshed Ghandhi on Tony Blair trip to the Middle East "to bring peace".
Item E. by Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun Magazine, is a "Palestinian Critique of the Holocaust Denial".
Item F. is an article by Edward Herman on the "limits of democracy in the U.S.".
Item G. is a short video sent to us by Edward Herman, on "How Isaelis Kill With Impunity"
And finally, item H. is American actor Sean Penn's call for impeachment President Bush at the Institute for Public Accuracy


And finally, a last word from former African-American slave and later abolitionist, Frederick Douglass :

"Find out just what people will quietly submit to, and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."



Sincerely,
Francis McCollum Feeley
Professor of American Studies
Dircector of Research
Université Stendhal Grenoble 3
http://dimension.ucsd.edu/CEIMSA-IN-EXILE/



_______________________
A.
From DEMOCRACY NOW :
19 December 2006


Noam Chomsky spoke this weekend at an event titled, "What's Next? Creating Another World in a Time of War, Empire and Devastation."
Chomsky spoke about the Iraq Study Group report, recent elections in Latin America, the current situation with Iran and much more.

From Bolivia to Baghdad: Noam Chomsky on Creating Another World in a Time of War, Empire and Devastation
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/19/1433244

_______________
B.
from Council for National Interest :
16 December 2006
Subject: No, Israelis are not Nazis. But it's time we talked of war crimes
The Independent (UK)

We think this is a remarkable comment on the Holocaust-denial conference just held in Iran.
Eugene Bird


Oh how - when it comes to the realities of history - the Muslims of the Middle East exhaust my patience. After years of explaining to Arab friends that the Jewish Holocaust - the systematic, planned murder of six million Jews by the Nazis, is an indisputable fact - I am still met with a state of willing disbelief.

And now, this week, the preposterous President Mahmoud Ahmadinajad of Iran opens up his own country to obloquy and shame by holding a supposedly impartial "conference" on the Jewish Holocaust to repeat the lies of the racists who, if they did not direct their hatred towards Jews, would most assuredly turn venomously against those other Semites, the Arabs of the Middle East.

How, I always ask, can you expect the West to understand and accept the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 men, women and children from Palestine in 1948 when you will not try to comprehend the enormity done the Jews of Europe? And, here, of course, is the wretched irony of the whole affair. For what the Muslims of the Middle East should be doing is pointing out to the world that they were not responsible for the Jewish Holocaust, that, horrific and evil though it was, it is a shameful, outrageous injustice that they, the Palestinians, should suffer for something they had no part in and - even more disgusting - that they should be treated as if they have. But, no, Ahmadinajad has neither the brains nor the honesty to grasp this simple, vital equation.

True, the Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem shook hands with Hitler. I met his only surviving wartime Palestinian comrade before he died and it is perfectly true that the intemperate, devious Had al-Husseini made some vile anti-Jewish wartime speeches in German, in one of which he advised the Nazis to close Jewish refugee exit routes to Palestine and deport Jews eastwards (why east, I wonder?) and helped to raise a Muslim SS unit in Bosnia. I have copies of his speeches and his photograph hangs in the Yad Vashem Museum. But the downtrodden, crushed, occupied, slaughtered Palestinians of our time - of Sabra and Chatila, of Jenin and Beit Yanoun - were not even alive in the Second World War.

Yet it is to the eternal shame of Israel and its leaders that they should pretend as if the Palestinians were participants in the Second World War. When the Israeli army was advancing on Beirut in 1982, the then Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, wrote a crazed letter to US president, Ronald Reagan, explaining that he felt he was marching on "Berlin" to liquidate "Hitler" (ie Yasser Arafat, who was busy comparing his own guerrillas to the defenders of Stalingrad).

That courageous Israeli writer Uri Avneri wrote an open letter to Begin. "Mr Prime Minister," he began, "Hitler is dead." But this did not stop Ariel Sharon from trying the same trick in 1989. By talking to the US State Department, Arafat was "like Hitler, who also wanted so much to negotiate with the Allies in the second half of the Second World War", Sharon told the Wall Street Journal. "... Arafat is the same kind of enemy."

Needless to say, any comparison between the behaviour of German troops in the Second World War and Israeli soldiers today (with their constantly betrayed claim to "purity of arms") is denounced as anti-Semitic. Generally, I believe that is the correct reaction. Israelis are not committing mass rape, murder or installing gas chambers for the Palestinians.

But the acts of Israeli troops are not always so easy to divorce from such insane parallels. During the Sabra and Chatila massacres - when Israel sent its enraged Lebanese Christian Phalangist militias into the camps after telling them that Palestinians had killed their beloved leader - up to 1,700 Palestinians were slaughtered. Israeli troops watched - and did nothing.

The Israeli novelist A B Yehoshua observed that, even if his country's soldiers had not known what was happening, "then this would be the same lack of knowledge of the Germans who stood outside Buchenwald and Treblinka and did not know what was happening".

After the killings of Jenin, an Israeli officer suggested to his men, according to the Israeli press, that, with close quarter fighting, they might study the tactics of Nazi troops in Warsaw in 1944.

And I have to say - indeed, it needs to be said - that, after the countless Lebanese civilian refugees ruthlessly cut down on the roads of Lebanon by the Israeli air force in 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996 and again this summer, how can one avoid being reminded of the Luftwaffe attacks on the equally helpless French refugees of 1940? Many thousands of Lebanese have been killed in this way over the past 25 years.

And please spare me the nonsense about "human shields". What about the marked ambulance of women and children rocketed by a low-flying Israeli helicopter in 1996? Or the refugee convoy whose women and children were torn to pieces by an equally low-flying Israeli air force helicopter as they fled along the roads after being ordered to leave their homes by the Israelis?

No, Israelis are not Nazis. But it's time we talked of war crimes unless they stop these attacks on refugees. The Arabs are entitled to talk the same way. They should. But they must stop lying about Jewish history - and take a lesson, perhaps, from the Israeli historians who tell the truth about the savagery which attended Israel's birth.

As for the West's reaction to Ahmadinajad's antics, Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara was "shocked" into disbelief while Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert responded with more eloquent contempt. Strangely, no one recalled that, the holocaust deniers of recent years - deniers of the Turkish genocide of 1.5 million Armenian Christians in 1915, that is - include Lord Blair, who originally tried to prevent Armenians from participating in Britain's Holocaust Day and the then Israeli foreign minister, Shimon Peres, who told Turks that their massacre of the victims of the 20th century's first Holocaust did not constitute a genocide.

I've no doubt Ahmadinajad - equally conscious of Iran's precious relationship with Turkey - would gutlessly fail to honour the Armenian Holocaust in Tehran. Who would have thought that the governments of Britain, Israel and Iran had so much in common?

Oh how - when it comes to the realities of history - the Muslims of the Middle East exhaust my patience. After years of explaining to Arab friends that the Jewish Holocaust - the systematic, planned murder of six million Jews by the Nazis, is an indisputable fact - I am still met with a state of willing disbelief.

And now, this week, the preposterous President Mahmoud Ahmadinajad of Iran opens up his own country to obloquy and shame by holding a supposedly impartial "conference" on the Jewish Holocaust to repeat the lies of the racists who, if they did not direct their hatred towards Jews, would most assuredly turn venomously against those other Semites, the Arabs of the Middle East.

How, I always ask, can you expect the West to understand and accept the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 men, women and children from Palestine in 1948 when you will not try to comprehend the enormity done the Jews of Europe? And, here, of course, is the wretched irony of the whole affair. For what the Muslims of the Middle East should be doing is pointing out to the world that they were not responsible for the Jewish Holocaust, that, horrific and evil though it was, it is a shameful, outrageous injustice that they, the Palestinians, should suffer for something they had no part in and - even more disgusting - that they should be treated as if they have. But, no, Ahmadinajad has neither the brains nor the honesty to grasp this simple, vital equation.

True, the Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem shook hands with Hitler. I met his only surviving wartime Palestinian comrade before he died and it is perfectly true that the intemperate, devious Had al-Husseini made some vile anti-Jewish wartime speeches in German, in one of which he advised the Nazis to close Jewish refugee exit routes to Palestine and deport Jews eastwards (why east, I wonder?) and helped to raise a Muslim SS unit in Bosnia. I have copies of his speeches and his photograph hangs in the Yad Vashem Museum. But the downtrodden, crushed, occupied, slaughtered Palestinians of our time - of Sabra and Chatila, of Jenin and Beit Yanoun - were not even alive in the Second World War.

Yet it is to the eternal shame of Israel and its leaders that they should pretend as if the Palestinians were participants in the Second World War. When the Israeli army was advancing on Beirut in 1982, the then Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, wrote a crazed letter to US president, Ronald Reagan, explaining that he felt he was marching on "Berlin" to liquidate "Hitler" (ie Yasser Arafat, who was busy comparing his own guerrillas to the defenders of Stalingrad).

That courageous Israeli writer Uri Avneri wrote an open letter to Begin. "Mr Prime Minister," he began, "Hitler is dead." But this did not stop Ariel Sharon from trying the same trick in 1989. By talking to the US State Department, Arafat was "like Hitler, who also wanted so much to negotiate with the Allies in the second half of the Second World War", Sharon told the Wall Street Journal. "... Arafat is the same kind of enemy."

Needless to say, any comparison between the behaviour of German troops in the Second World War and Israeli soldiers today (with their constantly betrayed claim to "purity of arms") is denounced as anti-Semitic. Generally, I believe that is the correct reaction. Israelis are not committing mass rape, murder or installing gas chambers for the Palestinians.

But the acts of Israeli troops are not always so easy to divorce from such insane parallels. During the Sabra and Chatila massacres - when Israel sent its enraged Lebanese Christian Phalangist militias into the camps after telling them that Palestinians had killed their beloved leader - up to 1,700 Palestinians were slaughtered. Israeli troops watched - and did nothing.

The Israeli novelist A B Yehoshua observed that, even if his country's soldiers had not known what was happening, "then this would be the same lack of knowledge of the Germans who stood outside Buchenwald and Treblinka and did not know what was happening".

After the killings of Jenin, an Israeli officer suggested to his men, according to the Israeli press, that, with close quarter fighting, they might study the tactics of Nazi troops in Warsaw in 1944.

And I have to say - indeed, it needs to be said - that, after the countless Lebanese civilian refugees ruthlessly cut down on the roads of Lebanon by the Israeli air force in 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996 and again this summer, how can one avoid being reminded of the Luftwaffe attacks on the equally helpless French refugees of 1940? Many thousands of Lebanese have been killed in this way over the past 25 years.

And please spare me the nonsense about "human shields". What about the marked ambulance of women and children rocketed by a low-flying Israeli helicopter in 1996? Or the refugee convoy whose women and children were torn to pieces by an equally low-flying Israeli air force helicopter as they fled along the roads after being ordered to leave their homes by the Israelis?

No, Israelis are not Nazis. But it's time we talked of war crimes unless they stop these attacks on refugees. The Arabs are entitled to talk the same way. They should. But they must stop lying about Jewish history - and take a lesson, perhaps, from the Israeli historians who tell the truth about the savagery which attended Israel's birth.

As for the West's reaction to Ahmadinajad's antics, Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara was "shocked" into disbelief while Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert responded with more eloquent contempt. Strangely, no one recalled that, the holocaust deniers of recent years - deniers of the Turkish genocide of 1.5 million Armenian Christians in 1915, that is - include Lord Blair, who originally tried to prevent Armenians from participating in Britain's Holocaust Day and the then Israeli foreign minister, Shimon Peres, who told Turks that their massacre of the victims of the 20th century's first Holocaust did not constitute a genocide.

I've no doubt Ahmadinajad - equally conscious of Iran's precious relationship with Turkey - would gutlessly fail to honour the Armenian Holocaust in Tehran. Who would have thought that the governments of Britain, Israel and Iran had so much in common?


_______________________________________
Council for the National Interest Foundation
1250 4th Street SW, Suite WG-1
Washington, District of Columbia 20024
http://www.cnionline.org/
http://www.rescuemideastpolicy.com/
Phone: 202-863-2951
Fax: 202-863-2952


____________________
C.
from Edward Herman :
16 December 2006
Subject: chosen people in the immiseration business


Israel shut its last border crossing with Egypt, keeping hundreds of thousands of Palestinians stranded and penned like cattle, unable to move freely in and out of their own land.

 

____________________
D.
From: Jamshed Ghandhi :
Sent: Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Subject: Blair as Angel of Peace
http://comment.independent.co.uk/
 

________________
E.
From Michael Lerner :
Subject: Holocaust Denial--A Palestinian Militant Speaks Out
19 December 2006
http://www.tikkun.org

 

An important message!

Dec. 18, 2006
 Palestinian Militant Critiques Holocaust Denial, Joining Many other Muslims who also Critique the Iranian sponsored Holocaust Denial Conference
An important message!

The following letter to the President of Iran was written by a Palestinian militant who had spent 18 years in an Israeli prison. It was sent weeks before the Holocaust-denying conference that the Iranian president sponsored last week in Teheran, and was printed in early December, before the conference, in Le Monde, and only recently was translated into English.

I have only one thing to add about the morally disgusting and intellectually bankrupt Holocaust-denying conference: it was an unearned gift to the Bush Administration and its attempt to gather support for a war against the "Axis of Evil" and for regime change in Iran. The president of Iran has weakened those of us in the peace movement who oppose any new US-initiated wars by giving to Cheney and Bush evidence of the irrationality of the Iranian leadership and hence greater credibility to the claim of right-wingers that Iran might use nuclear weapons against Israel and the West even if that was self-destructive, because these people are more interested in their ideology than in their own survival. We reject the conclusion that war is necessary, but it's hard not to feel a deep revulsion at the current leadership of Iran. For those of us who critique the lies and distortions that come from the Western media, it is particularly important to also critique the lies and distortions that sometimes come from the Arab, Muslim and Palestinian world--and this Holocaust denial is the mother of all such lies and distortions. That's why it's particularly significant that so many organizations of Islamic life are joining in the condemnation of the Holocaust denial that was sponsored by the Iranian government, and why I urge you to read carefully the statement from a Palestinian militant below.

Please read the statement below by Mahoud Al-Safadi--it is one of many from the Muslim world that is not given attention in the U.S. press or Israeli press, since these statements critiquing the Iranian leadershp's lies about the Holocaust would weaken the "dominant frame" through which the media views the current stories about Muslims in the world--namely that if they are militantlyi against western colonialism then they are automatically irrrational and anti-Semitic. Part of our task at Tikkun is to provide a more complex analysis of the world (and that is only one of many reasons why we are asking you to subscribe or make an end-of-the-year donation to Tikkun to support our work: checks to 2342 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley, Ca. 94708 or donate on line with your credit card at www.tikkun.org or www.spiritualprogressives.org or by calling 510 644 1200).

Blessings for a Happy, merry and spiritually rich Chanukah, Christmas, Hajj, Diwali, Kwanzaa, and New Year.

Michael
Rabbi Michael Lerner


Mr. President, I write to you following the announcement of your intention to organize a conference on the Holocaust in Teheran on 11-12 December, and I sincerely hope that this letter will be brought to your attention.

First of all, allow me to introduce myself: Mahmoud Al-Safadi, a former prisoner from occupied Jerusalem. I was released less than three months ago from the Israeli prison where I had been locked up for eighteen years for having been a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and having taken an active part in resistance to the occupation during the first Intifada. Since you were elected president, I have followed your declarations with great interest -- in particular those relating to the Holocaust. I respect your opposition to the American and Western injunctions concerning the Iranian nuclear program and believe it legitimate that you complain of the double standard that the world has with regard to the nuclear development of certain regimes.

But I am furious about your insistence on claiming that the Holocaust never took place and about your doubts about the number of Jews who were murdered in the extermination and concentration camps, organized massacres, and gas chambers, consequently denying the universal historical significance of the Nazi period.

Allow me to say, Mr. President, with all due respect to you, that you made these statements without really knowing the Nazi industry of death. To have read the works of some deniers seems to be enough for you -- a little like a man who shouts above a well and hears only the echo of his own voice. I believe that a man in your position should not make such an enormous error, because it could be turned against him and, worse still, his people.

Like you and millions of people in the world -- among whom, alas, are innumerable Palestinians and Arabs -- I was also convinced that the Jews exaggerated and lied about the Holocaust, etc., even apart from the fact that the Zionist movement and Israel use the Holocaust to justify their policy, first of all against my own people.

My long imprisonment provided me with the occasion to read books and articles that our ideology and social norms made inaccessible to us outside the prison. These documents gave me a thorough knowledge of the history of the Nazi regime and genocide that it perpetrated. At the beginning of the 1990s, by reading articles written by the Palestinian intellectuals Edward Said and Azmi Bishara, I discovered facts and positions which contradicted mine and those of many Palestinians. Their writings having piqued my curiosity and given birth inside me to the need to know more, I set about reading accounts of survivors of the Holocaust and the Nazi occupation. These testimonies were written by people of various nationalities, Jews or non-Jews.

The more I learned, the more I realized that the Holocaust was indeed a historical fact and the more I became aware of the monumental dimension of the crime committed by Nazi Germany against the Jews, other social and national groups, and humanity in general. I discovered that Nazi Germany aspired to found a "new world order" dominated by the "pure Aryan race" thanks to the physical annihilation of "impure races" and the enslavement of other nations. I discovered that various "normal" official institutions -- bureaucracies, judicial systems, medical and educational authorities, municipalities, railroad companies, and others -- had taken part and collaborated in the implementation of this new world order. From a theoretical point of view, this objective, just like the victories won at the time by the Nazi armies of occupation, threatened the existence of the Arabs and Muslims as well.

Whatever the number of victims -- Jewish and non-Jewish -- the crime is monumental. Any attempt to deny it deprives the denier of his own humanity and sends him immediately to the side of torturers. Whoever denies the fact that this human disaster really took place should not be astonished that others deny the sufferings and persecutions inflicted on his own people by tyrannical leaders or foreign occupiers. Ask yourself, I beg you, the following question: were hundreds of thousands of testimonies written about death camps, gas chambers, ghettos, and mass murders committed by the German army, tens of thousands of works of research based on German documents, numerous filmed sequences, some of which were shot by German soldiers -- were all these masses of evidence completely fabricated?

Can all that be summed up simply as an imperialist-Zionist plot? Are the confessions of high-ranking Nazis officials about their personal role in the project of extermination of whole nations only the fruit of the imagination of some disturbed spirit?

And all these heroic deeds of the people subjected to the German occupation -- the first among whom were Russians, Polish, and Yugoslavs -- only lies and gross exaggerations? Could the struggle of the Soviets against Nazi Germany be only a phantasm? The Russians continue to celebrate their victory over Nazi Germany and remember millions of their civilian and military compatriots who lost their lives in this struggle. Are they lying, too?

I invite you to read historical studies and serious testimonies before making your public statements. You divide the world in two camps: the imperialists-Zionists, who manufactured the myth of the Holocaust, and the adversaries of imperialism, who know the truth and uncover the plot. Perhaps you think that the act of denying the Holocaust places you at the vanguard of the Muslim world and that this refusal constitutes a useful tool in the combat against American imperialism and Western hegemony. By doing so, you actually do great disservice to popular struggles the world over.

At best, you cover your people and yourself with ridicule in the eyes of political forces who reject imperialism but cannot take your ideas and arguments seriously, due to the fact that you obsessively deny the existence of an abundantly documented and studied historical period whose consequences are still felt and discussed today.

At worst, you discourage and weaken the political, social, and intellectual forces who, in Europe and in the United States, reject the policy of confrontation and war carried out by George Bush, but are forced to conclude that you, too, jeopardize the world by your declarations denying the genocide and by your nuclear program.

Concerning the struggle of my people for their independence and their freedom: perhaps do you regard the negation of the Holocaust as an expression of support for the Palestinians? There, again, you are mistaken. We fight for our existence and our rights and against the historical injustice which was inflicted on us in 1948. We will not win our victory and our independence by denying the genocide perpetrated against the Jewish people, even though the forces who occupy our country today and dispossess us are part of the Jewish people.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mahmoud Al-Safadi is a former Palestinian militant, He was imprisoned in Israel for eighteen years and freed in 2006. The French text, a translation from English by Gilles Berton, was published in Le Monde on 4 December 2006. The English original was unavailable on the Net, so the English text on the right is a translation from the French text published in Le Monde. English translation by Yoshie Furuhashi.

---

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____________
F.
from Ed Herman :
20 December 2006
Subject:
Z Magazine
 
 
It has become absolutely standard practice for parties of the left, or that at least claim to represent mass constituencies, to make populist and  peace-stressing promises and gestures that are betrayed instantly on the assumption of power. Sometimes, as with Tony Blair in 1997, a close reading of the pre-election political statements would make one aware that neither service to ordinary citizens nor peace are likely to be high on the leader’s agenda. Also, a study of  the funding and  economic and political connections of  the  incoming leadership is often a giveaway as to likely political direction. But occasionally the leaders seem genuinely surprised that meeting their constituency’s demands will not be practicable, and that the political costs will be more than they care to accept.
 
Bill Clinton affords a classic case of  standard-form betrayal. He was going to “put people first,”  but very quickly abandoned even his initial modest expansionist program, partly on competing triangulation principles, partly upon his discovery that the bond market disapproved, which led to his rapid adjustment to that disapproval­he acknowledged that “Roosevelt was trying to help people. Here we help the bond market, and we hurt the people who voted us in.”  Clinton compromised his health care reform into unworkability and failed to press for it very hard, and famously put deficit reduction ahead of  people or programs (see Robert Pollin, Contours of Descent, chapter 2, “Clintonomics: The Hollow Boom”). He spent much of his political capital getting passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which his voting constituency was strongly against, but which was favored by the business community and major election funders.  His Crime, Terrorism and Personal Responsibility bills were strongly anti-people; there was a gigantic leap in black imprisonment in the Clinton years. He kept the military budget very high despite the death of the Soviet Union, precluding any peace dividend, sponsored  two nice wars in the Balkans, and was responsible for the “sanctions of mass destruction” against Iraq which cost possibly a million civilian lives.  His triangulation was an important reason for the Republican triumph in 1994, and his overall policy thrust paved the way to the continuing  Republican success in 2000.
 
The Clinton experience suggests some painful questions about the probable outcome of the recent Democratic election triumph. Some liberal-left commentators are claiming that the swing to the right is over and the left is now on the march (e.g., Paul Waldman, “A Big Step in Nation’s March to Left,” Baltimore Sun, Nov. 12, 2006). But Clinton’s years of office turned out to be only a  brief slowup in the longer-term move to the right, and in some ways he accelerated the move, as in his support of  the Personal Responsibility Act of 1996 that ended federal responsibility for  poor people. It has been argued that it would have been hard for conservatives to get this responsibility ended so quickly; it required “bipartisan” support, provided by the leadership of a Democratic President. Most important, by pushing for NAFTA and fiscal austerity, and failing to carry out any program that actually served the mass constituency of the Democratic Party, Clinton set the stage for a return of  Republicans able to implement an even more rightwing agenda.
 
The lesson was that unless the Democratic Party can actually come through and meet the demands and needs of  its mass constituency, its triumph can be short-lived. There are ample grounds for thinking that this problem is as acute now as it was 14 years ago, and that the existing Democratic Party is likely to fall short of meeting constituency demands. The Democratic Party has benefited from a widespread disaffection and distrust of  the Bush administration--its wars, corruption, mismanagement and lies--with votes falling into Democratic hands not because of  what the Democrats have done or even promised but simply because they are not Bush  and company.  Bill Fletcher and others have called this the “I am fed up” vote. Beyond this, if we examine what the Democratic Party stands for, who leads it,  who it represents, and what it is likely to do, it is hard to be optimistic.
 
Frank Rich, John Nichols and others contest this, arguing that the newly elected Democrats are almost across the board to the left of the displaced Republicans. Rich acknowledges that “disengaging America from that war is what the country voted for overwhelmingly on November 7, and that’s what the Democrats almost uniformly promised to speed up, whatever their vague, often inchoate notions about how to do it.” (Rich, “It’s Not the Democrats Who Are Divided,” New York Times, Nov. 19, 2006).  Nichols points out that the “Progressive Caucus” of the Democrats in the House (about 64 but growing) is substantially larger than the collections of “Blue Dogs” (perhaps 40) or “New Democrats” (possibly 50), and that virtually all of the newly elected Democrats were to the left of the displaced Republicans (Nichols, “The Crowded Progressive Caucus,” The Nation online, Nov. 12, 2006).
 
One difficulty with the Nichols argument is that the Progressive Caucus is still a minority bloc, and on his own count it is smaller than the Blue Dog plus New Democrat total even within the Democratic Party. The problem of the Democrats for years has been that with substantial numbers of  Blue Dogs and New Democrats ready to abandon the progressive ship on the basis of  non-progressive principle, or at the drop of a lobbyist’s check, progressive actions are easily stymied. Thus, in earlier years, under Carter and Clinton, progressive legislation and actions were regularly blocked in congress despite Democratic majorities and Democratic presidents. There have been no comparable dissident “liberal” blocs of Republican legislators, so that George W. Bush has had an easy ride with Republican legislative majorities.
 
With a splintered and not very well disciplined Democratic majority in the House, a majority in the Senate with Bush ally Joseph Lieberman as the balancing voter, and with George W. Bush still President and in possession of  a veto power, the possibilities for progressive Democratic action are sharply limited. It is hoped that the Democrats will at least launch some serious investigations of  Bush administration corruption, law violations, and mismanagement, but while this may transpire there are questions about how many and how aggressively and effectively they will function. The Democratic leaders will have to work with the executive to get many things done, and they have already indicated that they are keen to avoid “partisanship.” But non-partisanship will discourage or compromise the needed investigations and legal actions within congressional power.
 
Impeachment is ruled out in advance--“off the table” for both Nancy Pelosi and John Conyers, although Conyers himself sponsored  an impeachment hearing for Bush in the basement of the Capitol building on June 19, 2005, and although in terms of  impeachable behavior “Bush is the most impeachable president in American history” (Paul Craig Roberts). Furthermore, experts like Elizabeth Holtzman, Dave Lindorff and Barbara Olshansky, and Elizabeth de la Vega contend that impeachment for impeachable offenses is  legally obligatory on Pelosi and company. (For former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega’s very plausible hypothetical indictment of George W. Bush, see "Tomgram: United States v. George W. Bush et al.," Working for Change.com, Dec. 1, 2006.) The Democrats seem graciously willing and even eager to forget that the Bush administration’s effectiveness was based on partisanship without limit, and that in the Clinton years the Republicans were prepared to sabotage government functions in order to weaken and discredit Clinton.
 
One reason beyond their disunity that causes the Democrats to fight so weakly is their treatment by the media. We now have a very powerful rightwing media that runs interference for the Republican Party in a hugely unfair and unbalanced way, which has cowed the “liberal media,” causing them to work hard to disprove their alleged liberal bias by assailing the Democrats and showing their patriotic ardor. Thus the liberal media cooperated fully in the campaigns of denigration that sought Clinton’s impeachment for a lie without political significance, but none of them have called for Bush’s impeachment for serial lies of huge political importance. This contrast in itself is strong evidence of severe institutionalized media bias.
 
The media have also regularly peddled and failed to confront the charge that the Democrats are weak on “national security,” and Democratic deficits and spending have aroused them much more than Republican “borrow and spend” excesses. The Democrats are under constant pressure to counter their alleged spending excesses and “national security” caution, whereas the Republicans have been able to get away with larger and more corruption-ridden spending excesses and foreign policy actions that have been immensely costly while actually diminishing national security.
 
Nichols, FAIR, and others have pointed out how quickly the mainstream media have rushed to claim that the new Democratic legislators are conservatives and not likely to rock the political boat toward populism and cutting-and-running, and the media have also been very sensitive to aggressive Democratic statements that show “partisanship.” As Molly Ivins says, “So after 12 years of tolerating lying, cheating and corruption, the press is prepared to lecture Democrats on how to behave with bipartisan manners.” However, one thing the media (and John Nichols as well) fail to point out is that if  many of the newly elected Democrats are pretty conservative, and I believe they are--several dozen of them were carefully selected by New Democrat (and former Israeli warrior) Illinois congressman Rahm Emanuel, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee--they will not be truly representing the constituency that put them into office, a constituency once again likely to be denied a really progressive option. The  Democratic Party is capitalizing on a rejection of  Bush and policies that Blue Dogs and New Democrats have tended to support, and their success in keeping out real progressives will help prevent any major attacks on Bush, his constitution-busting, his foreign policies, and neoliberalism.
 
These political constraints on the Democrats flow in large measure from the fact that the Republicans serve the business community more undeviatingly than the Democrats, are more trusted by business, and therefore get more financial support from them and, as noted, kinder treatment by the corporate media. The Democrats have to struggle harder to prove their business-supportive credentials, including their support for “defense” and “national security.” This, and the related media bias, weakens the Democrats’ capacity for service in the general public interest and even for rational behavior. As regards Iraq, the Democrats are now ham-strung by the threat of political costs in failure to “support our boys” or responsibility for “losing.” Extrication has political risks in both Iraq and the United States, and the Democrats don’t like risk-taking, especially in a media environment in which a Democratic war hero can be trashed while Republican war evaders (“I had other priorities”)  and deserters can be essentially free of  criticism.
 
So the widespread public call for extrication will not see the Democrats calling for speedy withdrawal or even a definite time-table for withdrawal. Pelosi’s attempt to get John Murtha appointed House speaker, if successful, would have placed in a strong power position one of the few Democrats committed to an early and rapid withdrawal. His rejection was a defeat for the possibility of  a Bush-contesting Iraq stance on the part of the Democrats. (The winner of that struggle, Rep. Steny Hoyer, ranks number one in Public Citizen’s ratings of representatives “most dependent on special interest money to finance campaigns.” Admittedly, Murtha also ranks high in receipt of special interest money.)
 
 And the Democrats are not likely to use their theoretical control over the military budget to force a rapid withdrawal. Some of them even favor an escalation in one more “last push” to establish military control and “stability,” using this as an alleged response for the demand for change. One of Harry Reid’s earliest  post-election statements was a promise to boost the military budget by $75 billion “to try to get the Army’s diminished units back into combat shape.” (Jonathan Weisman,“Reid Pledges To Press Bush On Iraq Policy, “ Washington Post, Nov. 15, 2006.) The Pentagon is reportedly preparing a larger emergency budget request of  $127-150 billion that will supposedly put the military establishment into conflict with the Democrats and test the Democrats ability to rein in military spending. (See Julian Barnes and Peter Spiegel, “Controversy Over Pentagon's War-Spending Plans,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 29, 2006). On the other hand, it may be a deliberately inflated  request designed to give the Democrats room to make cuts without impinging on Pentagon plans, a tactic used often in the past.
 
Another major constraint on the Democrats is their close ties to the pro-Israel lobby and financial dependence on lobby-related campaign contributions, the latter compensating in part for the business community’s pro-Republican bias. We are talking about 40 percent or more of  the Democrats campaign budget, large enough, especially when combined with the aggressiveness of the lobby, to make any systematic criticism of  Israeli policy, no matter how egregious, out of the question. Hillary Clinton and Pelosi have been notorious for Israel-protective apologetics, and the new chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Tom Lantos, is a virtual agent of  the Israeli state. This is likely to constrain Democratic policy not only on doing anything about Israeli ethnic cleansing and semi-genocidal attacks on Gaza, but also in making difficult any constructive actions by the Democrats on  Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq itself, where Lantos, Pelosi and company are likely to support or at minimum fail to oppose Israel’s hardline and militaristic policies. (See “AIPAC Eats New Congress Critters for Lunch,” Signs of the Times, Nov. 13, 2006. See also Pelosi’s frightening remarks before AIPAC on May 24, 2005, with total apologetics for Israeli ethnic cleansing and a strong indication of support for military action against Iran: Mark Gaffney,“Nancy Pelosi Gives a Pep Talk to AIPAC,” with a copy of  her remarks included: Common Dreams.org, May 27, 2006).
 
In short, with the Democratic Party’s electoral triumph we may expect a small increment in the minimum wage, some other modest economic policy actions that serve middle America and the poor, and a brake on the Bush program of  service to a tiny elite and regressive environmental policy. The Bush take-down of the Constitution will probably be halted, but reversals of  the serious encroachments via the Patriot and Military Commissions Acts will face the veto plus traditional Blue Dog and New Democrat defections. Impeachment is already off the table, and investigations that will take place may be useful but may be compromised by the Democrats bipartisanship proclivities.
 
The Democrats may exercise a modest drag on the military budget, but the party has long been supportive of  a militarized state, and party funding, pressures to prove their “national security” credentials, and fear of  charges of failing to support our boys, are likely to sharply constrain Democratic initiatives here and as regards Iraq. They are likely to follow along with something like  the weak, conditional, slow, non-withdrawal  withdrawal proposals of the Bush appointed  “bipartisan” Iraq Study Group, designed to repel demands for a real withdrawal. As regards Israel and Palestine, the Democrats have been virtually captured by the Lobby and we can expect nothing from them in this crucial area where U.S.-Israeli policy feeds hostility to this country as well as Israel. Given Israel’s eagerness to get the United States to attack Iran, here again the Democrats are likely to offer nothing constructive and will provide little brake if Bush-Cheney decide that another war might serve God’s and the Bush administration’s interests. This country and the world still desperately need a party in the United States that will support non-violent and non-imperialistic alternative policies, something that the victorious Democrats do not provide.


________________
G.
from Edward Herman :
12 December 2006
Subject: how israelis kill with impunity
 AlterNet

One Iraqi solder says the world doesn't seem to notice killing in small numbers. And those closest to the violence become too scared to empathize for those who die.
 

_______________
H.
from Edward Herman :
Subject: Interviews Available on Sean Penn's Call for Accountability
December 19, 2006
Institute for Public Accuracy
http://www.accuracy.org


In a piece today, Editor & Publisher reports that Sean Penn "hit the media and called for impeachment of the president in receiving the 2006 Christopher Reeve First Amendment Award from The Creative Coalition Monday night in New York City."

In his speech, Penn said: "Now, there's been a lot of talk lately on Capitol Hill about how impeachment should be 'off the table.' We're told that it's time to look ahead -- not back. ...  Can you imagine how far that argument would go for the defense at an arraignment on charges of grand larceny, or large-scale distribution of ethamphetamines? How about the arranging of a contract killing on a pregnant mother? 'Indictment should be off the table.' Or 'Let's look forward, not backward.' Or 'We can't afford another failed defendant.'

"Our country has a legal system, not of men and women, but of laws. Why then are we so willing to put inconvenient provisions of the U.S. constitution and federal law 'off the table?' ... Unless we're going to have one set of laws for the powerful and another set for those who can't afford fancy lawyers, then truth matters to everyone. And accountability is a matter of human and legal principle."

Penn's remarks were first published at:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sean-penn/on-receiving-the-2006-chr_b_36659.html


Two former prosecutors released comments this afternoon to the Institute for Public Accuracy about Penn's speech and are available for interviews:

ELIZABETH HOLTZMAN, via Stephen Kent, (845) 758-0097, cell: (914) 589-5988, skent@kentcom.com, http://www.impeachbushbook.com

    Holtzman is a former Congresswoman and was the district attorney of Brooklyn; she was a member of the House panel that impeached Richard Nixon. Holtzman is co-author with Cynthia L. Cooper of the new book "The Impeachment of George W. Bush: A Practical Guide for Concerned Citizens."

    Holtzman said today: "Penn is right; the principle here is holding our leaders accountable for their actions under the law, just as citizens are held accountable under the law for theirs. There is plenty of evidence President Bush has committed what the Constitution calls 'high crimes and misdemeanors,' the remedy for which is empeachment. Congress needs to get the Constitutional machinery started, first by formally investigating the evidence, then executing the required procedures for impeachment and removal from office."

ELIZABETH DE LA VEGA, (408) 399-5641, ElizabethdelaVega@Verizon.net, http://www.thenation.com/directory/bios/elizabeth_de_la_vega,
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=126958

    Elizabeth de la Vega served as a federal prosecutor in Minneapolis and San Jose for more than 20 years. She is author of the new book "U.S. v. George W. Bush et. al."

    De la Vega said today: "Sean Penn is absolutely correct in his call for accountability. 'The law is no respecter of persons,' meaning, of course, that both the protections and the obligations of our laws apply equally to plumbers, preachers and presidents -- of corporations and of the United States. That is the bedrock principle of our justice system. Prosecutors who are trying to enforce the laws of our country will have a difficult task indeed if we allow the President and his senior administration to violate them at will, simply because our representatives, Democrats and Republicans alike, are more concerned about political strategy, however misguided, and protecting their power
than about carrying out their sworn duty to oversee the Executive Branch.

    "Even without having had hearings, we in the United States now have far more than enough evidence, based on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Report, and other documents, to know that the President and his senior administration officials used all of the same techniques used by fraudsters everywhere to deceive the American people and Congress into authorizing an invasion of people 8,000 miles away who had not harmed us in any way and were not threatening to do so. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell and others suppressed material information, repeated half-truths, used artfully-worded misleading statements and asserted 'facts' with reckless disregard for their truth or falsity.

    "Around this country every day, those who use such deceit to defraud people into making decisions they would not otherwise have made -- purchases of swampland in the Everglades or unneeded house repairs -- are prosecuted. Yet, in the case of the most egregious and horrific fraud imaginable, perpetrated by our highest elected officials, our Congress seems to have strategized itself into paralysis. In their obligation to conduct oversight of the Executive Branch, Congress stands in the shoes of law enforcement. We are calling 911 and we need them to respond.

    "It is long past time for everyone who loves this country and who cares about the Constitution to be on their feet saying 'I object!' to the conduct of this President and his entire administration. This is not a radical position, nor is it a partisan one. On the contrary, it is a conservative and patriotic stance that shows deep reverence for the
ideals and tenets that inform our legal system."

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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020, (202) 421-6858; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167