Tuesday, August 22, 2006
Immunity of Non-Combatants and Myth of Good Intentions: 61 Years After Hiroshima/Nagasaki
By Herbert P. Bix
In late 1945, in a context of restored peace, American leaders set about constructing the postwar international order. Among the issues they confronted were the establishment of the United Nations and the reaction of U.S. citizens to the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The latter especially provoked a short-lived mood of uncertainty about the future of humankind in the nuclear age.
The questions on American minds at the time were: Would atomic bombs someday be turned against us? Would this new “postwar” end, as the one that followed World War I had, with some great power rejecting the restraints of international law and morality and enfeebling the new world body? [1] In June 1950 President Harry S. Truman, a firm believer in the primacy of power politics over law, gave his definitive answer to the second question by trampling on the letter and spirit of the UN Charter. Specifically, he illegally committed the U.S. to war in Korea on his own authority, without Congressional approval or prior authorization from the UN Security Council, and his Sec. of State, Dean Acheson, dismissed the UN Charter as “impracticable.”
Truman and Acheson (left)
Hiroshima and Nagasaki posed a more intractable problem. Neither the media nor the American people objected publicly, as some in Britain did, to the carpet bombing of European and Japanese cities and the mass killing of Japanese or German civilians. Rather, most Americans registered the news of area bombing and atomic bombing approvingly. A Gallup poll in August 1945 found that 85 percent of respondents (who knew nothing about the radiation effects of the atomic bomb) endorsed its use against Japanese cities. The massacre of 200,000 innocent Japanese civilians evoked neither pity nor remorse. Indeed, 22.7 percent of Americans expressed genocidal sentiments right after the atomic bombs were dropped, regretting that more hadn’t been used to slaughter the Japanese. Fifty years later roughly the same percentage?24 percent?“strongly approved” dropping the first atomic bombs. [2] The majority, however, were uncertain how to respond to the nuclear destruction of whole cities. Nevertheless, a tiny minority of religious leaders, social critics, and antiwar activists labeled the destruction of the two cities a war crime, and charged that the government had trampled on the lofty ideals which were supposed to serve as the moral basis of U.S. foreign policy.
Image-conscious American political and military leaders quickly stepped in to fine tune the official government line. The generals claimed, disingenuously, that when the planes of the US Army Air Force burned down Tokyo and sixty-five other Japanese cities, they had aimed to achieve the goal of accuracy by “alternate means” so as to protect civilian lives while breaking Japanese morale. [3] As for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Truman initially “attempted to minimize the impression that civilians had been attacked with the atomic bomb.” His first press release had identified Hiroshima as “an important Japanese military base,” ignoring that the bomb had targeted the city’s civilian center in order to maximize civilian casualties. In his radio broadcast a few days later, on August 9, 1945, Truman re-emphasized “that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, in so far as possible, the killing of civilians.” [4] American newspaper journalists and magazine writers dutifully amplified Truman’s blatant lie by passing quickly over the details and writing their stories “in terms that ignored or obscured civilian deaths.” [5] Photographic images reinforced this impression: the mushroom cloud, not ruined cityscapes and corpses, told the official story.
Long before Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s article in Harper’s Magazine (February 1947) attempted to stifle further criticism from scientific leaders and ordinary citizens of Truman’s first use, without warning, of atomic bombs, U.S. officials introduced the counter-argument that the bombs had saved the lives of large numbers of Americans who had been scheduled to invade the Japanese home islands. Precisely by adding the saved-U.S.-combatant-lives-argument to Truman’s claim of having respected the norm of “non-combatant immunity,” American leaders were able to elicit uncritical public support for the atomic bomb project and to avoid public debate over terror bombing.
Yet criticism and doubts over how the U.S. and Britain had fought World War II continued. A small minority of Americans went on questioning the practice of killing large numbers of defenseless civilians. They yearned for a moral world free of war, militarism, and armaments. In foreign policy, however, the dominant elites believed that the rule of international law as framed primarily by the U.S. should prevail, and that world security should be guaranteed by the military power of the United States and Britain, acting to check the power of the Soviet Union.
Apprehension and hopefulness mingled. In the background was a troubled feeling that the country would remain in Roosevelt’s proclaimed state of unlimited national emergency (May 1941) and never emerge psychologically from its war crusade. Reinforcing this fear by some of an American counterpart to the Hitlerian “state of exception” was the growing worry that the U.S. with its nuclear monopoly might hold humankind itself captive to its expansionist designs.
Truman’s Democratic administration sought to offset such fear and uneasiness about massive civilian casualties and inordinate executive power by demonstrating that the U.S. was using its God-like power beneficently, to enforce the rule of law rather than the rule of the most powerful. The U.S. would try, rather than summarily execute, the surviving Axis war criminals at the first international war crimes trials at Nuremberg and Tokyo. These would be political show trials in the best sense, not like Stalin’s show trials. They would enhance U.S. prestige and present the U.S., a nation deeply scarred by racism, as the champion of human dignity.
But the more important method of allaying fear was government propaganda and rhetoric to blind Americans to the war crimes committed in their name by the U.S. military. This was coupled with a compliant, uncritical news media that kept the citizenry uninformed about international law and poorly informed about foreign affairs. The problem, as historian Sahr Conway-Lanz described it, was how to reconcile the Pentagon’s commitment to massively destructive, indiscriminate bombing of cities and towns, purportedly designed to save American combatant lives, with the norm of immunity for civilian non-combatants, upon which the laws of war are predicated. Eliminate the combatant/non-combatant distinction and all notions of international humanitarian law and justice die.
Thus, in order to achieve consistency between the reality of U.S. war making and international law, American leaders were forced to deny any contradiction between U.S. war policies, techniques, and instruments of warfare on the one hand, and the massive civilian casualties that necessarily resulted from them on the other. When the military services discussed bombing and nuclear strategy, the generals, admirals, and their civilian bosses repeatedly assured the public that the U.S. military exercised restraint, and neither advocated nor practiced systematic destruction of urban areas and civilian peoples, their homes and infrastructure. While never explicitly claiming that the lives of noncombatant civilians counted for nothing when weighed against the lives of U.S. soldiers, the U.S. concealed massive civilian casualties resulting from air strikes, or from war atrocities regularly committed by American soldiers on the ground.
To maintain the nation’s self-image as a uniquely humane power that cared about and acted to minimize civilian casualties, yet at the same time developed and deployed the world’s most destructively cruel weapons, U.S. leaders, as Conway-Lanz shows, brought into play two other linguistic devices: “elastic definitions of military targets” in enemy countries, and an emphasis on intention and premeditation that concealed the truth about how the Pentagon actually waged war. When the U.S. military loosed its air power on Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Afghan or Iraqi cities, towns, and villages; when it dropped “conventional” bombs and napalm, fired artillery, or used anti-personnel weapons such as cluster and phosphorous bombs that necessarily harmed civilians, it did not do so with the wicked intention to direct those weapons against them or against non-military objects. It did not knowingly commit war crimes, violate international law, or put civilians at risk. But if civilians not directly participating in fighting died, well, that was unintended “collateral damage,” the outcome of a righteous action, dictated by special conditions on the battlefield, not uncontrollable American firepower in the hands of gung-ho pilots or trigger-happy, war-stressed soldiers.
The key element was the intention. The proclaimed intention made the result--the killing of noncombatants?tolerable to the American conscience. What counted was the motive, not the consequences of the act or the nature of the weapons used. This extraordinary emphasis on intent in U.S. public discourse on warfare had its roots in both Christian notions of evil and sin as well as U.S. and international criminal law. [6] Collateral damage is a euphemism of the nuclear age, coined within the Pentagon, to conceal the deliberate killing of civilians. The military invokes this term as a way of exempting the U.S. from moral and legal culpability for such killing. [7] In short, collateral damage is all about intent, and the avoidance of responsibility for murdering the innocent. It is the military’s way of saying: judge the commander, the pilot, the combat soldier, even the U.S. mercenary and torturer not by what he did but by his subjective state of mind when he did it.
For over sixty-one years American leaders, firm in the belief of their moral superiority to others, have sought to avoid moral judgments on their conduct of warfare and its close link to war atrocities. Their aim has been to preserve the myth of American good intentions by highlighting the primacy of humanitarian sentiments in restraining the use of violence. Whether in times of peace or war, they propagate the myth of good-intentions in order to reinforce the larger myth of American exceptionalism. The latter is the view of the United States as the embodiment of Western virtue, the deliverer of ‘freedom” to oppressed peoples, God’s model of the world’s future?in brief, a chosen nation with an inherent right to lead others and set the world aright by waging war for the global good. [8] But since World War II, modern warfare has been more destructive of civilian than of combatant soldiers’ lives; while determining who is the enemy has grown impossibly difficult.
On the Japanese home islands alone, in the savage last months of the war, U.S. conventional bombs and nuclear bombs incinerated an estimated 600,000 to 900,000 noncombatants. The initial response of the American people and their leaders was to turn away from war crimes, and to avoid public debate about conventional bombing and the human consequences of the uranium bomb dropped on Hiroshima and the plutonium weapon exploded over Nagasaki. The same turning away from the human consequences of warfare was evident in 1949-50, during the public discussion of the building and testing of the hydrogen bomb, and again in 1951, when advocates of nuclear weapons argued that they could be redesigned for the battlefield and used only against targets of military significance.
Throughout most of the Korean War (1950-53) the U.S. relied on “strategic bombing” and used disproportionate, indiscriminate force against civilian targets and economic infrastructure. After Chinese troops entered the fighting, U.S. generals, under Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s operational control, not only replicated in Korea the 1945 carpet-bombing campaign against Japan. They also used more “surface-delivered munitions” on Korea than the U.S. had used in all theaters of World War II. [9] American forces burned down virtually every city, town, and village in North Korea. They bombed and killed noncombatants both north and south of the 38th Parallel, taking the lives of an estimated 2 million Korean civilians. American commanders actually issued direct orders for their soldiers to shoot refugees clogging roads and bridges, splashed napalm over the civilian population, and throughout the Korean peninsula destroyed civilian property without restraint. While the Pentagon concealed incidents of U.S. atrocities against Koreans, it assuaged the Christian conscience by allowing token aid to refugees and repeatedly affirming America’s good intentions. When the shooting stopped, an armistice was signed but the troops and bases remained, and half a century later no peace treaty has been signed.
Nine years after the Korean armistice the U.S. began another undeclared presidential war in its artificially created puppet-state of South Vietnam. The Air Force bombed and strafed cities and countryside in South and North Vietnam. It sprayed chemical defoliants on jungle foliage, rice fields, gardens, and orchards, and declared large parts of the countryside in the south “permanent free-fire zones” in which anything that moved could be killed. According to recently released U.S. Army investigative records, U.S. soldiers committed hundreds of massacres of Vietnamese civilians. Substantiated incidents of mass atrocity numbered 320; another 500 incidents the Army deemed “alleged” atrocities; and, because all war crimes were not reported, the estimates of atrocities ranged from about one-thousand to one-thousand five hundred per month. And the “[a]buses were not confined to a few rogue units . . . They were uncovered in every Army division that operated in Vietnam.” [10] An estimated 4 million Vietnamese civilians died in the war. Yet back in the United States, the White House and Pentagon brass managed to affirm America’s good intentions. As in Korea, no policy-makers were, or ever could be, brought to justice for having violated international humanitarian law, and the U.S. press, with but few exceptions, contributed to the false impression of a humane, well-intentioned war effort.
Truman’s decision to drop atomic bombs on the two purposely spared Japanese cities symbolized America’s optimistic belief in its military technology, its disregard of the laws of war, and willingness to murder civilians indiscriminately in order to force Japan’s rulers to surrender “unconditionally.” When George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and the top Pentagon officials approved “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” Hiroshima and Nagasaki were on their minds as metaphor. In March 2003, Air Force and Navy jets, firing cruise missiles, dropping huge, precision-guided bombs and napalm, spearheaded the Iraq invasion. The “shock” they delivered to the Iraqi leaders was supposed to have been “the non-nuclear equivalent of the impact that the atomic weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had on the Japanese,” which in turn was supposed to have forced Japan’s leaders to surrender unconditionally. [11] What a gross misunderstanding of history that was. Using overwhelming conventional force, American commanders and troops quickly toppled the regime of Saddam Hussein; but instead of inducing “awe” in the Iraqi people, their excessive use of firepower and racist brutality ignited the Iraqi nationalist resistance. The Iraq war became a re-run of the colossal Vietnam debacle, which, in part, was a rerun of the earlier Korea debacle?except that the nature of the resistance in Iraq is very different.
Long habituated to using force in disregard of international law, and to operating in a delusional world of military euphemism, the U.S. leadership embarked on all three wars without any plan for ending them. That these illegal wars debased the American people and widened the boundaries of their permanent state of exception should not be surprising.
Most recently, the U.S. and Israel have taken the World War II pattern of city and infrastructure bombing and applied it to Lebanon. On July 12, 2006, Israel launched an air and limited ground attack on the sovereign state of Lebanon, using as a pretext the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers by Shiite Hizbollah fighters in south Lebanon. The Israeli plan, cleared months in advance with the Bush administration, was to destroy Lebanon’s communications system, roads, bridges, oil depots, factories, buildings and homes, and kill large numbers of Lebanese civilians--all in the mad hope of turning the Christian and Sunni populations against Hizbollah. [12] The high tech weapons that Israeli forces used to commit these war crimes were put in their hands by U.S. taxpayers. But Hizbollah resistance fighters held their ground against the invaders and retaliated with rockets aimed at Israeli military and civilian targets. In 33 days of fighting Israeli forces displaced from their homes nearly a million Lebanese and killed an estimated 1,300 (mostly civilians), including many women and children in Qana. The Bush administration, together with the U.S. Congress, enabled Israel’s air strikes, defended unconditionally its killing of noncombatants, and for weeks prevented a cease-fire. The Israel-Lebanon war has further alienated public opinion against Israel and the U.S., while revealing yet again the self-delusion inherent in American “good intentions.”
August 20, 2006
[1] Eric F. Goldman, The Crucial Decade?And After: American, 1945-1960 (Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), p. 5.
[2] Editor and Publisher, Staff, “Poll Shows Americans, For First Time, Divided on Use of A-Bombs in 1945,” E & P, July 24, 2005.
[3] Sahr Conway-Lanz, Collateral Damage: Americans, Noncombatant Immunity, and Atrocity after World War II (Routledge, 2006), p. 11.
[4] Conway-Lanz, p. 13; Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995), p. 5.
[5] Conway-Lanz, p. 13.
[6] Conway-Lanz, pp. 13, 21, 229.
[7] Horst Fischer, “Collateral Damage,” available at Crimes of War Project?The Book,
[8] Herbert P. Bix, “The Faith that Supports U.S. Violence: Comparative Reflections on the Arrogance of Empires,” posted on Z-net website and japanfocus.org, Sept. 2, 2004.
[9] Herbert P. Bix, “War Crimes Law and American Wars in 20th Century Asia,” Hitotsubashi Journal of Social Studies, Vol. 33, No. 1 (July 2001), pp. 119-132.
[10] Nick Turse and Deborah Nelson, “Civilian Killings Went Unpunished: Declassified Papers Show U.S. Atrocities Went Far Beyond My Lai,” The Los Angeles Times (Aug. 6, 2006).
[11] Cited from Introduction to Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade, Shock & Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance (National Defense University, ACT 1996), n.p.
[12] See Seymour M. Hersh, “Watching Lebanon: Washington’s Interest in Israel’s War,” The New Yorker (Aug. 26, 2006), pp. 28-33.
Herbert P. Bix, author of Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, writes on problems of war and empire. A Japan Focus associate, he prepared this article for Japan Focus.
IRAN, NORTH KOREA, ISRAEL AND…HIROSHIMA
ZNet Commentary
News Media’s Love-Hate for Nuclear Weapons August 19, 2006
By Norman Solomon
Since the Soviet Union collapsed a decade and a half ago, nuclear weaponry has been mostly relegated to back pages and mental back burners in the United States. A big media uproar about nuclear weapons is apt to happen only when the man in the Oval Office has chosen to make an issue of them.
Sometimes a “nuclear threat” has been imaginary. During the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration went into rhetorical overdrive—fabricating evidence and warning that an ostensible smoking gun could turn into a mushroom cloud. The White House publicly obsessed about an Iraqi nuclear-weapons program that didn’t exist.
In sharp contrast, North Korea really seems to have a nuclear warhead or two. And because the Pyongyang regime is apparently nuclear-armed, Bush isn’t likely to order an attack on that country, as he did against Iraq and as he has been not-too-subtly threatening to do against Iran.
By all credible accounts, Tehran is at least several years—and probably more like a full decade—away from acquiring a nuclear bomb. But America’s top officials and leading pundits have been sounding urgent alarms.
Judging from the frequent denunciations of some countries for alleged plans to build a nuclear arsenal, you might think that the U.S. media are down on nuclear weapons. Not so.
Red-white-and-blue nuclear weaponry has been depicted by U.S. news media as a reassuring guarantor of national security—or at worst an unfortunate necessity—since the nuclear age went public 61 years ago with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
That first atomic bombing of Japan came three days before an initial presidential lie about U.S. nuclear weapons policies. The lie was huge, but very few journalists in the United States have ever done so much as murmur a complaint about it.
On Aug. 9, 1945, President Harry Truman told the public this whopper: “The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, in so far as possible, the killing of civilians.”
Actually, the U.S. government went out of its way to select Japanese cities of sufficient size to showcase the extent of the A-bomb’s deadly power—in Hiroshima on Aug. 6 and in Nagasaki on Aug. 9. As a result of those two bombings, hundreds of thousands of civilians died, immediately or eventually. If Truman’s conscience had been clear, it’s doubtful he would have felt compelled to engage in such a basic distortion at the dawn of the nuclear era.
The scientific know-how of the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb was headquartered at the secret Los Alamos laboratory in northern New Mexico beginning in the spring of 1943. Today, that one laboratory has a $2 billion annual budget, with most of the money devoted to the lab’s key role in helping to maintain the “reliability and safety” of the U.S. government’s nuclear arsenal—which currently includes about 10,000 thermonuclear weapons. But you’d have to search far and wide to find mainstream American news coverage that raises fundamental questions about that arsenal as any kind of “nuclear threat.”
Meanwhile, experts say that the Israeli government now has about 200 nuclear weapons. Israel’s military actions in recent weeks underscore its willingness to use high-tech weaponry for reckless offensives that kill many civilians.
But in U.S. news media, the implicit message is that American nuclear bombs are A-OK, and the fact that Washington’s ally Israel maintains a large nuclear arsenal is supposed to be no cause for major concern.
Until the moment when events prove otherwise, the policy of deploying an array of nuclear weapons with the rationale of “deterrence” can convince the faithful that the nuclear priesthood in Washington is worthy of our trust.
But, going deeper than nationalistic blind faith, some important questions should be considered. Last week, the Latin American writer Eduardo Galeano asked two of them: “Who calibrates the universal dangerometer? Was Iran the country that dropped atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima?”
Terrorism: The Real Threat We Face In Britain Is Blair
by John Pilger
If the alleged plot to attack airliners flying from London is true - remember the lies that led to the invasion of Iraq, and to the raid on a “terrorist cell” in east London - then one person ultimately is to blame, as he was on 7 July last year. They were Blair’s bombs then; who doesn’t believe that 52 Londoners would be alive today had the Prime Minister refused to join Bush in his piratical attack on Iraq? A parliamentary committee has said as much, as have MI5, the Foreign Office, Chatham House and the polls.
A senior Metropolitan Police officer, Paul Stephenson, claims the Heathrow plot “was intended to be mass murder on an unimaginable scale”. The most reliable independent surveys put civilian deaths in Iraq, as a result of the invasion by Bush and Blair, above 100,000. The difference between the Heathrow scare and Iraq is that mass murder on an unimaginable scale has actually happened in Iraq.
By any measure of international law, from Nuremberg to the Geneva accords, Blair is a major prima facie war criminal. The charges against him grow. The latest is his collusion with the Israeli state in its deliberate, criminal attacks on civilians. While Lebanese children were being buried beneath Israeli bombs, he refused to condemn their killers or even to call on them to desist. That a ceasefire was negotiated owed nothing to him, except its disgraceful delay.
Not only is it clear that Blair knew about Israel’s plans but he alluded approvingly to the ultimate goal: an attack on Iran. Read his neurotic speech in Los Angeles, in which he described an “arc of extremism”, stretching from Hezbollah to Iran. He gave not a hint of the arc of injustice and lawlessness of Israel’s occupation of Palestine and its devastation of Lebanon. Neither did he attempt to counter the bigotry now directed at all Arabs by the west and by the racist regime in Tel Aviv. His references to “values” are code for a crusade against Islam.
Blair’s extremism, like Bush’s, is rooted in the righteous violence of rampant Messianic power. It is completely at odds with modern, multicultural, secular Britain. He shames this society. Not so much distrusted these days as reviled, he endangers and betrays us in his vassal’s affair with the religious fanatic in Washington and the Biblo-ethnic cleansers in Israel. Unlike him, the Israelis at least are honest.
“We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population,” said Israel’s founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. Half a century later, Ariel Sharon said, “It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion . . . that there can be no Zionism, colonisation or Jewish state without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands.” The current prime minister, Ehud Olmert, told the US Congress: “I believe in our people’s eternal and historic right to this entire land [his emphasis].”
Blair has backed this barbarism enthusiastically. In 2001, the Israeli press disclosed that he had secretly given the “green light” to Sharon’s bloody invasion of the West Bank, whose advance plans he was shown. Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon - is it any wonder the attacks of 7 July and this month’s Heathrow scare happened? The CIA calls this “blowback”.
On 12 August, the Guardian published an editorial ("The challenge for us all"), which waffled about how “a significant number of young people have been alienated from the [Muslim] culture”, but spent not a word on how Blair’s Middle East disaster was the source of their alienation. A polite pretence is always preferred in describing British policy, elevating “misguided” and “inappropriate” and suppressing criminal behaviour.
Go into Muslim areas and you will be struck by a fear reminiscent of the anti-Semitic nightmare of the Jews in the 1930s, and by an anger generated almost entirely by “a perceived double standard in the foreign policy of western governments”, as the Home Office admits. This is felt deeply by many young Asians who, far from being “alienated from their culture”, believe they are defending it. How much longer are we all prepared to put up with the threat to our security coming from Downing Street? Or do we wait for the “unimaginable”?
Noam Chomsky on Media Treatment of Israeli attacks on Lebanon
Chomsky, on the mainstream media treatment of the Lebanon attacks, from
the Znet Forums (in answer to a question on media coverage).
There are scattered and good reports about the suffering of the Lebanese. But overwhelmingly, it’s presented from the Israeli point of view. And there is only oblique indication of the fact that it is a US-Israeli attack, not an Israeli-attack. One might do a count of the phrases “Iranian-supplied” and “US-supplied.” The ratio should be about one to 50, maybe, but I suspect it’s more like 50 to 1. And the US influence is vastly greater than any Iranian influence, but rarely discussed, because it’s taken for granted that it is right and just, even “an honest broker.” Same in Iraq. The journals of the occupying armies report Washington’s concerns about Iranian intervention. One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
It’s also worth remembering that there are three US-Israeli operations underway: (1) the West Bank programs of annexation and cantonization, designed to drive the last nail into the coffin of Palestinian national rights, cynically called “withdrawal” in the nation’s press, and barely reported, including the regular atrocities: (2) Gaza, where the US-Israel continue to carry out regular crimes in the largest prison in the world: 150 Palestinians killed in July, 19 killed in the first week of August (including 4 children), along with constant terror and destruction, scarcely reported; (3) Lebanon, reported, but as noted, overwhelmingly from the Israeli point of view (with the US presented not as a direct participant, as it is, but as seeking a peaceful settlement). There is also outright suppression. The current sharp escalation of violence began after the Hamas capture of Corporal Gilad Shalit on June 25, and the capture of two Israeli soldiers on the Israel-Lebanon border on July 12. Each case elicited enormous outrage in the US, and strong support for very harsh Israeli retaliation. On June 24, Israeli forces kidnapped two Gaza civilians, the Muammar brothers, a far worse crime.
That was scarcely reported and quickly dismissed to oblivion. The timing demonstrates with unusual clarity that the posture of outrage over the capture of Israeli soldiers is cynical fraud, facts underscored by the (null) reaction to the regular Israeli practice over many years of kidnapping Lebanese. It also follows at once that there is no moral legitimacy to either of the two major escalations against the populations of Gaza and Lebanon. And of course if we look at the ratio of killings, it’s overwhelmingly US-Israel, always. It’s interesting to see the reactions of the most depraved apologists for US-Israeli crimes when someone dares to mention the enormously important and dramatically revealing June 24 events. After the required tantrums, they shriek that Israel charged the Muammar brothers with being Hamas militants. And since Israel made the charge, it’s true by definition. Suppose it’s true. Then the apologists for US-Israel crimes should be lauding the capture of Cpl. Shalit, who was, uncontroversially, a soldier in an army attacking Gaza. None of this can be discussed in the major media and journals, and it’s only a fraction. When we look at what is swept under the rug, or grossly distorted, the extreme imbalance of coverage becomes much more severe. I’m omitting here pure fabrication, e.g, Ethan Bronner’s account of Sharon’s legacy in the NYT, Aug. 6. He does refer to an event that is very crucial in the present context: the (US-backed) Israeli in vasion of Lebanon in 1982, destroying much of the country and killing some 15-20,000 people. Bronner repeats the standard fable, long known to be a complete fabrication: “[Sharon] led the first invasion of Lebanon in 1982 to uproot the Palestinian ministate that had taken hold there to carry out raids on Israel, a goal the invasion achieved.” The goal of removing the PLO from Lebanon was indeed achieved, but had nothing to do with carrying out raids on Israel. The border had been almost entirely quiet after the cease-fire a year earlier, apart from many Israeli attacks, killing many people, probably in an effort to elicit a response that could justify the planned invasion. When that failed, Israel invaded anyway. The real reason for the invasion, as frankly acknowledged, was to put an end to increasin gly embarrassing PLO offers to settle the Israel-Palestine conflict through negotiations not violence, in accord with the international consensus on a two-state settlement that the US-Israel rejected. Those fabrications, which are common, are highly significant, for the present as well.
Hezbollah resistance in southern Lebanon has been much stiffer than was
expected, according to mainstream media - is the planned Israeli
intensification a response to these successes, or was it their intention
all along? Are Hezbollah successes productive, in the sense of dampening
the prospects for Israeli aggression, or not, in your estimation?
Supposedly, public opinion in Israel itself is hardening in favor of the
attack.
It’s true, and not controversial, that the resistance was far stiffer than expected, and is causing deep concern in Israeli (and presumably US) military-political circles. As for intentions, we don’t know. On effects, Hezbollah resistance, again uncontroversially, is arousing enormous support in the Arab world, including Lebanon, where by late July, 87% supported Hezbollah resistance, including 80% of Christians and Druze. In the longer term, who knows? It’s very likely that whatever the outcome, there will be another stimulus for radical Islamism and terrorism. That’s been the general effect of US and Israeli actions over many years—including, again uncontroversially, the invasion of Iraq. In Israel, public opinion has strongly supported the attack and wants it intensified, but there has been opposition, dismissed or ridiculed mostly in the US, but quite serious. By now even the pro-war Peace Now organization, and leading pro-war intellectuals (regarded here as “doves"), are raising questions about whether the invasion is too costly for Israel—reminiscent of US “doves” in the case of Vietnam, after the Tet offensive.
(1) ARE “ISRAEL: AND “JEWS” SYNONYMOUS? and (2) AIPAC Congratulates Itself on Lebanon Slaughter
By Danny Schechter
Mediachannel.org
News Dissector Danny Schechter is “Blogger in Chief"of Mediachannel.org. His latest film is “In Debt We Trust.” (Indebtwetrust.com) Comments to
I remember reading a story once about some of the Jewish fighters during the years of the Nazi genocide who escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto through the sewer system into another part of the city. Bedraggled and dazed, they came up into a city that was going about its business as usual, largely unaware of what was happening in a part of town that had been sealed off. (The street cars that went through the ghetto had to darken all windows so travelers couldn’t see what was going on.)
The escapees sought out brave members of the Polish resistance who were also fighting German aggression against their country. They too were at war with the invaders and occupiers. But they soon found that their “comrades in arms” couldn’t accept what they were being told, couldn’t believe the extent of the forced starvation and mass murder taking place just a few blocks away. They couldn’t image the extent of the barbarity, perhaps because it wasn’t happening to them. They were in denial.
The desperate Jews were shaken. They too couldn’t believe that they were unable to communicate the full horror of their plight and make it believable, even to people who shared some of their political goals. That realization turned into demoralization that turned to despair. They then felt guilty about fleeing and surviving while their friends and families were being killed.
They looked around at the normality and apparent indifference of carefree Warsaw, and decided to go back, back to their fate.
While there is never any exact parallel with today’s events—and no, I don’t believe that yesterday’s victims of Nazism have become today’s Nazis—there is one aspect of this terribly tragic story that has relevance: the inability of many people to transcend their own pain (or point of view) to empathetically connect with the pain of others or even hear the critics.
As someone who grew up in a community that each year marked the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, its lessons were drilled into my head from an early age. I was taught to support those who resist aggression and stand for human rights. And as anyone who saw the film Schindler’s List knows, it was not just Jews who joined that fight. There were “righteous” Christians and people of all nationalities.
Yet, at the same time, I believed that the bitter history of Jewish suffering conveyed on us a special responsibility to speak out when others are suffering and yearning for freedom. Is that not the key lesson of the annual Passover Seder and the idea of solidarity and community concern? Is that not why activist “Jews for Justice” rallied to the cause of Bosnia’s embattled Muslims? Is that not why many Jews have always been on the front lines of the fight for humanity and social change?
Like many, I was drawn to the civil rights movement and other social justice movements. During those years, I was privileged to personally meet and talk with a Muslim leader named Malcolm X who introduced me to his traditions. Since then I have traveled in the Muslim world and met many people who respect democracy and believe in the need for a just resolution of the Israel-Palestinian crisis.
I know of many Jews who share that concern, and, in fact, surveys have shown over the years that ordinary members of the Jewish community are far more politically progressive about the need for peace than those who claim to be their “leaders,” a self-righteous elite who sit on top of vast fundraising machines. They have well-paid jobs specializing in spreading fear and alarm about anti-Semitism as a tool for frequent solicitations and psychological conditioning. The memory of the Holocaust is still manipulated for political purposes.
There is a well-financed Israeli lobby that funds politicians and dominates the op-ed pages. What else explains the dramatic difference in public opinion in this country and overseas? Why do polls show Americans and Israelis backing the war while the world calls for a cease fire?
These organizations operate like a well orchestrated machine to enforce a “party line” and, in some well-documented cases, groups like the Anti Defamation League even spied on and demonized fellow Jews who feel differently. Pro-peace organizations like Tikkun have had to buy ads in the NY Times to get heard.
Jews who support Darfur are acceptable; those who oppose Israel’s bombing of Lebanon are deemed extremists.
Don’t they know that human rights are universal and cannot be invoked selectively?
Israel cannot be given a special pass: it has to obey international laws and UN resolutions, not just the ones it agrees with.
Just as the shelling of civilians by Hezbollah is unacceptable, so is the widespread Israeli devastation of a neighboring country, one ironically, with many people who wanted to live in peace with Israel. Almost every journalist who has looked at this war has noted that Israel used the kidnapping of its soldiers as a pretext for a war plans that were years in the making. The Hezbollah rockets were fired after Israel’s bombing began, not before.
If anything, this Bush-backed war will radicalize Lebanon as it is the Middle East and fuel more anti-Semitism and hostility to Israel. It has turned Hezbollah into a hero in the region.
Somehow many in our media have turned the words Israel and Jews into synonyms, as if all Jews are hard-line Zionists who automatically back the policies and practices of the Israeli government, every Israeli government. Ironically, there is more debate among Jews in Israel on these issues than is reported, or somehow allowed in the United States where Jewish critics of Israel policies are often ignored or labeled “self-hating” Jews.
Many organizations, especially in Democratic Party circles (and even the Blogoshere) would prefer to ignore the issue for fear of being divisive or attacked. Notice how many in the Congress rallied to Israel’s side before the facts were even in. Notice how few, even in the anti-war contingent had
the courage to speak out. (Read Tom Hayden’s recent piece apologizing for
how skillfully he was co-opted by the Israeli Lobby when he ran for
office in California.)
Some organizations are just shilling for the Israeli government -no matter what it does-out of both tribal loyalty and political fealty to neo-con/Likudnik politics, a perspective which enjoys unrivalled and disproportionate access to the media and its think-alike punditocracy. Some are just money generating mechanisms sending money to Israel, a developed county that gets $3 billion dollars annually in US aid intended for developing nations. The Federation which supports many social service just sent millions. One wonders how much of this will go to Israeli Arabs who have also had homes bombed?
It’s not surprising that many Jews are unaware of what’s happening largely because of the information diet they are exposed to, every day and in all media like the rest of us. They are expected to recite the “official” mantra-not think for themselves.
On Tuesday, I received an invitation from the president of the American Jewish Congress. It was for a 4 day “Israel Solidarity Mission.” Cost per person: $1000.
It is described as “Not only solidarity but much more!”
“Touring the embattled North of Israel and personally sharing our friendship with families there who have lived through the terror of Katyusha rockets falling on their homes;
“Visiting an air force base where we will thank the brave pilots who are defending Israel and see, up close, the advanced F-16-I jets they fly;
“Receiving a briefing from the Brigade Commander and his troops defending against Hamas terrorism in Gaza;
“Meeting with top officials of Israel’s government to hear what lies ahead and to learn how we can help.”
There’s not one word of interest or concern here with the civilian victims of bombing in Lebanon or the conditions of Palestinians in Gaza. Not one word of compassion or interest in meeting prominent Israelis who feel this war is not in Israel’s interest. It
strikes me as more reinforcement for the already deeply held prejudices.
Writing in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz-which far too many American Jews know nothing about-and in fact know little about Israeli political reality (preferring to live with feel-good myths dating back to Leon Uris’ book Exodus)--Nehemia Shtrasler contends:
“Israel has always said it has nothing against the Lebanese people and does not want to harm Lebanon, only the PLO (then) and Hezbollah (now). But in practice, it has harmed, destroyed and humiliated the Lebanese time after time. Their fate did not interest us.”
What does interest us? What should interest us? I know the great Rabbi Hillel once said, “If you are not for yourself, who will be for me.” But then, he added, let us not forget, “If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?”
And then, there is also, always, that golden rule, forgotten by warmakers across the ages: “Do not do to others what you would not have them do to you.”
AIPAC CONGRATULATES ITSELF (from CounterPunch)
By JOHN WALSH
“My fellow American,” Howard Friedman, President of AIPAC, begins his letter of July 30 to friends and supporters of AIPAC, “Look what you’ve done”! After warning that “Israel is fighting a pivotal war for its life,” by which he means Israel’s wanton slaughter and all-out destruction in Lebanon, Freiedman condemns “the expected chorus of international condemnation of Israel’s actions” and Europe’s call for “a cease-fire immediately.” Then he exults: “only ONE nation in the world came out and flatly declared: Let Israel finish the job. . That nation is the United States of America--and the reason it had such a clear, unambiguous view of the situation is YOU and the rest of America Jewry.” (All emphases in the original here and below.) Here I must take issue with President Friedman since I bet that most Jewish Americans, in contrast to the AIPAC crowd, were horrified by the slaughter in Lebanon. In fact if anyone other than President Friedman wrote this, he would be accused of fabricating a Jewish plot and labeled a nutty conspiracy theorist and scurrilous anti-semite.)
“How do we do it”? President Friedman asks a little further on. The answer is “decades of long hard work which never ends.” Not only is it hard work--but it’s eternal. However, President Friedman is not content with generalities and gives us some of AIPAC’s trade secrets. Here are two notables:
“AIPAC meets with every candidate running for Congress. These candidates receive in-depth briefings to help them completely understand the complexities of Israel’s predicament and that of the Middle East as a whole. We even ask each candidate to author a ‘position paper’ on their views of the U.S.-Israel relationship--so it’s clear where they stand on the subject.” (Would it not be great to see these “position papers”? I wonder how many candidates would release them? And what do the candidates get for all this effort? A pat on the back?)
“Members of Congress, staffers and administration officials have come to rely on AIPACs memos. They are VERY busy people and they know that they can count on AIPAC for clear-eyed analysis.. We present this information in concise form to elected officials. The information and analyses are impeccable--after all our reputation is at stake. This results in policy and legislation that make up Israel’s lifeline.” (Another way to read this is that the pea-brained hillbillies who make up most of the Congress can be led by the nose if the memos are simple enough. Testimony to this fact enters my mailbox, as I write, in the form of a must-read interview with Noam Chomsky, which details just how distorted the discussion of Israel and the war on Lebanon has become in the U.S.)
President Friedman’s letter continues with more headliners: “Unfortunately, our work has just begun”! “Hizballah must be defeated.” And finally, “The war is a diversion”!!!! This last section argues that the war in Lebanon is a “distraction,” to “divert attention away from Iran’s nuclear weapons program”! (In case you haven’t noticed President Friedman loves exclamation points, which leads one to wonder whether a good dose of lithium might not be in order.) But this “analysis’ is hopelessly confused since Israel started the war on Lebanon using a minor border skirmish as an excuse - as Chomsky points out in the interview alluded to above. It leaves one wondering about AIPAC’s analyses. Are they “clear-eyed” as Friedman claims, or wild-eyed?
President Friedman closes with the exhortation: “Now is the time for us, American Jews, to stand up and tell our elected officials that they must demand Iran halt its pursuit of atomic arms.” In other words, next stop Iran if AIPAC can swing it. And in that lies a great danger. The Bush administration is losing ever more of its base and only the neocon establishment and AIPAC remain securely in its camp. (Even some of the born-agains are deserting.) With the November elections coming, Rove and Bush desperately need AIPAC support, and so they may be even more susceptible than usual to its demands for going after Iran. Indeed this is a dangerous time.
John Walsh can be reached at .
From Mania to Depression
Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom.
Thirty three days of war. The longest of our wars since 1949.
On the Israeli side: 154 dead--117 of them soldiers. 3970 rockets launched against us, 37 civilians dead, more than 422 civilians wounded.
On the Lebanese side: about a thousand dead civilians, thousands wounded. An unknown number of Hizbullah fighters dead and wounded.
More than a million refugees on both sides.
So what has been achieved for this terrible price?
“GLOOMY, HUMBLE, despondent,” was how the journalist Yossef Werter described Ehud Olmert, a few hours after the cease-fire had come into effect.
Olmert? Humble? Is this the same Olmert we know? The same Olmert who thumped the table and shouted: “No more!” Who said: “After the war, the situation will be completely different than before!” Who promised a “New Middle East” as a result of the war?
THE RESULTS of the war are obvious:
* The prisoners, who served as casus belli (or pretext) for the war, have not been released. They will come back only as a result of an exchange of prisoners, exactly as Hassan Nasrallah proposed before the war.
* Hizbullah has remained as it was. It has not been destroyed, nor disarmed, nor even removed from where it was. Its fighters have proved themselves in battle and have even garnered compliments from Israeli soldiers. Its command and communication stucture has continued to function to the end. Its TV station is still broadcasting.
* Hassan Nasrallah is alive and kicking. Persistent attempts to kill him failed. His prestige is sky-high. Everywhere in the Arab world, from Morocco to Iraq, songs are being composed in his honor and his picture adorns the walls.
* The Lebanese army will be deployed along the border, side by side with a large international force. That is the only material change that has been achieved.
This will not replace Hizbullah. Hizbullah will remain in the area, in every village and town. The Israeli army has not succeeded in removing it from one single village. That was simply impossible without permanently removing the population to which it belongs.
The Lebanese army and the international force cannot and will not confront Hizbullah. Their very presence there depends on Hizbullah’s consent. In practice, a kind of co-existence of the three forces will come into being, each one knowing that it has to come to terms with the other two.
Perhaps the international force will be able to prevent incursions by Hizbullah, such as the one that preceded this war. But it will also have to prevent Israeli actions, such as the reconnaissance flights of our Air Force over Lebanon. That’s why the Israeli army objected, at the beginning, so strenuously to the introduction of this force.
IN ISRAEL, there is now a general atmosphere of disappointment and despondency. From mania to depression. It’s not only that the politicians and the generals are firing accusations at each other, as we foresaw, but the general public is also voicing criticism from every possible angle. The soldiers criticize the conduct of the war, the reserve soldiers gripe about the chaos and the failure of supplies.
In all parties, there are new opposition groupings and threats of splits. In Kadima. In Labor. It seems that in Meretz, too, there is a lot of ferment, because most of its leaders supported the war dragon almost until the last moment, when they caught its tail and pierced it with their little lance.
At the head of the critics are marching--surprise, surprise--the media. The entire horde of interviewers and commentators, correspondents and presstitutes, who (with very few exceptions) enthused about the war, who deceived, misled, falsified, ignored, duped and lied for the fatherland, who stifled all criticism and branded as traitors all who opposed the war--they are now running ahead of the lynch mob. How predictable, how ugly. Suddenly they remember what we have been saying right from the beginning of the war.
This phase is symbolized by Dan Halutz, the Chief-of-Staff. Only yesterday he was the hero of the masses, it was forbidden to utter a word against him. Now he is being described as a war profiteer. A moment before sending his soldiers into battle, he found the time to sell his shares, in expectation of a decline of the stock market. (Let us hope that a moment before the end he found the time to buy them back again.)
Victory, as is well known, has many fathers, and failure in war is an orphan.
FROM THE deluge of accusations and gripes, one slogan stands out , a slogan that must send a cold shiver down the spine of anyone with a good memory: “the politicians did not let the army win.”
Exactly as I wrote two weeks ago, we see before our very eyes the resurrection of the old cry “they stabbed the army in the back!”
This is how it goes: At long last, two days before the end, the land offensive started to roll. Thanks to our heroic soldiers, the men of the reserves, it was a dazzling success. And then, when we were on the verge of a great victory, the cease-fire came into effect.
There is not a single word of truth in this. This operation, which was planned and which the army spent years training for, was not carried out earlier, because it was clear that it would not bring any meaningful gains but would be costly in lives. The army would, indeed, have occupied wide areas, but without being able to dislodge the Hizbullah fighters from them.
The town of Bint Jbeil, for example, right next to the border, was taken by the army three times, and the Hizbullah fighters remained there to the end. If we had occupied 20 towns and villages like this one, the soldiers and the tanks would have been exposed in twenty places to the mortal attacks of the guerillas with their highly effective anti-tank weapons.
If so, why was it decided, at the last moment, to carry out this operation after all--well after the UN had already called for an end to hostilities? The horrific answer: it was a cynical--not to say vile--exercise of the failed trio. Olmert, Peretz and Halutz wanted to create “a picture of victory”, as was openly stated in the media. On this altar the lives of 33 soldiers (including a young woman) were sacrificed.
The aim was to photograph the victorious soldiers on the bank of the Litani. The operation could only last 48 hours, when the cease-fire would come into force. In spite of the fact that the army used helicopters to land the troops, the aim was not attained. At no point did the army reach the Litani.
For comparison: in the first Lebanon war, that of Sharon in 1982, the army crossed the Litani in the first few hours. (The Litani, by the way, is not a real river anymore, but just a shallow creek. Most of its waters are drawn off far from there, in the north. Its last stretch is about 25 km distant from the border, near Metulla the distance is only 4 km.)
This time, when the cease-fire took effect, all the units taking part had reached villages on the way to the river. There they became sitting ducks, surrounded by Hizbullah fighters, without secure supply lines. From that moment on, the army had only one aim: to get them out of there as quickly as possible, regardless of who might take their place.
If a commission of inquiry is set up--as it must be--and investigates all the moves of this war, starting from the way the decision to start it was made, it will also have to investigate the decision to start this last operation. The death of 33 soldiers (including the son of the writer David Grossman, who had supported the war) and the pain this caused their families demand that!
BUT THESE facts are not yet clear to the general public. The brain-washing by the military commentators and the ex-generals, who dominated the media at the time, has turned the foolish--I would almost say “criminal"--operation into a rousing victory parade. The decision of the political leadership to stop it is now being seen by many as an act of defeatist, spineless, corrupt and even treasonous politicians.
And that is exactly the new slogan of the fascist Right that is now raising its ugly head.
After World War I, in similar circumstances, the legend of the “knife in the back of the victorious army” grew up. Adolf Hitler used it to carry him to power--and on to World War II.
Now, even before the last fallen soldier has been buried, the incompetent generals are starting to talk shamelessly about “another round”, the next war that will surely come “in a month or in a year”, God willing. After all, we cannot end the matter like this, in failure. Where is our pride?
THE ISRAELI public is now in a state of shock and disorientation. Accusations--justified and unjustified--are flung around in all directions, and it cannot be foreseen how things will develop.
Perhaps, in the end, it is logic that will win. Logic says: what has thoroughly been demonstrated is that there is no military solution. That is true in the North. That is also true in the South, where we are confronting a whole people that has nothing to lose anymore. The success of the Lebanese guerilla will encourage the Palestinian guerilla.
For logic to win, we must be honest with ourselves: pinpoint the failures, investigate their deeper causes, draw the proper conclusions.
Some people want to prevent that at any price. President Bush declares vociferously that we have won the war. A glorious victory over the Evil Ones. Like his own victory in Iraq.
When a football team is able to choose the referee, it is no surprise if it is declared the winner.
Friday, August 04, 2006
TokyoProgressive August 2006
JAPAN AND ASIA
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Immunity of Non-Combatants and Myth of Good Intentions: 61 Years After Hiroshima/Nagasaki
...Truman initially “attempted to minimize the impression that civilians had been attacked with the atomic bomb.” His first press release had identified Hiroshima as “an important Japanese military base,” ignoring that the bomb had targeted the city’s civilian center in order to maximize civilian casualties....Most recently, the U.S. and Israel have taken the World War II pattern of city and infrastructure bombing and applied it to Lebanon. On July 12, 2006, Israel launched an air and limited ground attack on the sovereign state of Lebanon, using as a pretext the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers by Shiite Hizbollah fighters in south Lebanon. The Israeli plan, cleared months in advance with the Bush administration, was to destroy Lebanon’s communications system, roads, bridges, oil depots, factories, buildings and homes, and kill large numbers of Lebanese civilians--all in the mad hope of turning the Christian and Sunni populations against Hizbollah.
Read more:
Herbert Bix: Myth of Good Intentions
Iran, North Korea, Israel, Hiroshima: Media’s Love-Hate for Nuclear Weapons
...By all credible accounts, Tehran is at least several years—and probably more like a full decade—away from acquiring a nuclear bomb. But America’s top officials and leading pundits have been sounding urgent alarms. Judging from the frequent denunciations of some countries for alleged plans to build a nuclear arsenal, you might think that the U.S. media are down on nuclear weapons. Not so. Red-white-and-blue nuclear weaponry has been depicted by U.S. news media as a reassuring guarantor of national security—or at worst an unfortunate necessity—since the nuclear age went public 61 years ago with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima…
Read more:
Solomon:Nuclear Love-Hate
and:
Forced to ‘Choose’ its Own Subjugation: Okinawa’s Place in U.S. Global Military Realignment
http://japanfocus.org/products/details/2202
Japan’s Quake Standards Fall Victim to Greed
By Michael Zielenziger
http://www.jpri.org/members/zielenziger_LAT_0406.html
Rightist textbook adopted for use by public junior high school in Tokyo
http://www.japan-press.co.jp/2490/education.html
Edinburgh International Film Festival Returns Israeli Money in response to Boycott Plans
http://www.scottishpsc.org.uk/EIFF.html
【重大発表エジンバラ国際映画祭が、ボイコット計画に呼応してイスラエル出資金を返却】Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign
http://blog.livedoor.jp/awtbrigade/archives/50360926.html
【ギリシャがイスラエルの映画祭から撤収】The Daily Star, Lebanon(2006/8/2)
http://blog.livedoor.jp/awtbrigade/archives/50355819.html
WAR & PEACE. TERRORISM, AND THE POLICE STATE IN OUR MIDST
Terrorism. Lebanon. Israel and Palestine. Issues in the news, and yet how little of the information one gets from the news media is reliable. if there is one thing that is striking is that almost no-one in the mainstream media is connecting the rise of “terrrorist threats” with the ongoing policies of death and destruction of the Bush and Blair regime. Israel and the West are portrayed as innocent victims of a culture war. As was true after 9-11, we are still expected to believe that envy or resentment of our freedoms is what it is all about. That all 3 countries do retain the rhetoric of democracies and and an almost fanatical faith in their status as democracies, and since those who do not challenge the prevailing assumptions are rarely on the receiving end of repression, it is easy for the average television viewer to conclude, falsely, that democracy is under attack from cultures that do not share “our” democractic values.
TokyoProgressive does not pretend to know all there is to know about these issues, but in the interest of counterbalanacing the assumptions and biases of the mainstream media, which are clearly those of the elites, we present the following commentaries by Americans, Israelies, and British writers who do not buy into the prevailing assumptions. Inclusion here, as always, does not automatically mean we endorse evereything the individual writers say. Nor does it mean there may not be other voices worthy of being heard. Their inclusion here, IS intended, however, underscore how the mainstream media systematically denies its audience an opportunity to learn what is really happening or, at least, that there are views other than those the mainstream media and those in power would like you to know about.
Feel free to join the forum and post your comments as well.
Terrorism: The Real Threat We Face In Britain Is Blair
On 12 August, the Guardian published an editorial ("The challenge for us all"), which waffled about how “a significant number of young people have been alienated from the [Muslim] culture”, but spent not a word on how Blair’s Middle East disaster was the source of their alienation. A polite pretence is always preferred in describing British policy, elevating “misguided” and “inappropriate” and suppressing criminal behaviour.
Read more:
Pilger: Blair is Terrorist Threat
Also:
We should be sceptical about this alleged plot, and wary of politicians who seek to benefit
(Written by the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan)
Noam Chomsky on Media Treatment of Israeli attacks on Lebanon
The posture of outrage over the capture of Israeli soldiers is cynical fraud, facts underscored by the (null) reaction to the regular Israeli practice over many years of kidnapping Lebanese. It also follows at once that there is no moral legitimacy to either of the two major escalations against the populations of Gaza and Lebanon. And of course if we look at the ratio of killings, it’s overwhelmingly US-Israel, always....
Read more:
Chomsky: Attack on Lebanon
“Are Israel and Jews” Synonymous? and AIPAC Congratulates Self on Slaughter
Notice how few, even in the anti-war contingent had the courage to speak out...Some organizations are just shilling for the Israeli government -no matter what it does-out of both tribal loyalty and political fealty to neo-con/Likudnik politics, a perspective which enjoys unrivalled and disproportionate access to the media and its think-alike punditocracy. Some are just money generating mechanisms sending money to Israel, a developed county that gets $3 billion dollars annually in US aid intended for developing nations. The Federation which supports many social service just sent millions. One wonders how much of this will go to Israeli Arabs who have also had homes bombed?
Read more:
Schechter and Walsh: AIPAC
Uri Avnery: From Mania to Depression
At the head of the critics are marching--surprise, surprise--the media. The entire horde of interviewers and commentators, correspondents and presstitutes, who (with very few exceptions) enthused about the war, who deceived, misled, falsified, ignored, duped and lied for the fatherland, who stifled all criticism and branded as traitors all who opposed the war--they are now running ahead of the lynch mob. How predictable, how ugly. Suddenly they remember what we have been saying right from the beginning of the war.....The brain-washing by the military commentators and the ex-generals, who dominated the media at the time, has turned the foolish--I would almost say “criminal"--operation into a rousing victory parade. The decision of the political leadership to stop it is now being seen by many as an act of defeatist, spineless, corrupt and even treasonous politicians. And that is exactly the new slogan of the fascist Right that is now raising its ugly head.
Read more:
Avnery: Madness
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