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Wednesday, January 29, 2014
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
When Will They Ever Learn? The American People and Support for War
By Lawrence S. Wittner
When it comes to war, the American public is remarkably fickle.
The responses of Americans to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars provide telling examples. In 2003, according to opinion polls, 72 percent of Americans thought going to war in Iraq was the right decision. By early 2013, support for that decision had declined to 41 percent. Similarly, in October 2001, when U.S. military action began in Afghanistan, it was backed by 90 percent of the American public. By December 2013, public approval of the Afghanistan war had dropped to only 17 percent.
In fact, this collapse of public support for once-popular wars is a long-term phenomenon. Although World War I preceded public opinion polling, observers reported considerable enthusiasm for U.S. entry into that conflict in April 1917. But, after the war, the enthusiasm melted away. In 1937, when pollsters asked Americans whether the United States should participate in another war like the World War, 95 percent of the respondents said “No.”
And so it went. When President Truman dispatched U.S. troops to Korea in June 1950, 78 percent of Americans polled expressed their approval. By February 1952, according to polls, 50 percent of Americans believed that U.S. entry into the Korean War had been a mistake. The same phenomenon occurred in connection with the Vietnam War. In August 1965, when Americans were asked if the U.S. government had made “a mistake in sending troops to fight in Vietnam,” 61 percent of them said “No.” But by August 1968, support for the war had fallen to 35 percent, and by May 1971 it had dropped to 28 percent.
Of all America’s wars over the past century, only World War II has retained mass public approval. And this was a very unusual war – one involving a devastating military attack upon American soil, fiendish foes determined to conquer and enslave the world, and a clear-cut, total victory.
In almost all cases, though, Americans turned against wars they once supported. How should one explain this pattern of disillusionment?
The major reason appears to be the immense cost of war -- in lives and resources. During the Korean and Vietnam wars, as the body bags and crippled veterans began coming back to the United States in large numbers, public support for the wars dwindled considerably. Although the Afghanistan and Iraq wars produced fewer American casualties, the economic costs have been immense. Two recent scholarly studies have estimated that these two wars will ultimately cost American taxpayers from $4 trillion to $6 trillion. As a result, most of the U.S. government’s spending no longer goes for education, health care, parks, and infrastructure, but to cover the costs of war. It is hardly surprising that many Americans have turned sour on these conflicts.
But if the heavy burden of wars has disillusioned many Americans, why are they so easily suckered into supporting new ones?
A key reason seems to be that that powerful, opinion-molding institutions – the mass communications media, government, political parties, and even education – are controlled, more or less, by what President Eisenhower called “the military-industrial complex.” And, at the outset of a conflict, these institutions are usually capable of getting flags waving, bands playing, and crowds cheering for war.
But it is also true that much of the American public is very gullible and, at least initially, quite ready to rally ‘round the flag. Certainly, many Americans are very nationalistic and resonate to super-patriotic appeals. A mainstay of U.S. political rhetoric is the sacrosanct claim that America is “the greatest nation in the world” – a very useful motivator of U.S. military action against other countries. And this heady brew is topped off with considerable reverence for guns and U.S. soldiers. (“Let’s hear the applause for Our Heroes!”)
Of course, there is also an important American peace constituency, which has formed long-term peace organizations, including Peace Action, Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and other antiwar groups. This peace constituency, often driven by moral and political ideals, provides the key force behind the opposition to U.S. wars in their early stages. But it is counterbalanced by staunch military enthusiasts, ready to applaud wars to the last surviving American. The shifting force in U.S. public opinion is the large number of people who rally ‘round the flag at the beginning of a war and, then, gradually, become fed up with the conflict.
And so a cyclical process ensues. Benjamin Franklin recognized it as early as the eighteenth century, when he penned a short poem for A Pocket Almanack For the Year 1744:
War begets Poverty,
Poverty Peace;
Peace makes Riches flow,
(Fate ne’er doth cease.)
Riches produce Pride,
Pride is War’s Ground;
War begets Poverty &c.
The World goes round.
There would certainly be less disillusionment, as well as a great savings in lives and resources, if more Americans recognized the terrible costs of war before they rushed to embrace it. But a clearer understanding of war and its consequences will probably be necessary to convince Americans to break out of the cycle in which they seem trapped.
Lawrence Wittner (http://lawrenceswittner.com) is Professor of History emeritus at SUNY/Albany. His latest book is a satirical novel about university corporatization and rebellion, What’s Going On at UAardvark? (Solidarity Press). It can be obtained in a paperback version from Troy Book Makers and in a paperback or eBook version from Amazon.com.
New and Forthcoming Books:
Clyde, by David Helwig, Bunim & bannigan, Ltd. 978-1-933480-36-7; $18.95
Betrayed by his oldest friend, a boyhood companion, his gingerly constructed career at stake, Clyde Bryanton, property developer and Ottawa political consultant, unpeels layers and layers of memory, a half century of getting along by going along. Fatherless, his sire a casualty of the Dieppe raid, Clyde is as baffled by the emotions that occasionally sound from his depths as he is by his mentors, the banker and the senator who manipulate money and power in a small Canadian city. A stranger even to his wife, who dubs him ‘Joe the Silent,’ he navigates social, familial , political and commercial obligations with the same cool skills he exhibits on the golf courses that weave in and out of the fabric of his life. The darkest of secrets becomes no more to Clyde than the bunkers and sand traps he avoids with his selections of irons. This latest novel by distinguished Canadian author David Helwig, describes a North America, of eyes on the ground and noses to the grindstone, of business as politics and politics as business, of kindness and malice and nameless fear. CLYDE, is an incisive portrait of the generation that came of age in the 1960s, and of our post post-modern culture of opportunism and rootless communication.
The Endless Arms Race: Despite Great Power Promises, New Nuclear Weapons Are On the Way
By Lawrence S. Wittner
It’s heartening to see that an agreement has been reached to ensure that Iran honors its commitment, made when it signed the 1970 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), to forgo developing nuclear weapons.
But what about the other key part of the NPT, Article VI, which commits nuclear-armed nations to “cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament,” as well as to “a treaty on general and complete disarmament”? Here we find that, 44 years after the NPT went into force, the United States and other nuclear powers continue to pursue their nuclear weapons buildups, with no end in sight.
On January 8, 2014, U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced what Reuters termed “ambitious plans to upgrade [U.S.] nuclear weapons systems by modernizing weapons and building new submarines, missiles and bombers to deliver them.” The Pentagon intends to build a dozen new ballistic missile submarines, a new fleet of long-range nuclear bombers, and new intercontinental ballistic missiles. The Congressional Budget Office estimated in late December that implementing the plans would cost $355 billion over the next decade, while an analysis by the independent Center for Nonproliferation Studies reported that this upgrade of U.S. nuclear forces would cost $1 trillion over the next 30 years. If the higher estimate proves correct, the submarines alone would cost over $29 billion each.
Of course, the United States already has a massive nuclear weapons capability -- approximately 7,700 nuclear weapons, with more than enough explosive power to destroy the world. Together with Russia, it possesses about 95 percent of the more than 17,000 nuclear weapons that comprise the global nuclear arsenal.
Nor is the United States the only nation with grand nuclear ambitions. Although China currently has only about 250 nuclear weapons, including 75 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), it recently flight-tested a hypersonic nuclear missile delivery vehicle capable of penetrating any existing defense system. The weapon, dubbed the Wu-14 by U.S. officials, was detected flying at ten times the speed of sound during a test flight over China during early January 2014. According to Chinese scientists, their government had put an “enormous investment” into the project, with more than a hundred teams from leading research institutes and universities working on it. Professor Wang Yuhui, a researcher on hypersonic flight control at Nanjing University, stated that “many more tests will be carried out” to solve the remaining technical problems. “It’s just the beginning.” Ni Lexiong, a Shanghai-based naval expert, commented approvingly that “missiles will play a dominant role in warfare, and China has a very clear idea of what is important.”
Other nations are engaged in this arms race, as well. Russia, the other dominant nuclear power, seems determined to keep pace with the United States through modernization of its nuclear forces. The development of new, updated Russian ICBMs is proceeding rapidly, while new nuclear submarines are already being produced. Also, the Russian government has started work on a new strategic bomber, known as the PAK DA, which reportedly will become operational in 2025. Both Russia and India are known to be working on their own versions of a hypersonic nuclear missile carrier. But, thus far, these two nuclear nations lag behind the United States and China in its development. Israel is also proceeding with modernization of its nuclear weapons, and apparently played the key role in scuttling the proposed U.N. conference on a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East in 2012.
This nuclear weapons buildup certainly contradicts the official rhetoric. On April 5, 2009, in his first major foreign policy address, President Barack Obama proclaimed “America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” That fall, the UN Security Council -- including Russia, China, Britain, France, and the United States, all of them nuclear powers -- unanimously passed Resolution 1887, which reiterated the point that the NPT required the “disarmament of countries currently possessing nuclear weapons.” But rhetoric, it seems, is one thing and action quite another.
Thus, although the Iranian government’s willingness to forgo the development of nuclear weapons is cause for encouragement, the failure of the nuclear nations to fulfill their own NPT obligations is appalling. Given these nations’ enhanced preparations for nuclear war -- a war that would be nothing short of catastrophic -- their evasion of responsibility should be condemned by everyone seeking a safer, saner world.
Lawrence Wittner (http://lawrenceswittner.com) is Professor of History emeritus at SUNY/Albany. His latest book is a satirical novel about university corporatization and rebellion, What’s Going On at UAardvark? (Solidarity Press). It can be obtained in a paperback version from Troy Book Makers and in a paperback or eBook version from Amazon.com.
Monday, January 27, 2014
Herzl Must be Spinning in His Grave
By M.J. Rosenberg
A front page article in today's Ha'aretz struck me with the thought that, no matter what happens with the peace process, it is becoming impossible to expect non-Orthodox (i.e. 90-plus per cent) of young American Jews to identify with today's Israel.
There, on page one, was a photo of a beautiful young couple in their early 20's who are seriously dating. One is Prime Minister Netanyahu's son. The other is a Norwegian girl who happens not to be Jewish. Sweet looking kids. But, in Israel, a scandal.
Consider: more than 50% of American Jews of all ages marry non-Jews. Younger Jews, in their teens and 20's, don't even consider the race, religion or ethnicity of who they are dating. Some old Jews agonize over this. Young Jews, the same young Jews who overwhelmingly accept gay marriage and rejoiced at Obama's election and re-election, don't even think about it.
But in Israel, it's huge news that the prime minister's 23-year old son dates a Protestant.
And then there is this: the denunciation of young Netanyahu's relationship by the head of the Shas party, Israel's second largest party and part of Netanyahu's coalition.
From Ha'aretz:
"Woe is us if it is true," [Shas Chairman Aryeh] Deri said. "If it is true, he [the prime minister] and Sara have a great heartache."
Deri told the interviewer that the criticism was not an attack against the premier, but rather an issue of national concern. "I try not to raise personal criticism, but if, heaven forbid, this is true, it is no longer a personal matter – it is a symbol of the Jewish people."
The Shas leader went on to describe the great efforts being made to prevent assimilation, saying, "I have friends who invest tens of millions, hundreds of millions to fight assimilation throughout the world. If, heaven forbid, this is true, woe is us. I hope it is not true…."
Meanwhile, last night, here in the United States, the Grammy Award for best song went to Same Love, an anthem about marriage equality. Watch the video. It will give you goosebumps. And it will help you understand why American Jewish kids just aren't into an Israel run by religious fanatics and ethnic chauvinists. No wonder, Israel is reaching out to right-wing fundamentalist Christians.
As I say so often, Theodor Herzl is spinning in his grave. This was not his dream.
As for mine, a secular State of Israel with equal rights for all its citizens (Jewish and not) and no role for religion (any religion) in public life. In short, I want an Israeli James Madison!
Copyright © 2014 MJ Rosenberg, All rights reserved.
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JAMES WECHSLER, JOURNALISM’S LIBERAL CRUSADER, Or When the NY POST VWAS A REAL NEWSPAPER!
By Murray Polner
Few today remember the quintessential Cold War liberal newspaperman James Wechsler, the erstwhile voice of the once resolutely liberal (pre-Rupert Murdoch) New York Post. Since his death in 1983, he has fallen into undeserved obscurity because of liberalism’s equally unmerited fate. Not only do politicians dread any identification with the infamous L-word but also because to admit that liberals opposed Stalinism while defending freedom at home is, for many now in power, sheer heresy.
James Arthur Wechsler was born in 1915 and entered Columbia College just shy of the age of 16, graduating in 1935. Shortly after he began working as an assistant editor for The Nation. In 1940 he joined Marshall Field’s ad-less and innovative daily PM, serving as assistant editor ---and until his induction into the army--- as bureau chief of its Washington office. He later quit, charging that the newspaper was too pro-Communist for his taste.
From 1934-37, Wechsler was a member of the Young Communist League and a leader of the leftist and essentially pro-Communist American Students Union until he quit the YCL at the ripe old age of 22. Following the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939, he wrote an article for The Nation condemning the Stalinist regime. For this “sin,” the Daily Worker repeatedly damned him. And again, in 1948, he challenged the Communist Party by backing Harry Truman for the presidency when he opposed Henry Wallace’s campaign, insisting that the Communists had captured the Progressive Party.
Internationally, he was the personification of a Cold War liberal, a journalist and an activist. His views often coincided with that of George Kennan and Walter Lippmann and especially Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (who he brought on as a Post columnist) who defined Cold War liberalism this way: “liberalism and communism had nothing in common, either as to ends or means.” Wechsler backed NATO and the Korean War (which triggered the massive rearmament of the U.S., which he ultimately criticized) but furiously dissented from what other Cold War liberals like Hubert Humphrey and some in the Americans for Democratic Action (of which in 1947 he was one of the founders and a longtime member) favored in 1950, namely, detention camps for “subversives.”
With Wechsler as editor, the Post not only championed domestic liberalism but also frequently pricked readers’ consciences. Ted Poston, one of its black reporters, was sent south to cover the emerging civil rights story. It exposed Richard Nixon’s slush fund, which resulted in his humiliating “Checkers” speech to the nation. It featured sparkling liberal columnists like Murray Kempton, Marquis Childs, Pete Hamil, Max Lerner, William Shannon, and Samuel Grafton, one of country’s few columnists who regularly dared criticize the U.S. for not doing enough to rescue European Jews from the Nazis. Women reporters were assigned to major stories and its education and sports sections were among the best in the nation.
The Post published critical articles about J. Edgar Hoover, denouncing his unaccountability in a democratic society and for causing terrible harm to many innocent people. He defended Max Lowenthal, an early Hoover critic, who dared publish the first book excoriating the FBI director. Not surprisingly, Wechsler was hounded and monitored by the FBI He was relentlessly pursued by the FBI and even placed on its “custodial detention” list between 1942 and 1945. A notation by J. Edgar Hoover’s on a FBI memo described Wechsler and his wife, Nancy, as “radicals and leftists of the most dangerous type.” His FBI file numbers 530 pages!
In response, he created a sardonic “sacred cow” prize and awarded it to the FBI’s director. “Who else,” asked Joseph Rauh, the veteran liberal and arch-civil libertarian lawyer who had defended both Wechsler and Lillian Hellman before congressional anti-Red committees, “would have had the courage, the wit, the ability to ridicule J. Edgar Hoover at the height of his power?” Very few indeed.
Wechsler needed Rauh’s legal expertise after the Post published a series damning Joe McCarthy. He was hauled before the Senator’s senate committee in a nasty spectacle in which Wechsler confronted his inquisitors as an unfriendly witness. Still, in a controversial move even criticized by McCarthy’s opponents, he “named names,” after afterwards unconvincingly rationalizing his behavior for doing so, (he claimed he agonized over his decision. In his book, “The Age of Suspicion,” he wrote, “I did not believe my answers would tend to incriminate or degrade me but I was quite certain that silence would.” But McCarthy and his admirers were never persuaded of Wechsler’s “loyalty” and insisted he still retained Communist sympathies. In 1954 he was thrown off a popular TV show, “Starring the Editors,” for being a “controversial personality.”
He was a perennial debater, taking on the likes of conservative William Buckley and Beatnik Jack Kerouac and Yippie Jerry Rubin, among many others, and in time, became less of a cold warrior than a dove. He questioned an American foreign policy consensus that— until the invasion of Iraq-- would eventually be shattered by Vietnam, with 58,000 American body bags, tens of thousands more grievously wounded in body and mind, not to mention 3,400,000 dead Southeast Asians.
He wrote regularly what he saw as demonstrations of conscience during the Vietnam era: the ex-POW fighting for amnesty for draft resisters; the sacrifice of our troops in Vietnam; and the revelations of the Pentagon Papers. “The old men quibble, the young men die,” he said in 1968. “No one beyond the reach of the draft can or should tell the students how to meet the crisis.” The killings at Kent State in May 1970 horrified him and, in his fashion, he wrote about it through the grieving eyes of the father of one of the young women killed by the Ohio National Guard. He was aghast at the accession to power of the murderous American-backed Pinochet regime in Chile as well as the fascist-minded leaders in Argentina during the late seventies. In the spring of 1983 he turned his critical attention toward the Reagan administration’s military intervention in El Salvador and Nicaragua, his last public battle before he died of lung cancer in September 1983.
If he were alive today, I believe he would be very critical of the Bush administration’s imperial dreams and endless wars. I would hope too that he would be working hard to reformulate liberalism into a “new liberalism,” concentrating on America’s role as a stabilizing, less militarized and less quick to send in the troops and bombers. At home he would be drawn toward class and racial justice, balancing private and public interests with fairness, criticizing the enormous gap between the very rich and everyone else and always refusing to ignore the victims of our fiercely competitive, greed-driven society.
His legacy to publishers, editors and reporters who would follow him was simple: “It was said long ago that the function of a newspaper is to ‘comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.’ Too many newspapers have forgotten the word or grown so fat and comfortable themselves that they view the phrase as inflammatory. We like it and we propose to remember it, not because we regard success as subversive but because success too often means the complacent loss of conscience.”
Murray Polner wrote No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran and
co-authored Disarmed & Dangerous: The Radical Lives & Times of Daniel & Philip Berrigan. He is a book review editor for the History News Network.org and a columnist for the New YorkTimesexaminer.
Let Us Now Praise Edward Snowden
By Murray Polner
Nowadays it’s Edward Snowden, Snowden, Snowden, and Snowden everywhere, at least in spyworld, euphemistically dubbed our “Intelligence Community,” which in spite of its longtime claims of success, once famously misread the collapse of the Soviet Union and the coming of the Arab Spring. Now add another: Eric Schmitt’s recent Times front page article, anonymously sourced, read “CIA Noted Its Suspicions Over Snowden. Red Flags Overlooked 4 Years Before Leaks.” Schmitt’s comprehensive piece about the CIA’s failure to spot and report Snowden’s alleged problems also carried coverage of the four American whistleblowers (ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern, Jesselyn Radack formerly of the Justice Department, Coleen Rowley who once was an FBI agent and former NSAA official Thomas Drake) who on October 9th awarded Snowden in Moscow what they called the Sam Adams award which, in McGovern’s words, was for his “decision to divulge secrets about the NSA’s electronic surveillance of Americans and people round the globe.”
Still, the issue goes well beyond Snowden’s contributions, which raised the question: How much freedom shall American journalists be allowed [ my italics] by their government to publish stories critics say may cause great harm to “national security.”
Some words of warning of what reporters now face and what may lie ahead has just been provided by a surprising new report issued by the Committee to Protect Journalists.(http://cpj.org/reports/2013/10/obama-and-the-press-us-leaks-surveillance-post-911.php). Written by Leonard Downie Jr.,(assisted by Sara Rafsky) who once ran the Washington Post, DC’s preeminent establishment newspaper, it quotes among others, David Sanger, the Times’ chief Washington correspondent, who charged that the Obama White House is “the most closed control-freak administration I’ve ever covered” an accusation backed, he continued, by “a memo [that] went out from the chief of staff a year ago to White House employees and the intelligence agencies that told people to freeze and retain any e-mail, and presumably phone logs, of communications with me.” Consequently, long-term sources were afraid to talk with him. “They tell me, ‘David, I love you, but don’t e-mail me. Let’s don’t chat until this blows over.” His colleague Scott Shane also told Downie, that “seemingly innocuous e-mails not containing classified information can be construed as a crime.” They’re echoed by the Washington Post’s Dana Priest. “People think they’re looking at reporters’ records. I’m writing fewer things in e-mail. I’m even afraid to tell officials what I want to talk about because it’s all going into one giant computer.”
While not Chinese, Russian or Saudi Arabian media censors, Obama’s continual use of the 1917 Espionage Act and its Insider Threat Program, which demands federal workers report colleagues’ suspicious behavior, led Michael Hayden, who ran the NSA and CIA for the second Bush, to tell Downie that the ITP “is designed to chill any conversation whatsoever.”
It may be that Obama has been facing demands from Congress and intelligence agencies to stop national security leaks but if so, he has certainly given into their pressure. The result is what Downie’s report described as a “fearful atmosphere” among Washington-based reporters, including Times people. Yet the report and its implications have been ignored in the paper’s editorials, Op Eds, or Sunday Review essays. Even the Wall Street Journal gave it a good play, posting the AP dispatch “Report: Obama brings chilling effect on journalism.”
The question of press freedom also cropped up in The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson’s perceptive article “When Journalists Are Called Traitors.” In it, she recalled the 1962 Der Spiegel scandal when Konrad Adenauer and his Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss falsely charged the magazine with endangering German national security, using the words traitors and treason, once among the older Germany’s kindest words for its opponents, even Jewish kids. The publisher was jailed for a hundred and three days and several others were imprisoned as well. Police were stationed in Spiegel's offices before charges were dropped and Strauss let go. Davidson’s lesson: “the strands connecting the Spiegel and Snowden affairs are many and instructive—and are a reminder, above all, of why press freedom is worth fighting for.”
Relating it to the storm around Snowden, and praising the CPJ report, Davidson asked if it was a journalists’ job to publish pieces that the government considered secret and potentially damaging. How dare they place their judgments above government priorities and secrets? Documents are secret for state reasons, critics say, and have to be obeyed. Her response: “The professional secret- keepers are phenomenally bad at distinguishing between the threat of terror and t\heir terror at being threatened—or worse, as with Strauss, at being humiliated. They need the press not just to shake them up but also to keep them from being destabilized by their own weaknesses and vanities.”
Not to be outdone, our ever loyal British allies in war and peace (except for Syria), are very upset about Snowden’s leaks. Its conservative officials have been sneering at the leakers and the Guardian. The new M15 chief Andrew Parker defended its Tempora program (similar to the NSA’s Prism, divulged by Snowden) without saying anything specific about the sort of data collected. He called Snowden’s tapes, which had appeared in the Guardian, a “gift” to terrorists. Soon after, the conservative Daily Mail snarled that the Guardian was “The Paper That Helps Britain’s Enemies.” Not to be outdone, and more ominously because Britain has no Bill of Rights, PM David Cameron accused the Guardian of harming national security, even suggesting, however vaguely, that the paper’s editor be called before Parliament.
About the same time Times editor Jill Abramson was interviewed by British TV interviewer Jeremy Paxman who asked why her newspaper had turned down a British request that it give them documents based on Snowden’s information. Abramson, a very experienced journalist, remembered the uproar about the Pentagon Papers and read him some history: “When the New York Times published the Pentagon papers back in the 1970s, the same claims were made, that publishing did grave harm to national security, and yet a couple of years after we published them, the same officials who said that admitted that actually there had not been any real harm to national security.” Perhaps now the paper will talk about and analyze Downie’s report.
Sooner or later, and the sooner the better, the question how to cover honestly and fearlessly critical matters of national security needs to be resolved. Any resolution will need to keep the First Amendment in mind since . accountability is essential. That’s still a part of democracy, right? Failure to do so, the CPJ report concludes:
With so much government information digitally accessible in so many places
to so many people, there are likely to be more Mannings and Snowdens among
those who grew up in a digital world with blurred boundaries between public and
private, shared and secret information. That makes access by the press to a
range of government sources of information and guidance more important than ever.
Downie then turned to Lucy Dalglish of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, for steps the Obama administration might take to fulfill the president’s campaign pledge of transparency, Downie summarized her suggestions: “fewer secrets, improve the FOIA process, be open and honest about government surveillance and build better bridges with the press, rather than trying to control or shut it out.”
There’s not much time because Pierre Omidyar, the eBay’s billionaire founder, will soon provide some of his fortune to a new venture starring the iconoclast Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, the film documentarian, conduit between Snowden and Greenwald, and the subject of Peter Maass’ sympathetic feature in the Times magazine last summer, and Jeremy Scahill, the bane of private military contractors and mercenaries, to develop an online publication “to support independent journalists” according to NYU’s Jay Rosen who spoke to Omidyar.
Fair warning.
____________________
Murray Polner writes the Keeping Score column for the NYTimesExpress.com.
Published October 19. 2013
Who Speaks For America’s Jews?
By Murray Polner
The Times’ ubiquitous Thomas Friedman isn’t everyone’s favorite but when he writes about Israel he tends to irritate loyalists ready to condemn anyone making critical judgments about Israeli policies. In his 1989 book From Beirut to Jerusalem he mentioned his wife’s father being stopped by a friend who told him, “Your son-in-law Tom Friedman is the most hated man in New York City today.” His crime? Daring to report that Israeli soldiers behaved less than admirably in the invasion of Lebanon and also describing Israel’s less than honorable role in the Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinians.
Now he’s at it again in the debate about Iran, recently asking if Israel’s interests take precedence over American interests, which include settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict fairly and ending a Cold War with Iran dating back to 1954 when the British and the CIA toppled Iranian leader Mohammed Mossadegh. “If Israel kills this U.S.-led deal,” he wrote, “then the only option is military. How many Americans or NATO allies will go for bombing Iran after Netanyahu has blocked the best effort to explore a credible diplomatic alternative? Not many.”
Backed by the Israel Lobby, Christian Zionists, neoconservatives, every Republican senator eager to weaken Obama and 16 Democrats desperate for Jewish money and votes, the Kirk-Menendez bill to increase sanctions on Iran would end the recently concluded interim nuclear accord between Iran and the P+1 nations (the U.S. China, France, Great Britain, Germany and the Russia), which aims to establish limits on Iran such as removing some of its nuclear infrastructure and increasing international observations of Iranian compliance. On the Senate floor, Senator Diane Feinstein, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee and opposes the bill, said that if enacted and passed over Obama’s veto, it would mean that “Iran’s nuclear program would once again be unrestrained and the only remaining option to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon would be military action.” And then her clincher: “We cannot let Israel determine when and where the United States goes to war.”
It all reminds me of the cynical and satirical Onion gag line when Chuck Hagel was being skewered by the Lobby and its neocon friends: “Israel Vows To Use Veto Power If Chuck Hagel Confirmed As U.S. Secretary of Defense.”
Today Israel, their lobbyists and sympathizers, are involved in directly challenging a crucial U.S. commitment.
Fair enough. But who really speaks for America's Jews? Fact is, many of the Lobby’s American Jewish groups are no more than names on a letterhead, with few or no paid members. Twenty-three years ago the late Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, that keenest of Zionist scholars, detected an astonishing trend that is far more significant today: American Jewry, he said in 1990, “is an organized and aging half moving right and a younger, more liberal group increasingly abandoning Jewish organizations and declining to offer financial support.”
“I think the lobby has a demographic problem, M.J. Rosenberg wrote in January 2013. Rosenberg once worked for AIPAC and is now considered an apostate by True Believers for his often astute and dissenting views. “Every poll shows baby boomers are less interested in Israel than their parents, the WWII ‘greatest generation’ but even more striking is that the boomers’ kids, people in their ‘30s and younger, are far less interested than their parents” while “Israel is no longer a central concern of young Jews.” And then his central point: “Today, politicians think the easy way to a Jew’s heart and pockbook is through Israel. Soon enough they will understand that the way is through social justice issues here in America.”
120 rabbis recently signed Rabbi Arthur Waskow’s Shalom Center statement supporting détente with Iran. Peter Beinart, a former editor of The New Republic and now with The Daily Beast, has accused the “ American Jewish Establishment” of living in a “closed intellectual space,” abandoning their historically outspoken defense of working people, minority rights and civil liberties since now they are all about Israel, full--time. For decades, dissenters were driven out of American Jewish public life. No more. A growing number of Jewish groups such as J Street, Americans for Peace Now, the Israel Policy Forum, the Jewish Voice for Peace and Rabbi Henry Siegman’s U.S./Middle East Project among others offer serious alternatives that don’t conform to the party line. Even inside Israel, as the extraordinarily revealing Israeli film “The Gatekeepers” portrayed, former spymasters directly challenge Netanyahu’s hawkishness while Molad, The Center for the Renewal of Israeli Democracy, a new progressive Israeli think tank, came to Hagel’s defense and deplored Israel’s “self-appointed supporters” in the U.S.
The fact is the Lobby does not speak for American Jewry. We are diverse and more than most Americans bring a Judaic passion to pursue social justice. We were never “One,” as a long-discarded UJA fundraising slogan once claimed. We have always been anti-Zionist, Zionist and at times hard to define. As a result, Noam Chomsky is as Jewish as Abraham Foxman. In short, we are American Jews.
__________
Murray Polner was editor of Present Tense, once published by the American Jewish Committee. He has written and edited six books on Jewish life.
Thou Shalt Not Eat Meat
Richard H. Schwartz
Thou shalt not eat meat? Have I gone completely crazy? Am I not aware that the Torah gives people permission to eat meat and goes into detail in discussing which animals are permitted to be eaten and which are not? And that the Talmud has much material on the laws of kashrut related to the preparation and consumption of meat? And that various types of flesh products have been strongly associated with Sabbath and festival celebrations?
Yes, but I still think that it is necessary, actually essential, to argue this case because our modern meat-centered dietary culture is doing great harm to Jews, Israel and, indeed, the entire world and is inconsistent with several important Jewish values.
The world is rapidly approaching an unprecedented catastrophe from global warming and other environmental threats, to which animal-based agriculture is a major contributor. Pikuach nefesh (the mandate to do whatever is necessary to save a human life) is arguably Judaism's most important mitzvah, because it overrides all other mitzvot, except those forbidding murder, idol worship and sexual immorality, which are not applicable to the issues under consideration. It is especially important today that we pay attention to this mandate because we are dealing with the possibility of saving not just one life, but all of humanity.
Please consider:
* There are almost daily reports of the effects of global climate change, including severe heat waves, storms, droughts, floods and wildfires, and the melting of glaciers and polar icecaps.
* While these effects are due to an increase of less than 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the past 100 years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a group composed of the world's leading climate scientists, projects an increase of from 3 to 11 degrees Fahrenheit in the next 100 years, which would result in an unparalleled disaster for humanity..
*Some climate scientists, including James Hansen of NASA, are warning that global climate change may spin out of control within a few years with extreme consequences, unless major changes are soon made.
* Israel is especially threatened by global warming. It is now experiencing the worst drought in its history, and the reduced rainfall the last few years has so diminished the level of the Sea of Galilee that the pumping of water from it had to be stopped. In 2007 a report by the Israel Union for Environmental Defense projected that if current trends continue, Israel will experience major heat waves, storms and floods, a decrease in average rainfall of 20 to 30 percent and an inundation of the coastal plain where most Israelis live by a rising Mediterranean Sea.
* According to a 2006 UN Food and Agriculture Organization report, animal-based agriculture emits more greenhouse gases than all the cars, ships, planes and other means of transportation combined (18% in CO2 equivalents vs. 13.5%, and some reports indicate that the gap is even greater), and this difference will sharply increase because the number of farmed animals is projected to double in 50 years, if present trends continue. Hence, without a major societal shift to plant-based diets, it will be impossible to obtain the greenhouse gas emissions that climate experts think are essential to avoid the worst effects of global warming.
* Animal-centered agriculture also causes other serious environmental problems, including soil erosion and depletion, the rapid extinction of species, air and water pollution, and the destruction of tropical rain forests, coral reefs and other valuable habitats. An animal-based diet requires up to 14 times as much water as a vegan diet.
The many negative effects of animal-based diets was well summed up by the editors of World watch magazine in their July/August 2004 issue: "The human appetite for animal flesh is a driving force behind virtually every major category of environmental damage now threatening the human future. Deforestation, erosion, fresh water scarcity, air and water pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss,
social injustice, the destabilization of communities, and the spread of disease."
We have recently seen an example of that “spread of disease” as the close confinement of many farmed animals in very unsanitary conditions has resulted in a pandemic of swine flu, the latest example of diseases resulting from the massive factory farming of animals.
A second major reason that Jews should avoid eating meat is that high meat consumption and the ways in which meat is produced today conflict with at least six basic Jewish teachings:
1) While Judaism mandates that people should be very careful about preserving their health and their lives, numerous scientific studies have linked animal-based diets directly to heart disease, stroke, many forms of cancer, and other chronic degenerative diseases.
2) While Judaism forbids tsa'ar ba'alei chayim, inflicting unnecessary pain on animals, most farm animals -- including those raised for kosher consumers -- are raised on "factory farms" where they live in cramped, confined spaces, and are often drugged, mutilated, and denied fresh air, sunlight, exercise, and any enjoyment of life, before they are slaughtered and eaten.
3) While Judaism teaches that "the earth is the Lord's" (Psalm 24:1) and that we are to be God's partners and co-workers in preserving the world, modern intensive livestock agriculture contributes substantially to soil erosion and depletion, air and water pollution, overuse of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, the destruction of tropical rain forests and other habitats, global warming, and other environmental damage.
4) While Judaism mandates bal tashchit, that we are not to waste or unnecessarily destroy anything of value, and that we are not to use more than is needed to accomplish a purpose, animal agriculture requires the wasteful use of grain, land, water, energy, and other resources.
5) While Judaism stresses that we are to assist the poor and share our bread with hungry people, over 70% of the grain grown in the United States is fed to animals destined for slaughter, while an estimated 20 million people worldwide die because of hunger and its effects each year.
6) While Judaism stresses that we must seek and pursue peace and that violence results from unjust conditions, animal-centered diets, by wasting valuable resources, help to perpetuate the widespread hunger and poverty that eventually lead to instability and war.
We could say "dayenu" after each of the arguments above, because each constitutes by itself a serious conflict between Jewish values and current practice that should impel Jews to seriously consider a plant-based diet. Combined, they make an urgently compelling case for the Jewish community to address these issues.
This view is reinforced by some statements by Rabbi David Rosen, former Chief Rabbi of Ireland. He believes that even if eating meat is considered a mitzvah, which he doesn't, it would be a mitzvah haba'ah b'aveirah (a mitzvah based on transgressions). He asserts that “the current treatment of animals in the livestock trade definitely renders the consumption of meat as halachically unacceptable as the product of illegitimate means,” and that “as it is halachically prohibited to harm oneself and as healthy, nutritious vegetarian alternatives are readily available, meat consumption has become halachically unjustifiable.”
Finally, the view that Jews should not eat meat is reinforced by an extension of an article, “Thou Shalt Not Smoke,” by Rabbi Abraham J. Twerski, an Orthodox psychiatrist, scholar and author. His strong arguments based on health reasons are also applicable to eating meat and, as indicated above, there are many additional reasons for not eating meat.
Rabbi Twerski concludes, “Cigarette smoking causes disease and death. 'Those who have the capacity to eliminate a wrong and do not do so bear the responsibility for its consequences.' [His emphasis.] These are harsh words, but they are not mine. They are the words of the Talmud, Tractate Shabbos 54b.” Since the eating of meat not only “causes disease and death,” but also greatly harms billions of animals, contributes significantly to global warming and many other environmental threats, uses water, energy, land and other resources very inefficiently and contributes to widespread hunger, his conclusion is even more applicable to the consumption of meat.
For many years I have argued that Jews have a choice in their diets, but that choice should consider the negative effects of animal-based diets on Jewish teachings, such as those mentioned above. Unfortunately, this has had less impact than I would like, as the world moves increasingly toward a catastrophe beyond anything since the great flood in the time of Noah. Hence, while it may initially seem very foreign to many Jews, I think it is consistent with Judaism and essential to argue that “Thou shalt not eat meat.” Taking this assertion seriously and acting upon it is essential to moving our imperiled planet to a sustainable path.
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Richard H. Schwartz, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus, College of Staten Island
Author of "Judaism and Vegetarianism," "Judaism and Global Survival," and "Mathematics and Global Survival," and over 130 articles at www.JewishVeg.com/schwartz
President of Jewish Vegetarians of North America (JVNA) www.JewishVeg.com
and Society of Ethical and Religious Vegetarians (SERV) www.serv-online.org/
Associate Producer of A SACRED DUTY (asacredduty.com)
Director of Veg Climate Alliance (www.vegclimatealliance.org)
president@JewishVeg.com
Wa r Crimes:Who Are Accountable?
By Murray Polner
In October 1944, General Tomoyuki Yamashita was assigned to lead the Japanese forces in the Philippines. Ten days later U.S. army units began landing in Luzon and Leyte to open the campaign to liberate the Philippines. Before and after Yamashita’s arrival the Japanese had carried out the identical brutality they had too often meted out to civilians and POWs throughout Asia and elsewhere. Filipinos and foreigners living in the islands were singled out, especially in Manila where a bloodbath had been carried out,
It was called the Manila Massacre, which Yamashita insisted he never ordered. He was arrested soon after the Japanese surrendered. In the first war crimes trial of the Pacific war, he was tried by five generals, found guilty, and executed by hanging. His chief counsel, the American Col. Harry Clarke objected, saying he was not found guilty for having done something specific but rather “solely with having been something,” in this instance commander of troops who had committed war crimes. When the case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court and judgment denied, two justices, Frank Murphy and Wiley Rutledge, described the verdict as unjust.
What is most significant is that the Supreme Court has never rejected this principle, which holds that a military commander can be blamed for murder, rape and other horrible crimes carried out by troops under his command even if he had not ordered them to do so. Since then the “Yamashita Standard” as it is known, has been upheld as the law of the land.
Allan A. Ryan relates the entire story in Yamashita’s Ghost: War Crimes, MacArthur’s Justice and Command Accountability (Kansas 2012). He once clerked for Supreme Court Justice Byron White, was a U.S. Marine Corps judge advocate, as well as chief prosecutor of Nazis who fled to the U.S. and lied about their criminal past, has written an impressive and important book about the case in which he is unashamedly sympathetic to Yamashita and critical of the military judges and their superior, the imperious Douglas MacArthur.
Ryan’s sums up the case this way:
“But Yamashita’s ghost lingers in the law. Born in an unprecedented and ambiguous
charge by a vindictive American general, nurtured by a misbegotten trial by his subordinates, deferentially upheld by America’s highest court, shaped by two panels of American judges at Nuremberg, and incorporated into official American policy and international tribunals, it has loomed over the international law of war for too long.”
Yamashita’s Ghost notes that the general was the conqueror of Malaya and Singapore in 1942. Somehow, he alienated the hawkish Hideki Tojo and his war party who exiled him to northern China, by then hardly a war zone. After the fall of Tojo he was sent by the successor military regime in Tokyo to the Philippines, by then virtually a lost cause as American forces had destroyed the Japanese navy and was on the brink of a land invasion.
To Ryan, Yamashita “was a dignified and thoughtful man” respected by the American military lawyers who defended him in court. Yamashita, he agreed, never ordered the “Manila Massacre” and instead had ordered his officers to leave the city when invading American forces approached. The breakdown of communications and an aggressive Japanese naval command allowed the slaughters and rapes to proceed. Why, then, did MacArthur insist that Yamashita be tried? “What motivated MacArthur” asks Ryan? Admittedly no-one knows, not even his biographers. The chief prosecutor speculated that MacArthur wanted people to learn about the atrocious crimes committed by the Japanese. MacArthur explained the execution of Yamashita this way: He “failed his duty to his troops, to his country, to his enemy, to mankind; has failed entirely his soldier faith.”
We can only guess that MacArthur’s domineering personality and the fact that he was the son of the early 20th Century American commander of the Islands may have played a role. Or perhaps it was the earlier loss of the Philippines in 1942, one of the greatest single defeats in American military history. What we do know is that MacArthur wanted Yamashita (and General Masaharu Homma, the man who defeated him in ’42) executed as quickly as possible.
The military judges he selected were answerable to him. They were without legal experience and during the trial accepted hearsay and even double hearsay as evidence. When Frank Reel, a defense lawyer, protested the court’s acceptance of a suspected Japanese collaborator’s testimony that he heard another collaborator, Artemio Ricarte, claim he had personally heard Yamashita's order to kill, General Russell Reynolds, the presiding judge, asked Reel to explain “if all hearsay is excluded in court testimony.” Reynolds’ lack of legal knowledge astounded all the lawyers present. “Imagine the judge asking the defense counsel what the law is,” later wrote Lt.George Mountz, a defense lawyer. In any event all their objections were rejected. Robert Trumbull of the New York Times who covered the trial could only conclude “the rule of evidence set forth in General MacArthur’s directive can be boiled down to two words: anything goes.”
A prosecution witness stated that the late Artemio Ricarte’s grandson, fluent in Japanese, had actually interpreted Yamashita’s remarks ordering the carnage, a statement contradicted by the 14-year-old grandson who was reared in Japan and testified in Japanese. Time and again the boy vehemently denied ever having heard such a remark. “I know that any talk that my grandfather and General Yamashita talked together [hearing the orders being given] is a lie, and I came here today hoping to prove that.” His testimony stunned the court though it never altered the ultimate unanimous verdict. “In ten minutes,” Ryan comments, “the defense had obliterated the only evidence so far that, however dubiously, had actually linked Yamashita personally to the horrors that Japanese soldiers had committed.” The case, Robert Trumbull wrote in one of his reports, was “entirely in MacArthur’s hands.” No-one in Washington objected.
Ryan also poses a very difficult question: To what extent can the Yamashita Standard be used to prosecute those who instigated and led the U.S. invasions of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, where there may well have been war crimes? Had the Yamashita Standard been used in these wars, what high ranking generals and political leaders might have been held responsible for My Lai, Abu Ghraib and torture? Is no-one at the top ever accountable?
In the midst of the My Lai investigation General Telford Taylor, who had been a chief counsel at Nuremberg, published his book Nuremberg and Vietnam—An American Tragedy,, which raised the implications of the Yamashita ruling. Punishing only junior officers and enlisted men was hardly the point. According to Taylor, the chain of command from generals in the field up to the Joint Chiefs of Staff should be accountable for the behavior of troops in Vietnam. Of course, no American general or politician will ever be convicted because troops may have tortured and killed enemy prisoners. “The United States,” Ryan angrily concludes, “devised the Yamashita precedent, but it has never lifted the chalice to its own lips”
A quarter of a century after he argued Yamashita’s case before the Supreme Court, Frank Reel, a Yamashita defense lawyer, wrote a letter to the New York Times quoting Taylor that “Under the Yamashita rule as set down by the United States Supreme Court, [Vietnam War General] Westmoreland would be convicted.” Now he was absolutely not urging that American generals or presidents be tried under the Yamashita Standard [because] “the concept of punishing a man, not for anything he has done but because of a position he has held is abhorrent. It smacks of totalitarian tyranny rather than Anglo-Saxon law.” In affect, he was reminding Americans of the injustice of Yamashita’s trial and punishment.
Ryan’s challenging and brilliant book cites Dick Camp’s 2008 Talking with the Enemy,” published in Leatherneck in 2008, in which Marine Major Harry Pratt, the Yamashita trial’s chief interpreter, described the experience as “very worrisome. War crimes trials are a function of the victors. I could then and still find, that this law of command responsibility might well be charged against our own commanders under circumstances beyond their control.”
Before he was hung, Yamashita thanked his captors and lawyers “for their tolerance and rightful judgment,” adding, “I don’t blame my executioners. I will pray God bless them.” MacArthur sent three generals to observe the hanging.
And before Homma, a general held responsible for the Bataan Death March –which he denied--was killed, he told the officer in charge of his firing squad, “I’m being shot tonight because we lost the war.”
Sunday, January 26, 2014
By Murray Polner:
How many of our editorial writers, pundits and ordinary Americans know that Israeli PM Benyamin Netanyahu has articulate and informed opponents in Israel about Palestine and Iran? If you had no idea, you’ve been reading the wrong publications and watching the wrong TV news broadcasts. For insightful reporting and commentary you have to forego virtually all mainstream mass media and try some overlooked websites and publications. By solely relying on big media, we’re left to believe that Netanyahu, the rightwing settlers and his coalition of ultras have little or no serious political opposition inside Israel even as most Israelis have, since Yitzhak Rabin’s murder, become inured to real and imaginary cries of alarm.
Netanyahu’s Israeli opponents are true insiders who simply do not believe him when he regularly goes on about Palestine and Iran. An array of the most experienced former intelligence and security veterans, such as ex- Mossad director Meir Dagan, ex-Military Intelligence Director former Shin Bet Director Yuval Diskin, the IDF’s former chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi and former Military Intelligence Director Amos Yadlin and his predecessor Maj.Gen. Aharon Ze-evi-Farkash have all resisted Netanyahu’s tirades and oppose an Israeli attack on Iran. Dagan and Diskin have been arguing publicly that any future understanding with Iran, imperfect though it may be, will benefit both countries.
There are also many in the business and technical community, dependent as they are in doing business with the rest of the world, who are very uncomfortable with the PM’s bellicosity and especially the way Netanyahu deals with the U.S., the country’s benefactor. I have been unable to find any report of who said what at a public forum in early December in Tel Aviv other than in al.monitor.com by the intrepid Ben Caspit, an Israeli journalist, who attended together with some 600 people, no doubt most of them critics of the government’s policies. The main speaker was former Shin Bet Director Yuval Diskin, who sharply condemned Netanyahu’s Palestinian and Iranian policies. Caspit summarized what he said:
“It is time to preserve the sanctity of the people to the sanctity of the land, making Israel a home that does not require occupying another people. Israel must freeze the settlements [because] the number of settlers in the West Bank has reached such levels that no government will be able to evict them.”
And Iran?
Said Diskin: The “implications of failing to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are far more ‘existential’ –Netanyahu’s pet word to express alarm — “than the Iranian nuclear issue.”
The Forward, the English language, not the historic Yiddish, version often has incisive reports. A recent report by J.J. Goldberg cites Ron Ben-Yishai, the military correspondent of the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot, writing about “the state of open warfare” about Iran between “Israel’s political leadership and intelligence professionals.” Goldberg then clarifies the real differences between Israeli intelligence” that is, what Mossad, the Shin Bet and Military Intelligence consider to be true and the phrase “Israel believes”—which most U.S. mass media usually cite and therefore most Americans believe— and which represents, “a closed circle of hard-line politicians, ideologues and think tankers surrounding Netanyahu.”
Another essential analyst is Rabbi Henry Siegman, one of our shrewdest commentators. He once ran the American Jewish Congress and is now head of the US-Middle East Project, whose board includes “Realists” Brent Scowcroft, Thomas Pickering, Lee Hamilton and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Most Americans, Siegman writes, simply do not understand that Netanyahu will never grant Palestinians anything more than a “pathetic statelet,” if that. Having never forsaken his dream of a Greater Israel, Netanyahu has opposed every previous peace move signed by those who came before him, including accords with Egypt, Jordan and Ariel Sharon’s removal of settlements planted in Gaza. It is an “illusion,” Siegman rightly argues, that he will ever [not never!] allow an independent, viable, sovereign Palestinian nation as the discarded Roadmap for Middle East Peace once urged.
Always in the background is the role of the U.S. in the Middle East as it hints at withdrawing a bit to turn toward China — a potential enemy since American hawks must have enemies– while simultaneously having to confront the new Saudi-Israeli connection, one with mountains of money and oil and the other with massive military might and a superb lobbying apparatus in Washington. There is also a fear, however far-fetched it may seem to some, that if Israel and its allies manage to wreck the Iranian accord and war should follow, will the American people view yet another war as they did in rejecting Obama’s inane scheme to bomb Syria, or will they support bombing Teheran and sending in troops to fight alongside Israelis in Iran?
In the midst of the thorny Palestinian and Iranian issues, Nelson Mandela died. Unlike a huge number of heads of state, Netanyahu did not attend the memorial ceremony because, as The Times of Israel reported, “the financial and logistical outlays” were too expensive for a trip to Johannesburg. South African Jews reacted negatively by making clear that a great opportunity had been missed since Israel had been a good friend of South Africa’s apartheid government. Whatever the reason, as Lloyd Bentsen told Dan Quayle in a long ago vice-presidential debate, “Benyamin Netanyahu, you’re no Nelson Mandela,”
Murray Polner was editor of Present Tense, published by the American Jewish Committee from 1973-1990 and has written and edited books about Jewish life.
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Merry Christmas! President Obama: Harding Pardoned Debs So Why Not Pardon Manning and Snowden Too?
Who Speaks For America’s Jews?
By Murray Polner
The Times’ ubiquitous Thomas Friedman isn’t everyone’s favorite but when he writes about Israel he tends to irritate loyalists ready to condemn anyone making critical judgments about Israeli policies. In his 1989 book From Beirut to Jerusalem he mentioned his wife’s father being stopped by a friend who told him, “Your son-in-law Tom Friedman is the most hated man in New York City today.” His crime? Daring to report that Israeli soldiers behaved less than admirably in the invasion of Lebanon and also describing Israel’s less than honorable role in the Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinians.
Now he’s at it again in the debate about Iran, recently asking if Israel’s interests take precedence over American interests, which include settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict fairly and ending a Cold War with Iran dating back to 1954 when the British and the CIA toppled Iranian leader Mohammed Mossadegh. “If Israel kills this U.S.-led deal,” he wrote, “then the only option is military. How many Americans or NATO allies will go for bombing Iran after Netanyahu has blocked the best effort to explore a credible diplomatic alternative? Not many.”
Backed by the Israel Lobby, Christian Zionists, neoconservatives, every Republican senator eager to weaken Obama and 16 Democrats desperate for Jewish money and votes, the Kirk-Menendez bill to increase sanctions on Iran would end the recently concluded interim nuclear accord between Iran and the P+1 nations (the U.S. China, France, Great Britain, Germany and the Russia), which aims to establish limits on Iran such as removing some of its nuclear infrastructure and increasing international observations of Iranian compliance. On the Senate floor, Senator Diane Feinstein, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee and opposes the bill, said that if enacted and passed over Obama’s veto, it would mean that “Iran’s nuclear program would once again be unrestrained and the only remaining option to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon would be military action.” And then her clincher: “We cannot let Israel determine when and where the United States goes to war.”
It all reminds me of the cynical and satirical Onion gag line when Chuck Hagel was being skewered by the Lobby and its neocon friends: “Israel Vows To Use Veto Power If Chuck Hagel Confirmed As U.S. Secretary of Defense.”
Today Israel, their lobbyists and sympathizers, are involved in directly challenging a crucial U.S. commitment.
Fair enough. But who really speaks for America's Jews? Fact is, many of the Lobby’s American Jewish groups are no more than names on a letterhead, with few or no paid members. Twenty-three years ago the late Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, that keenest of Zionist scholars, detected an astonishing trend that is far more significant today: American Jewry, he said in 1990, “is an organized and aging half moving right and a younger, more liberal group increasingly abandoning Jewish organizations and declining to offer financial support.”
“I think the lobby has a demographic problem, M.J. Rosenberg wrote in January 2013. Rosenberg once worked for AIPAC and is now considered an apostate by True Believers for his often astute and dissenting views. “Every poll shows baby boomers are less interested in Israel than their parents, the WWII ‘greatest generation’ but even more striking is that the boomers’ kids, people in their ‘30s and younger, are far less interested than their parents” while “Israel is no longer a central concern of young Jews.” And then his central point: “Today, politicians think the easy way to a Jew’s heart and pockbook is through Israel. Soon enough they will understand that the way is through social justice issues here in America.”
120 rabbis recently signed Rabbi Arthur Waskow’s Shalom Center statement supporting détente with Iran. Peter Beinart, a former editor of The New Republic and now with The Daily Beast, has accused the “ American Jewish Establishment” of living in a “closed intellectual space,” abandoning their historically outspoken defense of working people, minority rights and civil liberties since now they are all about Israel, full--time. For decades, dissenters were driven out of American Jewish public life. No more. A growing number of Jewish groups such as J Street, Americans for Peace Now, the Israel Policy Forum, the Jewish Voice for Peace and Rabbi Henry Siegman’s U.S./Middle East Project among others offer serious alternatives that don’t conform to the party line. Even inside Israel, as the extraordinarily revealing Israeli film “The Gatekeepers” portrayed, former spymasters directly challenge Netanyahu’s hawkishness while Molad, The Center for the Renewal of Israeli Democracy, a new progressive Israeli think tank, came to Hagel’s defense and deplored Israel’s “self-appointed supporters” in the U.S.
The fact is the Lobby does not speak for American Jewry. We are diverse and more than most Americans bring a Judaic passion to pursue social justice. We were never “One,” as a long-discarded UJA fundraising slogan once claimed. We have always been anti-Zionist, Zionist and at times hard to define. As a result, Noam Chomsky is as Jewish as Abraham Foxman. In short, we are American Jews.
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Murray Polner, a previous contributor, was editor of Present Tense, once published by the American Jewish Committee. He has written and edited five books on Jewish life. This appeared in the NY Jewish Week.
The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI
By Betty Medsger
Knopf 2014
By Murray Polner
Murray Polner co-authored Disarmed & Dangerous: The Radical Lives & Times of Daniel & Philip Berrigan.
During and after WWI, and especially after the notorious Palmer Raids, the government and a legion of vigilantes went hunting for “subversive” left-wingers. Phones were tapped and postal workers opened mail, which led an old-fashioned traditionalist named Henry L. Stimson, Herbert Hoover’s Secretary of State, to close down the government’s cryptological section in 1929 with a quaint warning, “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.”
How charming, how innocent, how calming.
In late 1970, however, William Davidon, “a mild-mannered physics professor at Haverford College,” writes Betty Medsger, decided to issue a frontal challenge to government snoopers (full-discloser: I interviewed him several times about another case) and “privately asked a few people this question: ‘What do you think of burglarizing an FBI office?’”
Davidon hated the Vietnam War and a draft which forced reluctant kids into the military, which he believed had helped make the country an imperial, warrior state. Inspired by pacifist men of action Dan Berrigan and A.J. Muste, he wanted to do more than march and picket and lend his name to antiwar ads.
To do so, he recruited six like-minded men and two women who “were looking for more powerful nonviolent ways to protest the war.” Betty Medsger’s striking and well-paced investigative reportage in The Burglary, sympathetically describes the burglars, and unkindly to say the least, J. Edgar Hoover and his relentless pursuit of political opponents.
On March 8, 1971, ironically the day of the epic and widely-viewed Ali-Frazier bout, eight otherwise commonplace people, led by Davidon, forced open the door of an FBI office in Media, a suburb of Philadelphia, with a homemade crowbar and snatched about a thousand confidential files, which when publicized, sent Hoover and his supporters into shock. Never before had the unchallenged FBI been so violated. The burglars’ unprecedented catch revealed what Hoover’s FBI had been up to for decades. As Medsger carefully outlines the raid and its consequences, she reveals that Hoover had been running a “secret” and illegitimate FBI program called Cointelpro, whose purpose was to destroy dissent and dissenters. The burglars also discovered a long-established “Security Index,” aimed at rounding up and detaining “subversives” in the event of a “crisis.”
Once they read and absorbed the documents their job was done since only the national press had the means and the voice to spread the news. They mailed the documents to Medsger, then a Washington Post reporter, the LA Times’ Jack Nelson and the NY Times’ Tom Wicker. Copies also went to antiwar Senator George McGovern who loathed Hoover but denounced the burglary and returned the materials to the FBI. The group then retreated into a 43-year silence. Several weeks after the burglary, Medsger filed the first piece about the stolen files in the Post.
NBC’s Carl Stern began successfully filing Freedom of Information requests for the documents and thereby played a crucial role in introducing Cointelpro to the American people. It was, we learned, a covert and unlawful program designed to penetrate, shame and destroy domestic, essentially left-wing, political groups. It included the now-famous letter threatening to expose Martin Luther King Jr. for adultery unless he killed himself.
In previous years, the FBI had accomplished much, notably investigating and breaking up Soviet spy networks, as a forthcoming book by Mark A. Bradley, A Very Principled Boy: The Life of Duncan Lee, Red Spy and Cold Warrior (Basic Books), clearly demonstrates. But Hoover’s narrow-mindedness and absurd obsession that Moscow lurked behind critics and nonconformists, his inability to accept the slightest disparagement, and especially his refusal to recognize the growing presence of organized crime, tarnished his record further. Medsger even tells of FBI agents unhappy with his methods that were ignored or told to follow orders.
In 1950, Max Lowenthal’s ground-breaking book The Federal Bureau of Investigation deeply upset Hoover and his admirers trashed the book in their reviews. Still, the more the deification of Hoover and the FBI soared in films and pop culture, so did his dark side. Cointelpro portrayed him as petty, cunning, pitiless and indifferent to fairness and justice. For years he directed a chilling vendetta against dissidents, African-American faculty (Metzger says he despised blacks), college students, academics, politicians on whom he compiled extensive files, especially their sexual peccadilloes for possible future blackmail and reprisals. Signers of newspaper antiwar, anti-draft ads were placed on file. Those who wrote letters to newspapers deemed anti-FBI were noted. The antiwar, college-age daughter of Rep. Henry Reuss (Dem,-WI), was placed under FBI surveillance. As was a 14-year-old boy whose case was dropped when a sane agent finally protested that he was only a kid. He rarely read a serious book but detested intellectuals and writers. William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Thomas Mann, Carl Sandburg, Truman Capote, Ray Bradbury, Hannah Arendt and Graham Green all merited watching while files on them were assembled.
Medsger includes the FBI’s manufacture of a “crime” falsely meant to indict 28 draft board raiders, which a Camden. NJ, judge wisely threw out. Hoover also informed a House Appropriations Subcommittee without a shred of evidence that the Berrigan brothers were leading a new and gigantic conspiracy in America and planning to “kidnap a highly placed government official [Henry Kissinger]. William Sullivan, the FBI’s third-ranking agent who supervised criminal activities, espionage, and intelligence, was stunned at his boss’ statement. “I don’t think we’ll even have a case against them, and they could have a case against us.” Earlier, at a United Press International editors meeting, Sullivan was asked, “Isn’t it true that the American Communist Party is responsible for the racial riots and all the academic violence and upheaval?” “No,” he answered, “it’s absolutely untrue.”
When Washington Post cartoonist Herblock mocked him Hoover ordered a file opened on him. Jimmy Wechsler, a critic and editor of the once liberal NY Post and Murray Kempton, the brilliant literary journalist who believed Hoover’s anti-Communist crusade was a travesty, earned their own files.
Perhaps more inexcusable was the prosecution and persecution of four non-political Boston men “framed” by the FBI for a killing they did not commit. “They were convicted and kept in prison for more than three decades—where two of them died—on the basis of the false testimony of an informer the FBI knew was lying, and who, worse, actually had been coached by the FBI in his lying,” notes Medsger, who points directly at Hoover, who, she writes, “was informed of, and approved, each step of the framing of the men.”
Toward the end of WWII, the British mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell offered his insight into every age’s Torquemadas and the terror and panic they were able to spread: “Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a Great Fear.”
Hoover, the propagator of fear, may or may not have been clinically paranoid but given the absence of any oversight, he could do just as he pleased to preserve his unparalleled power. Medsger dispenses with psychobabble and a full portrait of the man, leaving that to his able biographers Athan Theoharis, John Stuart Cox and Curt Gentry. Instead, she concentrates on how and why one man was able to generate so much anxiety among Americans.
For five years the FBI searched unsuccessfully for the Media burglars and produced 33,698 pages about the case. At the same time, many more conventional Americans may have asked themselves “Who would go to prison to save dissent?” And who would dare resist so powerful a government agency? Obviously, Medsger believes the Media raid and the positive things it produced was well worth the risks involved since for her it was really about the indefensible power of unnecessary government secrecy.
William Davidon died in 2013. John Raines, in 1971 a Temple University professor of religion, and his wife Bonnie, the parents of three young children, were among the burglars. Raines had been introduced to the Catholic Left peace movement by a nun, Sister Sarah Fahy,whose father was Judge Charles Fahey of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington. Looking back, John Raines rightly told Medsger,” It looks like we were terribly reckless people. But there was absolutely no one in Washington—senators, congressmen, even the president—who dared hold J. Edgar Hoover to accountable. It became pretty obvious to us that if we don’t do it, nobody will.”
6-7-13
Murray Polner: Review of Kenneth T. MacLeish’s "Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military Community" (Princeton, 2013)
tags: Princeton, books, book reviews, Murray Polner, Kenneth T. MacLeish, Making War at Fort Hood
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Murray Polner wrote “No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran” and edited and produced “When Can We Come Home?”-- about the thousands who refused to serve during in the military the Vietnam War and were exiled in foreign countries and also undergound
Fort Hood, in Texas, is named after Confederate General John Bell Hood, who lost his arm and leg at Gettysburg and Chickamauga but was defeated at Nashville and Franklin, Tennessee. It employs 50,000 troops and civilian employees and is close by the city of Killeen, population 130,000, and which, like most military satellite cities and towns, thrives because of its location, selling food, goods of all sorts, housing, and loans, some no doubt predatory. In fact, as Kenneth T. MacLeish writes, Killeen is “more prosperous than Austin, the state capital, home to a large university and a booming tech sector.” When he asked soldiers what impression off-base civilians mistakenly held of them he was told “That we have a lot of money.”
What McLeish, assistant professor of medicine, health, and society at Vanderbilt University, has done is explore the impact of our recent wars on the military men and women and their families and loved ones. For those who have never served in the military and been burdened by its demands, Making War at Forth Hood is a humane and penetrating look in some depth at a huge military base and its military and civilian inhabitants. Some of his material is very familiar, given the combat experiences of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. But what he does that is different is put it all into context.
MacLeish frankly admits at the outset that we -- presumably himself too -- Americans “don’t know as much as we think we do about what the violence done by and visited on soldiers means for them or for us “ Dime -- a pseudonym, like all his interviewees -- is a thirty-five-year-old veteran of Iraq, married with kids, who joined up at age thirty-one so his kids would have health insurance, who tells MacLeish the first time they met,” Don’t fuckin’ leave any of this shit out.”
“We did what we could,” Dime says. “We did it so you didn’t have to go over and do it,” the only rationale he and others can hold onto. After all, in war -- the unjust as well as the just -- virtually anything goes. Randy, a wounded mid-thirties NCO with PTSD tells him that the most painful yet most gratifying part of having fought in Iraq is really “hardest to convey to someone who hadn’t been there.” He then tells MacLeish, “The best thing was taking care of soldiers, nineteen and twenty years old,” adding “Most who are fighting are children -- seventeen-, eighteen-, and nineteen-year-old kids who haven’t really seen the world yet.” When the son of a former army friend assigned to his squad in Iraq is killed he is consumed with guilt that he could not save the boy. “Randy’s story,” MacLeish comments, “is just one of many I heard in which a type of nurturing, responsible, parental love frames the lives of soldiers’ lives cut short by war.” He returns to Dime. “Fuckin’ nineteen years old, getting their asses blown the fuck up. They haven’t even felt the warm embrace of a real woman and a real relationship. ... Sorry, that sucks. In my eyes, that blows. Never being able to have kids.” Or, as Randy put it, those young troops are “just doing what they’re told.”
More than a few of Fort Hood’s families have suffered separation anxiety, troubled kids, alcoholism, ruptured marriages, PTSD and tramautic brain injuries (TBI), inexplicable suicides, debt, and recurring tours into the war zone. But it happens amid the superficially normal atmosphere of everyday life where class distinctions are very evident: “distinctions between soldier and civilian, enlisted and officer, those who had been deployed and those who hadn’t, the injured and the healthy, the green and the experienced, the ignorant and the wise, the dedicated and the lazy, those who saw combat and those who stayed inside the wire, soldiers and spouses, and men and women,” groupings which are often fluid and in a constant state of flux.
Modern military life has often proved beneficial to African Americans but racial diversity sometimes collides with daily subtle affronts, which might mean comradely joshing or, as MacLeish overheard, some nasty racial remarks when whites were alone together. Of course the Army promotes a policy of color blindness where soldiers must and do work together and function as a team. But apparently women soldiers also cause some problems for some males and even female soldiers, the latter “deeply invested in the male homosociality of Army corporate culture” and eager to be accepted by males as equals. Adds MacLeish: “I heard from many male soldiers that they were disruptive of good order, relied on their femininity as a crutch, and were generally less capable,” a sentiment shared by “many” women troops MacLeish encountered. “Dana” a female soldier, told him, “I hate females so much.” A surprising comment, because since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, an estimated 280,000 women have served, many in combat situations.
Despite strained and broken marriages and adulterous affairs, and despite MacLeish’s detached yet affecting witness to troops saying farewell as they departed for the Middle East, there is also much contentment at Fort Hood. Life goes on. Many reunions are picture perfect, some marriages are OK, and often he found the wounded and hurt comforted and perhaps healed to some extent by the love of their partners.
All the same, as everyone by now should realize, people are changed by war. Even older men like “Childs,” a National Guard chaplain in his sixties, who was hurt and suffered from tramautic brain injury with recurrent “mood swings, memory loss, and Tourett’s-like swearing fits.” At home he had a mild but frightening stroke. When his wife spotted blood on one of his boots, the blood of a soldier who died near him, he told his uncomprehending wife. “That’s Browning’s blood.” “No it’s not,” she said. “You don’t love me anymore.” His response was that he wanted to return to Iraq to be with his fellow soldiers.
All this suffering and sacrifice for a war that was dreamed up and promoted by distant ideologues, many of whom had never served a day in the military. That may be a topic for debate among civilians but politics is rarely discussed at Fort Hood, at least not when MacLeish was near. However, Ernie, an infantry NCO, criticizes visiting politicians who while in Iraq pledged support for the troops but upon their return home spoke of reducing the money flow and pulling out.
Cindy, the wife of a helicopter pilot, organized a nonpartisan military wives group critical of the Army and government for denying treatment for PTSD and TBI veterans who had received bad conduct discharges. “Most military folks are at least a little uncomfortable with this level of politicization,” Cindy, a law school graduate, explains to MacLeish: “Everybody knows what it’s like to love somebody. It’s not political. We just want someone to take care of our husbands! We can speak when they can’t.” Or as Kristen, another wife said, “In regular everyday life, you don’t have to sit around and wait to hear whether or not your husband’s dead.”
More than 4,400 U.S. troops have died and about 32,000 wounded in a war that was initially supported by most Americans, a majority of both political parties, ubiquitous think tankers, and virtually the entire print and TV mass media. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed and about two-and-a-half million fled. Today a cruel internal battle rages in chaotic Iraq between religious and political sects. For all this, no American policy maker will ever be held accountable.
But more to the point, how will we find the many billions to care for these veterans’? A question that will no doubt remain unanswered and probably forgotten as the decades pass and more young men and women are forced to fight our inevitable future wars. MacLeish’s unrivaled study is, he angrily concludes, “an argument for recognition -- for collective and social responsibility for violence done in the name of preserving the sociality that we inhabit. The logic of the gift tells us that this responsibility will never expire, so why not let it take the form of an open question?”
Indeed.
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