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. ========================= 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.”

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. Share this: 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. __________ 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 0 0 0 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. Copyright 2014. All rights reserved.