reed writes

It’s probably best not to criticize Israel and if you do, it’s wise to keep in mind the following names…former U.S. Senator Charles Percy, former U.S. Senator William Fulbright, former U.S. Undersecretary of State George Ball, former Republican Representative Paul Findlay, former congressman Paul (Pete) McLoskey, former Chicago Sun Times syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer and that’s just a few of them.

What those people all have in common is one thing: they either suggested a more balanced approach to Middle East policy by the United States, or criticized Israeli policy in public. They were then targeted by AIPAC, the America-Israel Political Action Committee. All were branded as anti-Semitic enemies of Israel.

Miami News editor Howard Kleinberg wrote in an editorial that “I can’t remember more outside pressure on anything than I have on Georgie Anne Geyer’s columns on Israel…Geyer’s antagonists have portrayed her not only as anti Israel, but anti-Semitic as well; ‘Frau Geyer’ some of them call her.”

The result of the AIPAC pressure means that none of the American media left or right, take a balanced approach to Middle Eastern affairs and very seldom ever print or broadcast critical analysis of anything Israel does.

So listen to George Bush and watch what you say kiddies.

An Eye For an Eye Makes the Whole World Blind

Israel has always said that while scripture calls for “an eye for an eye”, Israel has always taken two eyes for an eye. Sooner or later the belief has been, the eye-takers will learn their lesson.

The difficulty lies in identifying just who the “eyetakers” are exactly.

Palestinian refugees believe that they were the first to lose an eye, when they lost their homes. That would also be the view of Noam Chomsky and others who are often described as “self-hating” Jews.

Israel’s leaders contend that the Palestinians and their sympathizers are wrong…it was Jewish eyes which were taken first..by the Germans.

Palestinians respond that they had nothing to do with German eyetaking.

This has been the germ at the heart of the Middle East and Palestine/Israel now, for more than half a century.

It seems that taking “an eye for an eye” or even two eyes for an eye hasn’t worked in the past and it’s unlikely to work this time.

Half the problem with this approach to things is that in the game of eyetaking, the takers often cannot distinguish between those eyes which are guilty and those which are innocent.

The other half is that there can be unintended consequences to the eye-taking business. It was Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982…when Ariel Sharon was after Arafat’s eyes…that the Shi’ites of Lebanon gave birth to Hezbollah.

The eye-taking philosophy has, for the past half century- on both sides of the divide-shed what must amount to metric tonnes of blood, produced stacks of lost limbs and enormous piles of corpses…and for what?

To bring the satisfaction of vengeance?

To “teach a lesson”?

To bludgeon the recalcitrant into submission?

To be a deterrent?

I fear that once again, as in so many conflicts throughout the history of humankind, religious exclusivity is at the core of what’s happening now.

Hezbollah, which claims to be acting in sympathy with the Palestinians, calls itself “the Party of God” and the government of Israel bases its actions and finds justification for its approach to Defence in scripture.

Meantime the innocents are losing their sight, the ranks of the disaffected are growing, and those who might be in a position to help- are- as liberal catnip points out in herr blog- laughing.

I’d say God help us, but at present I’m well on my way to becoming an agnostic.

I’ve just been reading about the charges laid against a young American soldier in connection with the rape and killing of a young Iraqi woman. In the preamble to the charges it’s noted that the 21-year-old American suffers from a “personality disorder”. Because of that he had received an honourable discharge and that’s why he is being tried in a U.S. civilian court. It may be that the Americans have lowered their standards for military service so low that a number of men and women with various illnesses are being admitted.

2 months ago the U.S. army signed up an 18-year-old autistic man and his father had to go to court to have him released from a contract he did not understand.

We don’t know how many other marginal cases there are in the American military but quite possibly there are many many others.

The responsible figures in this tragedy are the men and women who led their country into this mess.

This is precisely why the U.S. government refused to sign onto the idea of an International Criminal Court. They fear that prosecutions for war crimes could reach up quite high into their government. Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, for example, approved the illegal bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War…in fact there’s a case to be made that the whole Vietnam invasion was entirely illegal.

Remember that the German officials at Nuremberg were not charged with the crime of genocide…they were accused quite simply of “Planning and Waging an Aggressive War” full stop. Several high officials were found guilty on that charge and were hung.

George W. Bush and Tony Blair have a great deal to answer for…and no doubt, they will be tried in absentia by some court somewhere. Certainly these people will not escape the judgement of history.

It’s true that part of any soldier’s training involves a brief course in desensitization, with respect to both the “collateral damage” of civilian deaths and the possibility of “friendly fire” deaths. So there’s a tendency to view death as a normal part of military activity. These rapists and killers knew what they did was wrong, but most of them were able to live with it.

There is also, of course, the inherent prejudice of North Americans and Western Europeans against those we consider inherently inferior. Canadians need to ask themselves how it is that these rather ordinary, undistinguished and not very intelligent men like George Bush, Tony Blair and Stephen harper are empowered to – as Randolph Bourne put it- “open the sluices and flood us with the sewage of the War Spirit”. We as citizens must bear some responsibility for what is done in our name.