Beyond the Numbers

Stewart catches Olmy napping, and the Israeli people speak out for justice (click to view)

A few weeks ago, I wrote that, no matter what we may think of its government's actions, Israel is a fairly healthy democracy--healthier, in fact, than ours is now. And here's further proof.

Next week, I'm going to take the wraps off some psychological research I've been doing into the leader of the free world. This is the kind of thing I have in mind. However, in case you haven't noticed, he's got plenty of company in the lunacy department: check out this nut and his baseball-is-like-Iraq rant. Do you think Jon Stewart is paying these people to feed him fresh material, right over C-Span?

I paid $25 to help get this ad about the Bush veto on the air; you may wish to have a look at it and decide for yourself.

Small money, indeed, but that's all I'm worth for now. But enough of all that, then. Here's a little piece about big money and statistics.

What can money not buy? It can buy the media; it can buy opinion or reputation; it can purchase a gleaming image, or a floating corporate island green in the middle of Rockefeller Center.

But it cannot buy sanity. In fact, when it comes to that, the more you use money, the further do you tend to drift from sanity. The more you rely on money to open doors around you, the further do you become unhinged within. The greater your dependence on purchase, the higher the cost to your true self. The slavish pursuit and use of money will inevitably trap you within a cage, whose four walls are conflict, conformity, estrangement, and cynicism.

Any one amid 300 million can be an American; any one among tens of thousands can become a representative of a great multi-national corporation; any one of about 2.5 million can be a millionaire; any one of billions can be a Christian, a Muslim, a Jew, or a Buddhist. But to become your true self, to fully actualize the destiny that was born within you--that takes more than numbers. And less.
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Tomorrow: Harry Potter and the State

"Fora Bush"

"He's a disaster...everywhere he goes he causes disaster..."--Brazilian protestor

Can there now be any question about the hatred this man has spawned, all around the world? Can Congress continue to treat him as if he actually has a scintilla of leadership in him? The people of South America, it is clear, are not fooled. Nor should we be any longer.

But I'd like to close out the week with a few thoughts on the Mideast, in the context of our look at Jimmy Carter's book. Like Carter, we have had plenty of criticism of Israel in this space, yet it cannot be denied that Israel is a democracy. In fact, their democracy may be more vibrant than ours has been these past few years. In his book, Carter talks about the loud and raucous debates that commonly broke out in the Israeli parliament, and the pleasure that even Begin took in these demonstrations.

Their press can be a real pain in the ass to the powerful, too. That, after all, is what a free press is all about. Today, one of their newspapers reported that Olmert had planned the invasion of Lebanon months before there was any attack made on his soldiers; so that it is now clear that the Israeli government did not respond to a provocation, but simply consummated a plan that had been on the drawing board for a long time (does this sound familiar, America?).

So today, I feel more united with the Israeli people than I ever have. Yesterday, I mentioned that the people are not represented by thugs like Olmert and his ilk. The BBC report mentions another Israeli news source, which did an opinion poll on Olmert. This survey found that 2% of respondents said they trusted the PM. Two per cent! Shit, that makes Bush seem like Barack Obama by comparison!

This is the wisdom of the people; the same grassroots insight that we are seeing evidenced in South America and even here. Next weekend, we will mark the 4th anniversary of the Iraq War, and organizations like UFPJ are gearing up for nationwide protests and events that will reveal once again the depth and breadth of public discontent with this tyrannical regime in Washington.

I truly hope it's as non-violent as it is enormous in its scope and expression. I've been roughed up by cops in my younger days, and I can tell you that it's a lousy, dehumanizing experience. Oh, and it hurts, too. But more to the point, it detracts from the message of public protest and civil disobedience, which is to assert the people's will for peace and true democracy on the smug power of corporate government.

According to most polls, nearly three-quarters of Americans are now either partially or totally disgusted with the Bush tyranny. In Israel, well above 90% have had enough of the murder and slavery practiced by the Olmert regime. In his book, Jimmy Carter describes clearly much of what has so enraged the Israeli people against their government:

In addition to cutting off about 200,000 Palestinians in Jerusalem from their relatives, property, schools, and businesses, the wall is designed to complete the enclosure of a severely truncated Palestine, a small portion of its original size, compartmentalized, divided into cantons, occupied by Israeli security forces, and isolated from the outside world. In addition, a network of exclusive highways is being built across even these fragments of the West Bank to connect the new Greater Israel in the west with the occupied Jordan River valley in the east, where 7,000 Jews are living in twenty-one heavily protected settlements among about 50,000 Palestinians who are still permitted to stay there. The area along the Jordan River, which is now planned as the eastern leg of the encirclement of the Palestinians, is one of Palestine's most lucrative and productive agricultural regions. Most of its inhabitants were forcibly evicted in 1967, and the Israelis have not allowed these original families to return.

The people know that their security is not furthered by tyrants; it is only endangered the more a tin pot corporate junta like the Halliburton presidency or the apartheid paranoia of the Olmert regime is allowed free reign.


Joseph Wilson spoke for many of us in his interview with Keith Olbermann in the wake of the Libby verdict, when he mentioned the "abuse of the public trust" that is the common element to all these depredations by corporate, fundamentalist governments against humanity and justice. This week--in South America, in Israel, and here in America--the public is raising its voice and demanding an end to that abuse of its trust, and a calling to account of all those who, for the sake of power and profit, betray the responsibility that comes with public service.

"The Wall as Prison"

Here's a telling snippet from Monday's White House press briefing; the discussion is about the latest in the long train of the incompetencies and oversights of tyranny, the Reed Army Hospital scandal—you might call it the military's version of Katrina-FEMA:

MR. SNOW: ...So we take a very exhaustive look at this. It is very important to figure out what's wrong, and get it fixed. And the President is committed to that.
Q But the President hasn't said in any way, shape, or form, this is my responsibility, this is on me?
MR. SNOW: Okay, well, I'll take the rhetorical flourish under advisement.

In other words, the admission of failure, even of simple error, is still, to this administration, beneath one's lorgnette to even discuss. Anyone who suggests that it might help for the powerful to start admitting to their mistakes is lightly accused of engaging in "rhetorical flourishes." It has gone so far past the point of revulsion that I can no longer come up with an appropriate rhetorical flourish of disgust to do it all justice. So we may leave it there, I suppose, but with a reminder that what follows below is all related to the sacrifices that these soldiers of ours have made, only to be treated little better than POWs in an enemy camp once they come home wounded from their service.
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Introduction: check here for the results of the latest worldwide poll on public perception of various nations. Israel, Iran, and the U.S. rank #1, 2, and 3 for "most negative image." This may help to explain much of what follows.

I live in a true melting-pot style neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY. On my block, there are Chinese, Italians, Poles, Russians, and of course, Arabs. Most of the folks here are, in fact, Palestinian or Lebanese. The memory of 9/11 is still painfully fresh here, because we unwittingly harbored one of the terrorists, about a block and a half from where I am sitting now.

I forget the guy's name, but I remember recognizing his face when someone showed me a grainy picture of him in the Daily News, about a week after the attacks. He had lived among us for months, and no one was the wiser. FBI-looking types were here for a long time after that—maybe they still come around now, though more furtively and in fewer numbers than they did 5 and a half years ago.

This is to introduce what is to follow this week, so that you know how we came to our little book of the month selection here. One day, a few weeks back, a Lebanese fellow I know from the neighborhood handed me a book. I'm not going to identify him except to note that, like many of his countrymen here in Kensington, he has a deep personal history in the Mideast and its conflicts; and he is one of the most patriotic, as in pro-American, people that I know.

So he handed me a book and said, "Brian, if you want to know what's truly going on over there—you know, in the Mideast—please read this man's book. This is the most accurate account of what's happened there and what's going on now that I've seen."

I've been reading bits and pieces from this book—Jimmy Carter's Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid, but have been hesitant to write about it, because as much as I respect my Lebanese friend, I thought maybe he was pursuing a private agenda. Then something else happened.

Another friend came by one evening to pick up his daughter, who had been playing with my kid that day. He's Jewish, and he saw the book lying on my desk. "Ah, you're reading Carter's new book? I haven't read it myself, but I hear it's very accurate historically and has a lot to teach us about what's going on there."

I asked him if he found the imputation that Israel engages in apartheid, or is headed in that direction, offensive.

"No, not at all," he said. "After all, Israel is a country with a government and politicians who are trying to gain and hold power—you think they care what Americans think of them? Jimmy Carter has always stood firmly for Israel's right to exist; he just doesn't think they should dominate the region."

Indeed, as I came near the end of the book, I found Carter's list of "key requirements" for peace. Bullet point A of these reads as follows:

The security of Israel must be guaranteed. The Arabs must acknowledge openly and specifically that Israel is a reality and has a right to exist in peace, behind secure and recognized borders, and with a firm Arab pledge to terminate any further acts of violence against the legally constituted nation of Israel.

So why was this guy attacked as he was for this book? One FOX News pundit openly accused Carter of plagiarizing "his" maps! And an entire chorus of others called Carter's book "shameful" and an "attack against Israel". Those were the reasonably civil voices raised against this book; I won't even bother to cite what has been heard from many others since last December.

But one criticism I can't find of Carter's book is any fault with its history. More than half the book, I'd say, is a recounting of the history relating to the current nexus of conflict as it exists now (Carter was writing in 2006, amid the most recent occupation of Lebanon). Of course, since Carter himself was at the center of much of this history, as President during the talks that led to the Camp David accords, his accuracy is hardly surprising, though it is noteworthy.

I have discovered through personal experience that people who have the clearest view of the past tend to be right about the present and even the future. So overall, I found Carter's book to be just as my Lebanese friend had predicted—a lucid, balanced, and passionate plea for sanity and diplomacy before it becomes too late for peace to have a chance. Indeed, I found none of the supposed over-the-top hatchet job on Israel that the mass media (most of whom probably hadn't read it) reported. If anything, Carter is especially harsh on—guess who—the American government, as in this:

All Arab neighbors must pledge to honor Israel's right to live in peace...The United States is squandering international prestige and goodwill by unofficially condoning or abetting the Israeli confiscation and colonization of Palestinian territories.

Meanwhile, the killing, the escalation of violence , and the insanity of conflict over 40-year old wounds continue apace—right in today's news.

We'll have more on Jimmy Carter's book later this week. Meanwhile, if you have thoughts on the matter, even if it's to call me a friend of the terrorists (I've heard it before), by all means post a comment.