Friday, September 28, 2007

FEAR ITSELF


by Malik Isasis























“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” - President Franklin Roosevelt



The corporate media has laid down the ground work for another Middle Eastern colonization grab by childishly dehumanizing the Iranian head of state President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with racist epithtets. He was called ‘evil’ and ‘Hitler” both cartoonish caricatures, but this is how the United States prefers to view people it deems evil. The corporate shills in the media not only gave Bush and Co. the pleasure of not having to speak with Ahmdinejad, but they illustrated that the propaganda against Iran was a success and that the politics of fear has again won the day.

The Democratically ‘lead’ congress is still being lead by the nose by the Republican Party because the Democratic Party is unable to comprehend that they were voted into power to counter the despotism that infected the Republicans during their absolute reign for six years. The Democrats have internalized the Republican Party’s propaganda of them, which is being weak on issues of national security, poor stewards of the economy and that Democrats are culturally immoral. As evidence to the contrary, skewers the Republican Party over the open flames of the hell of their making, the Democrats consistently are proving at least one of the Republican talking points correct: The Democratic Party is a weak alternative to their imperial aggression.

The Democrats have been so consumed by the fear of being called unpatriotic that they are willing helpers of shoveling the bodies of the dead and future dead soldiers into the Gears of War to win the approval of the Republicans, but instead of receiving approval for their obedience, the Democrats receive instead more emotional abuse. It is a sick cycle. The more the Democrats bend the more the Republicans psychically abuse them.

Bush and the Republican Party are strategically putting the Iraq occupation failure in the lap of the Democratic Party by saying they don’t support the troops and that they want to cut and run. So, no matter what happens the Democratic Party will receive the credit for Bush’s and the Republican Party’s policy failures.

Cowardice on Display

Moveon.org a liberal advocacy group called General Petreaus “General Betray Us” after Patreaus made a political decision to support Bush’ s perpetual occupation of the Iraqi people. The Republicans’ very effective echo chamber began to run in overdrive denouncing moveon.org as a far-left wing organization and began demanding that the Democrats disavow them.

"Democratic leaders must make a choice today: either embrace the character assassination tactics Moveon.org has leveled against the four-star general leading our troops in the fight against al Qaeda, or denounce it as disgraceful. [Senator Boehner].

[Notice how skillfully Boehner inserted al Qaeda as if to connect 911 to Iraq?]

Can you guess what the Democratic Party did?

The Senate voted on Thursday to repudiate an ad from MoveOn.org that referred to Gen. David Petraeus as “General Betray Us.” Democratic presidential front-runner Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) opposed the measure, while her closest competitor, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), missed the vote.

The Democrats obviously haven't learned the lessons from the Iraq invasion and subsequent occupation. Former Democrat, now Independent Neocon Despot Joseph Leiberman has wrote a non-binding Amendment No. 3017 or National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008. Purpose: "use of all instruments of United States national power in Iraq." The amendment declares the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization.

Can you guess how the Democratic Party voted?

Yesterday, the Kyl-Lieberman amendment passed with a vote of 76 to 22. There is a full list of the Senators who voted on the amendment at the U.S. Senate website. Peace Action stands against this, and any amendment, which we believe will further degrade U.S. relations with Iran and lead us into war. [US Senate vote breakdown].

US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates requested from Congress an additional amount of USD 42 billion, shoring up the 2008 budget allocated to fund the ongoing military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan to nearly USD 190 billion.

How do you think the Democrats will vote?

Based upon the pattern since their taking over congress, they’ll give Bush exactly what he wants. Strength, courage and wisdom have been subverted by fear.

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

THE DUAL MELTING POT


by BAR contributing editor Stephen Steinberg, Black Agenda Report























There is a "melting pot" of all the races of Europe in America, but it does not include African Americans. It may someday include light-skinned Hispanics, and everybody else but Blacks. The American paradigm of race requires that there be an "other" - and the other is Black people. That's what makes white people, white. African Americans for some time have been demonstrating that they reject assimilation into a house that does not want them, by taking on their own names and holidays. No one should be fooled by white youth embrace of Hip Hop culture - a form of commercial consumption, rather than political conversion. It ain't real.

This article is excerpted from Dr. Steinberg's book, Race Relations: A Critique, published in September by Stanford University Press. The text preceding the excerpt criticizes sociologists for advancing "an epistemology of wishful thinking" that denies the reality of the melting pot.

"....Like it or not - and the dissent of the multiculturalists is clear - assimilation is the wave of the future, the inexorable byproduct of forces put into motion by the act of immigration itself."

Admittedly, this is a sweeping conclusion. While I believe that it captures the main thrust of American ethnic history, it does not tell the whole story. In particular, it does not account for the African American exception. Here we speak of a group that came to America in slave galleys, not immigrant vessels. While successive waves of immigrants flowed into the country, first to settle the land mass and later to provide labor for burgeoning industries, blacks were trapped in the South in a system of feudal agriculture. Even in the North, a rigid color line excluded them from the manufacturing sector, except for a few dirty, backbreaking, and dangerous jobs that whites spurned. In effect, the industrial revolution was "for whites only," depriving blacks of the jobs and opportunities that delivered Europe's huddled masses from poverty.

This was the historic wrong that was supposed to be remedied by landmark civil rights legislation in the 1960s. However, by the time large numbers of blacks arrived in northern cities, the manufacturing sector was undergoing a long-term decline, reflecting the impact of laborsaving technology and the export of jobs to low-wage countries. Not only did blacks encounter a far less favorable structure of opportunity than did immigrants, not only did they suffer from the economic consequences of past discrimination, not only did they continue to encounter pervasive racism in the world of work, but they also encountered intense labor competition from yet another huge wave of immigrants. Ironically, most of these immigrants would not be here but for the civil rights movement that led to the overhaul of immigration policy in 1965.

The standard cant is that immigrants take jobs that blacks don't want, but this is a partial truth at best. Immigrants have made inroads into every segment of the workforce, including coveted jobs in the health care industries, construction, building maintenance, light manufacturing, and even government service, which has long been the staple of the black middle class. Nor are immigrants any longer restricted to a few gateway cities. Increasingly, they are penetrating all regions of the nation and all segments of the American economy, as is their aspiration and their right. Without doubt the continuing flow of immigrants has been a boon to the national economy, but it has also dealt a blow to African Americans who were poised for progress in the wake of the Civil Rights Revolution.

Notwithstanding their "racial" differences and the many impediments that they confront, the new immigrants have been able to bypass blacks on the proverbial road to success. As I argued above, this is also a road that ultimately leads into the melting pot. It is a mark of the melting pot's failure that African Americans, whose roots on American soil go back to the founding of the nation, are today more segregated than recent immigrants from Asia and Latin America. According to Douglas S. Massey, "no other ethnic or racial group in the United states has ever, even briefly, experienced such high levels of residential segregation." What clearer manifestation of African American exceptionalism could there be?

All the while that Zangwill's melting pot was "roaring and bubbling," and Europe's "races" were amalgamating into whites, thirty states had antimiscegenation laws proscribing marriages between blacks and whites. Sixteen of these states still had these laws on the books when the Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional in 1967. Even today, at a time when marriage across racial lines has been soaring for Asians and Latinos, it has inched up only slightly for blacks (to 6 percent for males and 2 percent for females).

Not only do blacks bear the brunt of exclusion, but there is also evidence that many blacks actively reject the melting pot. At least this can be inferred from baby naming practices. In A Matter of Taste, Stanley Lieberson found that black and white naming conventions were similar early in the century, but diverged sharply after the rise of Black Nationalism in the 1960s.

Blacks developed a custom of finding unique names, often derived from African languages, or coining entirely new names. A recent study based on California's birth data found that "more than 40 percent of black girls were given names that were not given to even one of the more than 100,000 white girls born in the state the same year." In New York City, the five most popular names for black girls in 2005 were Kayla, Jada, Madison, Destiny, and Brianna. For boys they are Joshua, Elijah, Justin, Jayden, and Isaiah. With the exception of Justin, which is popular among Asians and Latinos, these names have little currency among other groups. If it is true, as I contended earlier, that the naming practices among Asians and Latinos indicate that these groups are on a path into the melting pot, then the naming practices among blacks suggest the opposite: that blacks are defiantly running away from the melting pot. Not without penalty, however. Recent studies report that employers often discriminate against applicants who have conspicuously "black" names.

There are other ways in which it can be said that blacks are "running away from the melting pot." At the same time that immigrants were losing their ancestral languages, blacks were forging an African American dialect, one that, according to sociolinguists, has all of the defining attributes of a legitimate language. Another example is the emergence of Kwanzaa as an African American variant of Christmas. As Elizabeth Pleck has shown, this was the invention of black nationalists in the 1970s, but over time has evolved into a celebration of family and blackness. By themselves, these developments may not be all that important, but they are important insofar as they reflect deeper trends of identity, culture, and community.

Here we confront the major point of difference between African Americans and immigrants so far as the issue of culture is concerned. For immigrants, the ethnic community was a transitional phenomenon that facilitated their movement, geographically and socially, into the mainstream of society. To be sure, economically mobile immigrants exhibited a pattern of resegregation, as Louis Wirth observed, as they attempted to rebuild churches and other institutions that were essential to their collective survival. They did not simply flop into the melting pot and melt into oblivion. However, we now have the verdict of history, though some will still deny it: these ethnic communities were destined to a gradual and inexorable decline across generations.

For African Americans it was another matter altogether: the ghetto was a permanent fact of life. And here we confront a great historical paradox - for these ghettos, the enforced home of the nation's racial pariahs, also spawned and nourished a vibrant African American subculture. Again, the contrast with immigrants is striking, as Bob Blauner argued in Racial Oppression in America.

Whereas the immigrant ghettos allowed ethnic cultures to flower for a period, in the long term they functioned as way stations on the road to acculturation and assimilation. But the black ghetto has served as a central fixture of American racism's strong resistance to the assimilation of black people. Thus the ghetto's permanence has made it a continuing crucible for ethnic development and culture building.

Thus, the supreme paradox: precisely because of its permanence, the ghetto functions as "a continuing crucible for ethnic development and culture building." It is precisely because no other ethnic or racial group in the United States has ever experienced such prolonged levels of residential segregation that the ecological and social prerequisites did not exist for ethnic persistence and renewal.

Other differences ensue from the simple fact that blacks were not immigrants. Unlike immigrants, who clung to vestiges of cultures ripped from their moorings in distant places, black culture evolved out of the lived experience of black people on American soil. Instead of isolated fragments selected precisely because they did not interfere with mainstream American culture, black culture is an integral part of the everyday lives of black people. In short, it is a living culture, one that displays a vitality and dynamism that is generally lacking among the atrophying cultures of the nation's immigrant groups.

Ironically, generations of sociologists have taken the opposite position, on the one hand valorizing the rich cultures of the nation's immigrants, and on the other, holding that blacks were "only white men with black skin, nothing more, nothing less," as Kenneth Stampp wrote in the preface to The Peculiar Institution. The further irony is that this position had liberal intentions. It was the way that white liberals avowed that blacks are "just like us" but for the happenstance of skin color. It was meant as a compliment, however much it was predicated on myopia and condescension.

This is how Nathan Glazer came to commit a major gaffe. In Beyond the Melting Pot, in which he and Daniel Patrick Moynihan declared that ethnic groups survived the melting pot, Glazer wrote: "it is not possible for Negroes to view themselves as other ethnic groups viewed themselves because - and this is the key to much in the Negro world - the Negro is an American and nothing else. He has no values and culture to guard and protect." This was 1963, before the upsurge of black militancy and the eruption of the "soul movement" that celebrated and rejuvenated black culture. By 1970 Glazer came under fierce attack, and in the second edition, he confessed, albeit in fine print, that his statement had given him "considerable pain." All that he meant, he now explained, was that blacks have no foreign culture to guard and protect. However, this only compounds the error! These foreign cultures - precisely because they were foreign - were destined to a gradual but inexorable decline. In contrast, black culture is a bona fide example of ethnogenesis - literally, the genesis of new cultural forms that evolved through interaction with American culture, a far cry from the fraught attempts of immigrants to cling to shards of the past. Moreover, as an indigenous product of the American experience, black culture continues not only to thrive in segregated black communities but also to exert a powerful influence on mainstream American culture.

In an edited collection, Signifyin(g), Sanctifyin', and Slam Dunking, Gena Dagel Caponi and her collaborators make a powerful case that there is - always has been - a distinctive African American aesthetic that runs through music, dance, sport (hence the inclusion of slam dunking), and oral expression. The vitality and dynamism of this aesthetic derives, not from tutelage, but from the lived experience of ordinary people. This is captured in an evocative passage from an autobiographical book by Johnny Otis, a white rhythm and blues artist who grew up in a black neighborhood in Berkeley, California:

"I never had to instruct my horn players how to phrase a passage.... The music grew out of the African American way of life. The way mama cooked, the Black English grandmother and grandfather spoke, the way daddy disciplined the kids - the emphasis on spiritual values, the way Reverend Jones preached, the way Sister Williams sang in the choir, the way the old brother down the street played the slide guitar and crooned the blues, the very special way the people danced, walked, laughed, cried, joked, got happy, shouted in church. In the final analysis, what forms the texture and adds character to the music is the African American experience."

Clearly, none of this was within Nathan Glazer's orbit of experience when he wrote that blacks have "no values and culture to guard and protect," or when he amended this to imply, contradicting his own analysis of white ethnics, that the only "real" culture is a foreign culture.

In contrast to Glazer's vacuity, consider the account of the writer John Edgar Wideman: "our stories, songs, dreams dances, social forms, style of walk, talk, dressing, cooking, sport, our heroes and heroines provide a record... so distinctive and abiding that its origins in culture have been misconstrued as rooted in biology." Indeed, Robert Park, the "father" of the race relations school at the University of Chicago, speculated that blacks had a distinctive temperament that was transmitted biologically, and accounted for their "genial, sunny, and social disposition."

From Park through Glazer, white sociology failed to apprehend - indeed, could not know - that there is a distinctive African American culture that has roots in Africa and evolved on American soil, first under slavery and later in those very ghettos that white sociology portrayed mainly as sites of social disorganization and cultural pathology. "That an African American aesthetic not only survives but thrives and has been the vanguard of American cultural expression," Caponi writes, "is a powerful testament to its vitality and power."

The contemporary manifestation of this vibrant African American aesthetic is the emergence of hip hop culture, and its florescence into a cultural phenomenon that embraces music, dress, and graphic art. The profound impact of hip hop culture on white youth has aroused consternation, however. "What are we of make of a young white man from the suburbs," Charles Gallagher asks, "who listens to hip-hop, wears baggy hip-hop pants, a baseball cap turned sideways, unlaced sneakers and an oversized shirt emblazoned with a famous NBA player who, far from shouting racial epithets, lists a number of racial minorities as his heroes?" It is tempting to see this as an important cultural exchange, one that marks a bridging of the racial divide, as white youth identify with black performers and emulate the black idiom of dress and self-presentation. Are white youth in a sense "becoming black"? Does it imply a breach of the color line, potentially with political consequences as these youth identify with the racial "other" and with the black cause?

Critics think otherwise. In an incisive article entitled "Blackophilia and Blackophobia: White Youth, the Consumption of Rap Music, and White Supremacy," Bill Yousman contends that the white dalliance with hip hop culture is about consumption and self-gratification, and hardly makes whites allies in the struggle for racial justice. On the contrary, it reinforces the "otherness" of blacks, and like black minstrelsy in past generations, provides white youth with a template for projecting their own sexual anxieties and illicit desires. To quote Yousman: "the images that White youth consume most voraciously are images of Black violence, Black aggression, and Black misogyny and sexism. These are the very same images that both mainstream conservative politicians and far-right white supremacists invoke to justify regressive social policies or violent ‘reprisals.'"

Another astute critic, Robin Kelley, writes that gangsta rap "is a place of adventure, unbridled violence, erotic fantasy, and/or an imaginary alternative to suburban boredom." For blacks this culture may represent a form of political resistance and protest against the ravages of life in the hood. But for whites it amounts to voyeurism from the safe distance of white privilege. As Yousman writes, "it is far too easy for White youth to adopt the signifiers of Blackness when they do not have to deal with the consequences of Blackness in America." Nor can it be assumed that these white youth even hear the same music, or rather derive the same meaning from it. Consider Richard Wright's penetrating observation some sixty-five years ago: "our music makes the whole world dance.... But only a few of those who dance and sing with us suspect the rawness of life out of which our laughing-crying tunes and quick steps come; they do not know that our songs and dances are our banner of hope flung desperately up in the face of a world that has pushed us to the wall."

Wright's eloquence provides a conceptual lens for examining ongoing debates about the impact of hip hop culture on black youth. Some commentators go so far as to place the blame for the myriad of problems that confront black youth on hip hop culture. A recent example is Orlando Patterson's op-ed piece in the New York Times under the self-contradictory title, "A Poverty of the Mind." Reacting to a number of recent studies documenting the crisis among black youth in terms of schooling and jobs, Patterson asserts that the "standard explanatory fare" of structural factors fails to explain the poor school performance of black men, who also, or so he alleges, pass up low-wage jobs that immigrants are willing to take. He locates the blame in black subculture, specifically the "cool-pose culture" that is "simply too gratifying to give up." According to Patterson, "For these young men, it was almost like a drug, hanging out on the street after school, shopping and dressing sharply, sexual conquests, party drugs, hip-hop music and culture, the fact that almost all the superstar athletes and a great many of the nation's best entertainers were black." Patterson calls this "the Dionysian trap," an erudite spin on obsolete culture-of-poverty theory.

Instead of realizing that gangsta rap is a culture of alienation, a wail against the hopelessness and degradation of the inner-city poor, "our banner of hope flung desperately up in the face of a world that has pushed us to the wall," Patterson, from his ivory tower, inverts cause and effect, and posits hip hop culture as a source of the overwhelming problems that beset poor black youth. The effect is to blame these powerless people for their own degradation, and even to begrudge our nation's youthful outcasts the ingenuity and creative energy that drive hip hop culture, providing some outlet and solace for what the legacy of slavery has wrought.

The conclusion is unavoidable: America's melting pot has been inclusive of everybody but blacks. Or to put it another way, we have a dual melting pot: one for blacks, and the other for everybody else. This should come as no surprise. Dualism has always been the ruling principle of race in the United States: it began with the dualism between slave and free labor, which itself was predicated on an ideological dualism between civilized and primitive man. The dualism of Jim Crow. The dualism of segregated housing, schools, cultural institutions, and the health care system. The dualism in the sphere of everyday life, where blacks and whites live in different worlds. Not to speak of the internal duality that Du Bois wrote about so luminously - the double-consciousness of being both an American and a Negro, "two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body." The visionaries who imagine getting "beyond race," "beyond ethnicity," "beyond multiculturalism" are sadly out of touch with the events on the ground in the here and now. Perhaps the day will come when their books will be lauded for their prescience, but at this moment they seem strangely removed from the world we inhabit.

A number of recent writers contend that there is an evolving "black" melting pot that will absorb all of those groups who are phenotypically "black," including African Americans, Caribbean immigrants, Afro-Latinos, and African immigrants. To be sure, these groups resist being lumped together, and insist on being defined by nationality or ethnicity. This was Mary Waters's finding in her study of West Indian immigrants and their children in New York City, but to her surprise Waters also found that "hardly anyone saw any problems with intermarrying with American blacks." Afro-Latinos are marrying along racial lines as well. Among U.S.-born Puerto Rican males aged twenty-five to thirty-four, 54 percent of those who self-identified as white married non-Latino whites. The figure for those who identified as non-white was only 27 percent, suggesting a tendency to "melt" along racial lines.

If this analysis is right, and groups that are phenotypically black are destined to merge through intermarriage, the other melting pot will include everybody but blacks, including Asians and light-skinned Latinos. This means that the ballyhooed American melting pot is actually a racist formation, divided along racial lines. It is a testament to the unremitting impact of racism, of a nation that has stubbornly refused to confront its legacy of slavery and to include African Americans in the circle of "we." I am tempted to say that the dual melting pot reflects a failure of American democracy, but when we remember that two centuries of slavery and a century of Jim Crow were sanctioned by all three branches of our government, it should come as no surprise that our vaunted democratic institutions have failed to forge the basis for genuine racial reconciliation.

Just think: it required a long and bloody grassroots struggle in the second half of the twentieth century just to attain the rights of citizenship that were supposedly secured by the Reconstruction amendments and the Civil Rights act of 1875 that guaranteed blacks equal treatment in all public accommodations. If this is "progress," it is progress of a people on a historical treadmill.

Stephen Steinberg teaches in the Urban Studies Department at Queens College. His most recent book Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy received the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship. In addition to his scholarly publications, he is a frequent contributor to New Politics. Email at ssteinberg1@gc.cuny.eduThis email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it .

Monday, September 24, 2007

BIG, BAD BOOGEY MAN


by Malik Isasis






















UPDATED: 9/25/07

MSNBC Debates President Ahmadinejad's visit.

United States' government and corporate media blames Iran for shipping weapons and arming terrorists, however, the United States has armed militias and terrorists and has lost: · 110,000 AK-47s · 80,000 pistols · 135,000 bits of armour. It is more than likely that US' supplied weapons are killing US soldiers and countless civilians.
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In an age where war is peace, fiction is fact, and diplomacy is determined ignorance, it is no wonder that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to New York City is causing protestation amongst those who’ve been spoon fed propaganda on Iran by Bush and Co. and the corporate media.

"He has American blood on his hands," said City Council member David Weprin, "as he has aided the insurgency in Iraq by sending weapons and manpower for the sole purpose to kill Americans."

Councilman Weprin is in a line of political lemmings making an incredible leap of logic off the cliff. If Mr. Weprin were to care about getting beyond the headlines, and take his misplaced outrage down a notch, or bothered getting off his ass and reading he would have discovered that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki asked for help from Iran.

The prime minister said his three-day visit aimed at enlisting Iranian help in calming Iraq's turmoil — though he has not said whether he was pressing Iran on the U.S. accusations.

Iranian leaders vowed their support for Iraq's security, but in their talks with Maliki they stuck by their stance that real peace would only come when U.S. forces pull out.

"Establishment of peace and tranquility in Iraq depends on withdrawal of occupiers and their avoidance of interfering in Iraq," Iranian Vice President Parviz Davoodi said after meeting Maliki.



Doesn’t the U.S. support its allies with munitions, planes and such? Isn't the blood of Palestinians on our hands? If Iran feels that the United States is an occupying force and Iraq is its ally, it makes sense that they would be sending weapons and giving tactical support. The United States can’t have it both ways; you can’t occupy a sovereign nation and not expect people and their allies to rise up against the subjugation.

There are many examples of this throughout history. China and Russia supported North Vietnam in the American War against Vietnam, and again in the Korean War, just as the United States supported the Bin Laden in the 1980s to defeat the occupying forces of Russia in Afghanistan.

New American Diplomacy

The corporate media and the Bush administration will again blow an opportunity to gain the world’s confidence in the United States’ to emerge from its puerile stupor. Instead, the corporate media will act like a child imitating her parents by calling the Head of a State, names. They’ll say stupid shit like, “Ahmadinejad has, in many ways, the same ideology as those that attacked us on Sept. 11. If he cared about the United States so much and wanted to pay his respects to ground zero, where was he after that horrible day?”, and " 'TEHRAN'TING LUNATIC … bloody handed villain … bearded blowhard" —New York Post. "Iranian thug … madman" — New York Daily News. "Maniac" — Republican Rep. Vito Fossella of Staten Island.

Hey now, I have a beard.

This childish mocking of a Head of State has replaced real diplomacy. Now, Bush can sit on his lazy ass and watch the corporate media excoriate Ahmadinejad, and Bush will get away with it again, of not having to personally meet with a world leader who disagrees with him. He’s a snake oil salesman who is selling flood protection coverage to people living in a desert and large portions of the public are buying the plan.

The United States has to speak in a way that others can hear, and stop calling people names and sticking its tongue out. The corporate media and politicians need to grow up, just like the tooth fairy, boogey men do not exist.

Friday, September 21, 2007

HOSTILE ENTITY


by Malik Isasis



















Just how far is the Israeli government ready to go to continue its policy of colonization of the Palestinian people? On Wednesday, September 19, 2007 the Israeli government declared Gaza a “Hostile Entity”, which will give the Israeli government the green light to shut off food supplies, electricity, and water to 1.5 millions Palestinians. Israel's new policy is likely to exacerbate an already humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip.

Is Israel calling the trees, water, rocks and soil of the Gaza Strip, hostile? If my calculations are right, and it’s not the topography that is hostile, it must be the 1.5 million people.

The decision to declare the Palestinians a “Hostile Entity” was reportedly due to the frequent rocket attacks by individuals and or groups in the Gaza Strip. The Turkish Press reported, ”Although the frequent rocket attacks launched from the Gaza Strip are rarely carried out by Hamas, Israel holds the group responsible, claiming it does nothing to stop them”.

Coincidently, the Missing in Action Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice emerged from hiding to pay a visit to Israel. She said Hamas was "indeed a hostile entity. It is a hostile entity to the US as well," then she stuck her head back up her ass.

Rice followed that statement with this, “[Washington]will not abandon the innocent Palestinians in Gaza and indeed will make every effort to deal with their humanitarian needs." Remember the 30-Day Israel-Lebanon War of August 2006? Rice refused to call a cease fire, stating instead, “false promise if it simply returns us to the status quo.” She added, “Syria knows what it needs to do and Hezbollah is the source of the problem.” Meanwhile, the Israeli Defense Forces were dropping U.S. made incendiary, bunker-busting bombs, and bombs laced with white phosphorous, which is a chemical agent that melts the skin like wax, on the civilian population of Lebanon.

Are Arabs and Muslims suppose to believe her when she says that the United States “will not abandon the innocent Palestinians in Gaza”? Why would they when she just referred to them as a “Hostile Entity?”

How is Hamas hostile to us? Have they attacked us? Is Israel the 51st state? Just curious.

Patterns of War




Just as Bush and Co. decided to call accused terrorists “Enemy Combatants”, the Israeli government has decided to call a State or Territory a “Hostile Entity”. The two almost sound alike don’t they? The corporate media doesn’t question these terms or declarations; they just go along with it. These declarations are specifically meant to dehumanize Arabs and Muslims so that the United States, and Israel can colonize, humiliate and subjugate them under the guise of fighting terror.

“Why are you sticking a probe in this man’s ass while hanging him upside down?”
“Enemy combatant, sir.”
“Carry on.”

“In other news, the Israeli Defense Forces continued its air campaign over Gaza, now referred to by Israel as a “Hostile Entity”. Thirty civilians were killed, most were children…O.J. Simpson was again acquitted for….”

Importance of Narrative: A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

Against all common sense and logic, maybe not, Israeli’s neocons and powerful lobbying group The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) are able to project the folklore of Israel’s as being a victim, but more importantly, like her guilt ridden big sister the United States, Israel feels it is exceptional. As noted in a paper titled, “Israel’s National Security and Myth of Exceptionalism” (Political Quarterly, Vol.114, No. 3, pp.409-434, Autumn 1999) by Gil Merom, “…Americans still believe today that they are inspired by an exceptional idealist creed.
A sense of exceptionalism may also serve collectives, the modern nation-state included, in other instrumental ways. When married to power, a notion of exceptionalism may generate aggression and violence (pp.409).


Built into this exceptionalism is the idea of innocence, benevolence. It is why Americans have difficulty with the idea that it could be a fundamentally white supremacist society, which is why African Americans are made to feel like their crazy when they point out policies and State sponsored violence against them or that the United States has effectively killed 1 million Iraqis under its occupation. The atrocities that were committed against Jews throughout history, specifically during World War II have made the State of Israel hypervigilent. It is difficult for many Jewry to imagine that the Israeli government's subjugation and daily humiliation of Arabs is nothing other than for their safety, rather than the government subjecting a people to some of the same oppression because of racism. Neither America nor Israel was inoculated from the human condition of oppressing the weak.

America is not innocent, or benevolent and neither is its little sister, Israel.

ALL THE RAGE


by Malik Isasis












The Republican Party, or as some in the African American community call them “The White Man’s Party” has passed its fanatical rightwing base’s audit and have been recertified as the racists pieces of shit that they proudly claim to be. The top tier Republican candidates for president all had scheduling conflicts and passed on the Black Forum Debate at Morgan State University, which was to be moderated by PBS’ Tavis Smiley.


"The frontrunners, specifically Mr. Romney, Mr. McCain and Mr. Guiliani, have said to us they will not be on stage at Morgan State University on September 27th. All the Democrats showed up in June, but the front running Republicans have said they will not be there. They have also told Univision that they will not be there for the Hispanic debate. So, collectively, what the Republican frontrunners have told both black and brown Americans is that we don't appreciate you, don't value your issues and you're not a priority to us."

The corporate media as disconnected, and nonsensical as ever has joined in on the tone of the Republican Party’s xenophobia. Here’s what I got out of this week's monitoring MSNBC, FOX NEWS and CNN: black and Arab people are hostile, belligerent; Mexicans are invading; and the Chinese are trying to kill Americans softly. CNN and Fox News are the worst offenders with daily coverage about illegal immigration, which is code for Mexicans and foreign imports, which is code for Chinese.

When Nothing Else Works

When nothing else works, fear.

Black People. Brown People. Yellow people will kill you.

The corporate media, right wing political operatives and the Republican Party are stoking the ignorance of their base, igniting white rage, and there’s nothing scarier in the world than scared white people.

There are 1 million dead in Iraq to prove it.

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

OH, BOY


by Malik Isasis























My grandmother use to say, “Lord, have mercy.” She said that when something terrible happened—like when as a child I got a fever of 103 degrees. Today after watching what is consider news, I found myself saying, “Lord, have mercy.” The corporate media are slobbering like Pavlov’s dogs as O.J. Simpson is back on stage to play the straw man for the white rage that is so prevalent in American culture.

O.J is not alone in the media orgy. Former Detroit Piston basketball player and current New York Knicks’ basketball coach/president Isaiah Thomas is also in the media mix. He has been accused of sexual harassment. Thomas’ court proceeding is being played out like a soap opera here in New York.

I’m not in the business of justifying anyone’s behavior, but the media are Klingons when it comes to black athletes and their pathologies. There is an assortment of admiration, resentment and racism at the core of their obsessive coverage and manufactured outrage.

Although it appears that O.J. Simpson may have been set up on kidnapping, and armed-robbery charges, the corporate media are lazy, and the nostalgia of having another O.J. Simpson trail is too tempting to set on the back burner and cover say, the occupation of Iraq.

The cottage industry as a result of O.J. Simpson spawned the awful mess that is Greta Van Susteren, who no matter what is going on in the world, continues to cover selectively, missing white girls.

If only corporate media investigated the Hurricane Katrina Aftermath with such vigor. The corporate media will allocate so-called reporters and newsreaders in a big waste of air time.

Lord, have mercy.

I’m done with giving this anymore life.

Don’t be fooled by the yellow brick road of distraction.

Bush is still out there.

Monday, September 17, 2007

HOW I BECAME WHITE


From the desk of White Correspondent, Callie Shanafelt

























Inter-racial friendship is one of the biggest struggles of my anti-racist journey. Ironically I think it’s also a crucial element to dismantling racism.

I’ve always been passionate about racial justice. Yet, as a young white girl in the suburbs of Seattle, the most radical racial justice theory that I was exposed to was “color-blindness.” I wanted to be friends with the few people of color around me, but culturally I was stripped of the tools to understand the differences.

I had one friend whose mother was white and father was black. Her parents weren’t together and she lived with her mother. We were friends throughout elementary school and jr. and during that time we were very similar culturally. I loved the difference in our skin tone, and because of the colorblind culture we were swimming in we never spoke of our racial differences. By the time we were in high school, she went to live with her father. In my eyes she had changed. Her friends were now predominately black, she started corn-rowing her hair and listening to music that I didn’t. Our friendship fell apart.

I later realized that I felt betrayed. I wanted her to fit into white culture so that we would be the picture of multiracial harmony. Of course this notion was racist. Color blindness had stripped us of the closeness to talk about these things as they happened.

After high school it didn’t take long for a person of color to knock me out of my color-blind stupor. She insisted, “If you don’t see color, you don’t see me.” So I passionately threw myself into “understanding” people of color. In many ways this was a crucial moment of my development. Unfortunately, I took it to the extreme and put all people of color up on a pedestal, which also lead to difficult relationships.

I had a mentor who I put on a particularly high pedestal. I was dying to join her in the way she thought. I quickly threw out any previously held convictions and espoused her beliefs. Many of those views I’ve kept to this day, but I learned the hard way that instead of appropriating her thoughts – I had to develop my own through experience. When my views developed differently than her's, it was pretty hard to watch the pedestal topple.

The other key lesson I’ve learned is that it is more important for me to understand myself culturally than it is to understand others.

Now I build friendships where I recognize and appreciate cultural differences, but the journey is never over. I feel like my biggest struggle is getting too comfortable but that is the beauty of growth; there will always be more to learn.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

SHITASTIC!


by Malik Isasis



















Shit’tas’tik, adjective, the exact opposite of fantastic, an observation typically delivered in an acerbic manner: President George W. Bush is shitastic.

On September 13, 2007, President Bush gave a speech on Iraq covering General Petraeus’ report. In the speech Bush tucked himself neatly into the folds of General Petraues’ ass and hid like the coward he has shown himself to be. The corporate media and the whores that are their punditry are pretending to be surprised that Bush has finally admitted that he has no plans to get out of Iraq. If they are genuinely surprised then they are as obtuse as I’ve suspected them to be. Then again, like politicians, these Washington pundits and newsreaders are driven by career advancement rather than advocacy. They have no interests in getting off the breast milk of complacency.

Colonization Are Us

The United States’ and Israel’s plans of settling Iraq to attempt to colonize both Iran and Syria are moving in slow motion right before our eyes. Just as Dr. Dan Plesch and Martin Butcher predicted in their paper, “Considering a War with Iran: A Discussion Paper on WMD in the Middle East”. In the paper, Plesch and Butcher writes:

General Wesley Clark claims that he became aware of the Bush Administration’s instructions concerning the overthrow of the Iranian regime in September 2001. He states that he was told this in the Pentagon by a serving General holding the order in his hand.

“He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, “I just got this down from upstairs” meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office -- “today.” And he said, “This that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”

In various forms, regime change or change of orientation favouring the US occurred in Iraq, Lebanon, Libya and Somalia in the ensuing six years. (pp. 6)


On September 12, 2007 Haaretz reported a strike against Syria.

Democrats Wanted

The Democratic Party has bought into Bush’s shitastic voyage, and now they find themselves no where to hide. They can no longer blame the despotic Republicans for their ideological imprisonment. The Democrats now have to take responsibility for their decision to go along with Bush to colonize Arab and Muslim people, or not by cutting funding to the occupation of Iraq.

Here’s a prediction: the Democrats will go along with the colonization effort because they confuse corporate media spin as the voice of the American people…and they are cowards.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

PIED PIPER…OF DEATH


by Malik Isasis























It didn’t take Nostradamus ability to predict that General Petraeus would come back and report progress and recommend a sustained occupation. One can read the political stunts of Bush and Co. in advance because they are as transparent as graffiti on the wall. Every time Bush opens his foul mouth, flies rush out from the rot within. Bush pathological lying has rotted his morality inside out. Yet, the corporate media report what he does with doe eyes and with the innocence of a child, repeatedly giving him all the benefit of the doubt in spite of the reality of the death and destruction he has begotten.

The corporate media is birthing another bastard child of Bush by referring to a so-called recommendation of General Petraeus of cutting the troop forces by 30,000.

WASHINGTON - President Bush will tell the nation this week he plans to reduce the American troop presence in Iraq by about 30,000 by next summer, but will condition those and further cuts on continued progress, The Associated Press has learned.

It’s another rouse. The military is so stretched thin that they need to reduce the levels in order to keep rotating troops in the rotisserie that is Iraq. The surge of the additional thirty thousand troops was not militarily sustainable from its inception. It was a short-term surge, these troops were already supposed to come back after the so-called surge. However, being the opportunistic leech that he is, Bush has coined the-already-planned-reduction as a reduction based off success of the surge. The corporate media knows this but report it as fact.

Are the corporate media that dumb? Probably not, they know exactly what they are doing. They are focusing their resources on furthering humiliating Brittany Spears. It’s all part of the conspiracy to distract while their parent companies take part in the raping and pillaging of the Middle East.

What Now?

What now Democratic Party? You too have been mesmerized by Bush playing of his flute of lies and have went out of your way to compromise when you’ve held all the cards. Bush and the Republican Party are dumping the failures of this occupation in your laps whether you go along or not. So what the hell are you going to do now that you’ve given Bush billions of dollars to sustain the occupation and three months to come up with a report?

Just as General Colin Powell’s unconvincing presentation at the U.N. was used to legitimize an invasion of Iraq, General Petraues’ presentation to the Congress has been used to sustain a bloody occupation, which has failed a hundred times over.

Bush is not imaginative nor is he curious, but what’s more disturbing is that the Congress too is neither imaginative, or curious but rather hide behind Bush’s failure to prop themselves up. Republicans as well as Democrats always put their career aspirations before the country’s work. This is why the Democrats will not stop the war, they along with Bush and his despotic Republicans are willing to sacrifice life to hold onto power.

Absolute power doesn’t corrupt, power corrupts, period.

Dear Democratic Party. Don’t hide behind the fact that you will not get Republicans to support a withdrawal. You have all the power you need, which is the purse. Stop this occupation and the spread of American imperialism by immediately withdrawing funds. Show true courage, if you don’t the terrorist win, right?



ANALYSIS: Strike in Syria / The secret that cannot be kept


By Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff, Haaretz

At six in the evening Tuesday, and while Christiane Amanpour was dropping her CNN bomb, Major General Eliezer Shkedi, chief of the air force, was milling about the yard at the air force center in Herzliya, shaking hands with airmen who excelled during the Second Lebanon War. The media had come in numbers but they did not succeed in getting anything out of Shkedi, besides a lukewarm greeting for the New Year.

Will the new year really be better than the last one? A lot depends on the impact of that air strike that Syria claimed occurred in the north of the country six days ago. Even if Amanpour's report is not completely accurate, the fog surrounding the circumstances of the attack is beginning to lift. Even more important than the details of the incident is the fact that CNN, an international media outlet, has lifted the gauntlet and tried to solve the mystery. It is now a matter of time before the main elements of the story are released to the media.

th the Syrian and the Israeli leadership have been extraordinarily silent about this. According to European diplomats, the Syrians have made it clear that Israeli silence over the incident is "worthy."

It is still difficult to assess what the ultimate response of the Syrians will be, at least on the basis of the statements being made these past six days. On the one hand, the Syrians warn of the consequences and are angry that no one seems interested in condemning Israel's illegal raid. On the other hand, they are not talking about the "strategic" target that was bombed in their territory - according to Lebanese press. If they admit it, this would be a troubling sign that they are weighing a serious response.

The officers on the lawn in Herzliya did not seem phased by any concerns about Syrian reaction.

Of course, the air force did not suffer the humiliation of the ground forces. But even the air force, which succeeded in destroying the long-range Fajr rockets early in the war, was responsible for the failure in effectively countering the short-range Katyushas.

The tension is also being felt in the South, where events have an indirect link to what is taking place in the North. The Qassam rocket fired by Islamic Jihad against the Zikkim army camp was not launched following a direct order from Damascus. Nonetheless, it seems that Islamic Jihad (a proxy for Hamas) is making every effort to heat up the southern front.

Islamist organizations will not oppose helping Syria, which has generously hosted them for years now. However, most of their attention is focused on ways of undermining the diplomatic process between Israel and the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank. A Hamas spokesman described Tuesday's attack as "a victory from God," using language used by Hezbollah to describe its war against Israel.

Was the rocket attack a response to Israel's air strike in Syria? Highly unlikely. This is too small a reaction. Syria will continue in its efforts to drain Israel, for example, by ensuring that the IDF is on endless alert in the North. For nearly the same reasons, Israel will not respond to the massive strike against its soldiers at Zikim with a major operation against the Gaza Strip. So long as everyone is concentrating on the northern front, the IDF will prefer not to get involved in a two-front fight.

The attack at Zikkim exposed a major malfunction: Two years following the Gaza disengagement, the army has not kept its promise to effectively fortify the base, which had come into the effective range of the Qassam rockets since the pullout. Two years ago, when Mrs. Levy dragged her husband and they pulled their daughter out of the base in front of the cameras, people thought that she was hysterical.

There is no justification for relocating a military base inside the sovereign territory of the country at a time when the kibbutzim and the moshavim bordering the Gaza Strip are being hit by rockets. On the other hand, in none of the other communities are 40-odd people sleeping in the same tent without real protection.

Monday, September 10, 2007

THE LEARNING TREE


by Malik Isasis























"I can make your lives disappear with a stroke of a pen," said white District Attorney Reed Walters to a group of black high school kids standing under a tree in protestation. Jena is a small rural throwback town in Louisiana, reminiscent of the antebellum south. The black students were protesting the three nooses that were found hanging from the “Knowledge Tree” after a black student took refuge in the shade of the “Knowledge Tree”, which is reserved for white students. The tragedy of the Jenna Six Case in Louisiana unearthed the shallowly buried Jim Crow laws that ushered in Apartheid for Black America after the American Civil War.

District Attorney Reed Walters continues the American tradition of lynching, hanging black men from trees but only in the 21st Century lynching involves mass incarceration, and state-sponsored violence. Either way, black men lives are being destroyed.

America refuses to deal with the 800-pound gorilla that is white supremacy. The white collective not only suffers from selective amnesia but also selective mutism. If we don’t talk about it, they won’t bring it up. If they bring it up, we’ll just deny we know anything. This is the approach that is taken when discussing race in America with white people. When we discuss race, they want to make us feel like we’re crazy. Not even after, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina did white people believe that the criminal neglect by the federal government was due to racism.

“I Can Make Your Lives Disappear with A Stroke of a Pen.”

The audacity of such a statement is mind bending but doesn’t it mirror a much broader, systemic illness? Walters’ sentiment is the white American male indoctrination into the American society. White people, white men in particular see themselves as God and since God is theoretically infallible, they see their actions as infallible.

I won’t waste a breath in asking why The Jena Six isn’t being covered in the corporate media. You know why.


THE CASE OF THE JENA SIX


Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!



Friday, September 07, 2007

MEDIA DECAY


by Malik Isasis























Malcolm X once said, “You can't drive a knife into a man's back nine inches, pull it out six inches, and call it progress.” Bush has destroyed Iraq, killing 600,000 people, ruined the economy, the infrastructure, and is stealing the country’s resources. If 90 people die of violence in one particular day instead of the average a 100 a day, this is reported as progress. Never mind that the violence moved north, where 500 people died in one suicide bombing.

In spite of the proliferation of unimaginable violence in Iraq; in spite of the puppet government’s failings; and in spite of the blood that now fertilizes Iraq’s soil, the media has helped Bush in dispensing the fairytale of progress.

The punditry and news readers has used the word “progress” as a tool to influence the oft-spineless Democratic Party to continue support the occupation of Iraq because somehow the Democratic Party’s cognitive dissonance associates the corporate media’s and Bush’s propaganda as the voice of the American people. And they fall for it every time because of their sickness of needing approval from the Republicans. I submit Evidence A:

After short-circuiting consideration of votes on some bipartisan proposals on Iraq before the August break, senior Democrats now say they are willing to rethink their push to establish a withdrawal deadline of next spring if doing so will attract the 60 Senate votes needed to prevail.

Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, said, "If we have to make the spring part a goal, rather than something that is binding, and if that is able to produce some additional votes to get us over the filibuster, my own inclination would be to consider that."


The collapse of the fourth estate is a symptom of a much greater sickness in American democracy.

The corporate media reports facts as being fluid. If Republicans say that the world is flat and the Democrats say it is round, the media will report both sides and say, “You decide.” Media consolidation has all but done away with advocacy media and because there is the corporatisation of the media, the media no longer acts in the interests of the people, but in the interest of corporations. We have eased into fascism as fat and happy as a baby.

Lies Most Foul

Bush and his Syndicate have destroyed Iraq, and now he claims there is progress. He says the same about New Orleans too. So he expects the Iraqi people to be grateful because he deployed more American troops to kill them.

He destroyed Iraq. What progress?

The hype over General Petraues’ report is just that, it will be neither positive or negative, giving both the Republicans and the Democrats enough bullshit to justify staying the occupation.

Bush, in our name has and continues to committ heinous crimes against humanity. Ultimately, the chickens will come home to roost and the media will ask why without connecting their own bloody hands to the crime scene.

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

A DARK, WARM MOIST PLACE II


[part 1]
by Malik Isasis

























While the corporate whores in the media cover titillating scandals of celebrities, they will act genuinely surprised when Bush and his Syndicate begin dropping 80,000 lbs of incendiary explosives over Iran. In addition to occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush plans on destroying a third country and its culture, ultimately creating a regional mess that will involve China and Russia. But never mind that, a gay Republican senator's sex life needs to be explored more.

Reuters reported on September 4, 2007 that Bush might cut troop levels in Iraq if progress continues. That was the headline on top of the fold in the New York Times, but far from what Bush actually means, and they know it.

SYDNEY (Reuters) - U.S. President George W. Bush said on Wednesday he saw signs of progress in Iraq on both the military and political fronts and again held out the possibility of a reduction in U.S. troop levels.

But Bush said no final decisions had been made on troop levels and said he would not follow "artificial timetables" to gauge whether it was time to make reductions.

"I'm not interested in artificial timetables, or dates of withdrawal. I'm interested in achieving an objective," Bush said at a joint news conference in Sydney with Australian Prime Minister John Howard ahead of the Asia-Pacific leaders' summit.


Bush has proven himself to be a pathological liar, and yet the corporate media as well as the Democratic Party will continue to believe what he says. “I’m not interested in artificial timetables, or dates of withdrawal.” If these reporters read between the lines they will understand that Bush says or insinuates what he needs to in order to bide more time to pass this mess off to the next president. He is a liar. Always have been, always will be. His pathology is deeply based in his character make up, which doesn’t allow him to admit failure or mistakes and if someone is as flawless as Bush believes himself to be, you have to lie to yourself and those around you to sustain the folklore.

Since Bush has no interests in withdrawal, timetables, and measurable progress, General Petraeus’ forthcoming progress report is pointless because the truth doesn’t matter. Bush is determined to stay in Iraq and the American and Israeli neocons will make sure that the unjustifiable, is justified.

Bush staged a public relations appearance in Baghdad. Like Senator John McCaine before him, he looked like a fool. The most powerful man on the planet had to sneak in, in the dead of night and stay on the base. Bush’s stunt really underscores the failure of the Iraq occupation but that’s neither here nor there, is it?

Bush is on a head on collision with a brick wall, and none of us have seat belts.

The corporate whores will keep on keeping on. Their heads will continue to be securely planted deeply up their asses, and maybe it’s because they like the way their shit smells.


WHOOPIN’ ASS

























What is it about the show The View conservatives don’t like? Whoopi Goldberg recently joined the cast of The View, and already she is in the cross hair of the conservatives for saying this:

She (Goldberg) thinks Vick may have simply been unaware that something which appears to be the cultural norm where he’s from is morally reprehensible in other areas of the country.

“Instead of just saying he’s a beast or a monster, this is a kid who comes from a culture where (this) is not questioned,” Goldberg said.

Her “defense” of Vick was debated in some of the ensuing reviews of Goldberg’s first show, but she wasn’t actually defending what he did. She was simply providing another perspective that hasn’t been fully explored on other chat shows. And that’s one of the reasons why Goldberg is good for the show. With that explanation she opened up the door for Hasselbeck, in full third trimester glow, to mention that in some cultures wife beating is acceptable, but that it wasn’t OK.
.

Watch out for conservatives and their Rightwing Hate Machine to generate false outrage over Goldberg’s political perspectives.

Monday, September 03, 2007



by Marjorie Cohn, Common Dreams























The Sunday Times of London is reporting that the Pentagon has plans for three days of massive air strikes against 1,200 targets in Iran. Last week, Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, told a meeting of The National Interest, a conservative foreign policy journal, that the military did not intend to carry out “pinprick strikes” against Iranian nuclear facilities. He said, “They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military.”

Bush has already set the wheels in motion. With Rovian timing, Alberto Gonzales’ resignation was sandwiched between two Bush screeds - one aimed at ensuring Congress scares up $50 billion more for the occupation of Iraq, the other designed to scare us into supporting war on Iran. As Gonzales rides off into the sunset, the significant questions are who will take his place and how that choice will facilitate Bush’s occupation of Iraq and attack on Iran.

One name that’s been floated for Bush’s third attorney general is Joe Lieberman, the “independent” senator from Connecticut. Lieberman, who advocates the use of military force against Iran, was the only person Bush quoted in his August 28 speech to the American Legion. Bush called Iran “the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism” and pledged to “confront Tehran’s murderous activities.”

Gonzales greased the Bush/Cheney wheels for torturing in violation of the Geneva Conventions, illegally spying on Americans, and purging disloyal Bushies.

Similarly, Lieberman would ensure the Justice Department mounts a vigorous defense of a war of aggression against Iran. And Bush would get a two-fer: Connecticut’s Republican governor would appoint a Republican to fill Lieberman’s seat, returning control of the Senate to the GOP. A Republican-controlled Senate would direct the agenda, thereby furthering the Bush/Cheney plan.

Lieberman is closely affiliated with American Israeli Public Affairs Committee. “AIPAC leverages its power by an alliance with the Christian Right, which has adopted a bizarre ideology of ‘Christian Zionism,’” according to University of Michigan professor Juan Cole. “It holds that the sooner the Palestinians are ethnically cleansed, the sooner Christ will come back. Without millions of these Christian Zionist allies,” Cole added, “AIPAC would be much less influential and effective.”

During the 2004 election, a 100% “AIPAC voting record” was Lieberman’s litmus test for an acceptable presidential candidate. As the House of Representatives was on the verge of passing a resolution that would’ve required Bush to consult Congress before attacking Iran, the AIPAC lobby stopped it in its tracks.

Bush’s WMD-hyping against Iran is déja vu in the run-up to Operation Iraqi Disaster, where he played loose and fast with the truth about Iraq’s alleged WMDs. His statement that a nuclear Iran could put the region “under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust” conjures up his images of a “mushroom cloud” in the hype-up to Iraq.

How inconvenient for Bush that the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) just found Iran’s uranium enrichment program is operating well below capacity and is nowhere near producing significant amounts of nuclear fuel. The IAEA report says Iran “has been providing the agency with access to declared nuclear materials, and has provided the required nuclear material accountancy reports in connection with declared nuclear material and facilities.”

Iran and IAEA agreed on a plan with a step-by-step timetable of cooperation to settle unresolved issues. The agreement said there were “no other remaining issues and ambiguities regarding Iran’s past nuclear program and activities,” and characterized the accord as “a significant step forward.”

“This is the first time Iran is ready to discuss all the outstanding issues which triggered the crisis in confidence,” said IAEA director general Mohamed ElBaradei. “I’m clear at this stage you need to give Iran a chance to prove its stated goodwill. Sanctions alone, I know for sure, are not going to lead to a durable solution”

In 2003, when Dr. ElBaradei reported there was no evidence that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program, the White House was not pleased. And as Saddam Hussein became more cooperative with the weapons inspector, Bush became “infuriated,” according to Bob Woodward.

Bush’s vow, “We will confront this danger before it is too late,” is the Iran incarnation of his illegal preemptive war doctrine, which he inaugurated in Iraq. In a clear signal he is seeking regime change in Iran, Bush called for “an Iran whose government is accountable to its people, instead of leaders who promote terror and pursue the technology that could be used to develop nuclear weapons.”

Barnett Rubin reported on Global Affairs blog that one of the leading neo-conservative institutions has “instructions” from Dick Cheney’s office to “roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day; it will be coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual suspects. It will be heavy sustained assault on the airwaves, designed to knock public sentiment into a position from which a war can be maintained. Evidently they don’t think they’ll ever get majority support for this - they want something like 35-40 percent support, which in their book is ‘plenty.’”

Bush/Cheney created the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) to lead a propaganda campaign to bolster public support for war with Iraq. The White House decided to wait until after Labor Day of 2002 to kick off WHIG’s mission. Chief of staff Andrew Card explained, “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.” Five years later, they’re marketing a new and even more dangerous product - war with Iran. British military historian Corelli Barnett says “an attack on Iran would effectively launch World War III.”

Our military spending has reached $1 billion every 2-1/2 days and we are borrowing $2-1/2 billion per day. Bush is mortgaging our children’s future security and wealth.
We have lost more than 3,700 soldiers in Iraq and tens of thousands of Iraqis have died.

We have already seen how easily Congress caves in to AIPAC. It’s up to the people. As Noam Chomsky said, “The most effective barrier to a White House decision to launch a war [on Iran] is the kind of organized popular opposition that frightened the political-military leadership enough in 1968 that they were reluctant to send more troops to Vietnam.”