JOHN CHUCKMAN

RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GIDEON RACHMAN IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

As far as the Hyde Park-Kenwood area you toured, Gideon, I spent about half my childhood there.

The area has many beautiful old homes and elegant apartments from the early 1900s when it was a high-end neighborhood with an ambiance not unlike West End London.

But by my day, it had fallen into a pretty sad state.

The Great Black Migrations out of the South in the 1940-50s had landed tens of thousands of non-urban, uneducated people there, and much of it had become a ghetto with the added phenomenon known as “white flight,” middle-class white people leaving quickly for other neighborhoods or suburbs.

Crime was tremendously on the upswing. People were mugged in the streets, and graffiti for gangs like the Blackstone Rangers were ominous on buildings and sidewalks. Where once – before my time – people slept on the porch or in the park on hot summer nights, no one in their right mind continued the practice, and people avoided walking in many areas alone or at night.

Few of your readers will know it, but at one point, I believe in the early 1960s, the University of Chicago seriously considered picking up and leaving its beautiful old campus and heading for the suburbs.

But it decided to stay, and the city gave it a lot of encouragement and special help to keep it there.

Women students who had to walk for evening classes were accompanied. I don’t know whether this practice still exists.

I don’t know whether it is still true, but whole side streets were fenced off with very tall fences to make movement from the worst ghetto – around 47th Street – very difficult. It was a very strange and memorable thing to turn on a side street and see it end with something like a tall drawbridge.

Police patrols too were increased, and lighting was improved.

The new confidence over some time, and a growing black middle class, gave the neighborhoods a boost over the decades. Many of the old mansions have been restored.

But despite the likes of the Obamas, there remains a heavy population of very poor and uneducated people, making it still not the kind of neighborhood you would sensibly walk around in late at night. Its beautiful parks – the work of the great landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted, are still places to exercise caution in if alone or at night.

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO AN ARTICLE BY GIDEON RACHMAN IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

“Power does not need to be a zero-sum game and nations need not fear the success of each other.”

These words of Obama’s are true, and I wish they set the tone for relations between China and the United States.

But they are not the view of the American establishment, and they are extremely unlikely to set the tone.

People of power and privilege who think about power and privilege all the time do not regard such a parvenu with open arms.

We already have had a great deal of anecdotal evidence that insiders from the Pentagon to the State Department have not adopted Obama’s words as their slogan.

I believe that America’s reaction to the rise of China is one of the greatest dangers to world peace we will see over the coming decades.

After all, if you go back and study the rise of Japan, you will see a pattern.

The United States did everything it could think of to hinder the rise of Japan. Indeed, the Japanese felt such intense pressure they did something they had never planned on doing, attacking the United States.

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GIDEON RACHMAN IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

There is only a military rivalry in American eyes.

China has been explicit in policy statements that it has no intention of pursuing America’s place at the top of the arms totem.

It really is important to remember that China spends a small fraction of what the U.S. does on arms.

Official numbers used to put it at 10% of American expenditure, but analysts have put a more realistic figure of 15%.

No matter how clever you are you cannot compete in an arms race spending roughly 15% of what the other fellow spends.

Of course, all those percentages assume American published figures are accurate, something which is almost certainly not the case.

America spends as much as the entire rest of human society on arms. It is also the world’s largest arms merchant, contributing greatly to violence in dozens of places.

What China is doing with its military is only preparing it to defend its legitimate interests. After all, it isn’t China sending warships to Chesapeake Bay or buzzing around San Francisco with spy planes.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GIDEON RACHMAN IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

You do not have to be “conspiracy-minded” to believe that Doctor Kelly did not kill himself.

The associate of Doctor Kelly’s, Mai Pederson a military interpreter, who recently revealed facts about his physical state – some injured part of his arm meant he could not wield a knife and made it impossible for him to cut his own wrist –  is not a “conspiracy-minded.” She says he also had been advised quietly he was on a hit list. She also tells the story of the red laser site which appeared on his forehead on a walk together in Baghdad, something which made him take the threat seriously.

The relative of Doctor Kelly who said absolutely that that just was not his temperament is not a “conspiracy-minded.”

The expert doctors who’ve said he could not have died the way it is said that he died are not “conspiracy-minded.” The vessel cut could not even have bleed him to death.

The term “conspiracy theorist” often used instead of “conspiracy-minded” is actually one that, in my view, automatically marks out its user as dishonest.

It is a way to condemn all people who question the facts of something as borderline paranoids.

It truly is a term without meaning too, displaying for those who are careful of words its user’s lack of thinking.

We do, after all, have genuine conspiracies by governments with large interests. To say otherwise is to display ignorance.

This has always been true in history, but today the stakes are higher than ever in matters of international affairs for some countries.

It is, for example, open knowledge that Israel sends dozens of agents abroad in elaborate schemes to murder those deemed enemies.

And what of the years-long cover-up in Britain of the true events around Bloody Sunday?

What of the case, a few years ago, of a half-dozen American nuclear warheads being shipped across the country? Every outside expert says that the checks and balances make such an “accident” impossible?

What of the downing of the fourth hi-jacked plane on 9/11 over Pennsylvania? It was almost certainly shot down, likely on Cheney’s orders, because multiple debris fields stretched for miles, something impossible in the kind of crash claimed.

What of Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty, spy ship, during the Six Day War? When Israel finally got around to explaining it, it claimed an “accident”? A two-hour attack against a well-marked ship, one Israel had been advised would be on station and when the lead Israeli pilot made an initial low enough pass slowly to acknowledge crew members waves? Taking the ship out of commission cut off American information of the battle field and gave General Dayan the time to turn around his armor to complete the conquests of the Six Day War, the effort to secure Greater Israel, the results of which we suffer to this day.

What of Israel’s nuclear weapons program? Years of intense, high-level deception.

What of South Africa’s nuclear weapons program?

By the way, I wonder how many readers know that Doctor Kelly was one of the technical team assigned to take possession of South Africa’s nuclear warheads when the apartheid regime ended? Doctor Kelly knew many damaging secrets.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY GIDEON RACHMAN IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

This kind of legislation is just one more chilling aspect of the Islamophobia which has descended on Western society like a poisonous cloud of volcanic ash.

It really would be nice to get a break from all this mindless, anti-Muslim hysteria.

What do I care what my neighbor wears so long as he or she is a peaceful member of society?

My experience with Muslims is simply one a sweet-tempered people who pretty much mind their own business.

I wish their critics displayed half their excellent qualities.

A few decades back, in films, the niqab was viewed by our public as alluring and fascinating. There are many scenes exhibiting these aspects in old films and serials, scenes made to appeal to our sensibilities.

Now, it has completely turned around with people attributing the most outlandish motives. It’s just the backwash from America’s insane war on terror, fed by Bush’s lame stuff about women’s rights when what he was about was killing.

Women wearing the niqab or the burka – both not really common in the Islamic world – were admitted as immigrants to France with their garments and customs. What right does anyone have to say high-handedly, after they have moved their lives there, they must do away with it?

This is the attitude of the intolerant and those who do not understand what they are talking about, using flimsy excuses like women’s rights. A woman’s rights include wearing what she wishes, does it not?

The reasons for these garments among a minority of Muslims are complex – social, historical, and not just religious, but for devout wearers religion is very important, more so than secular critics can understand.

Almost all immigrants eventually give up their native dress. It is up to them to decide on that, not shrill accusers in a newspaper column.

Those shrill demands are the way Americans behave. It’s one of their most unpleasant qualities. Live and let live so long as people are not being hurt.

We have women being beaten in their homes by the thousands in all Western countries. We have a world packed with abusive practices towards women – bride burning and horrid shunning of widows in India to female genital mutilation (not a Muslim custom but an African one with 3 million victims a year) to the widespread acceptance of fathers and other elders raping young girls in Africa, and people focus on this insignificant phenomenon?

It wasn’t many decades ago that fashionable women in Britain and the United States wore veils with hats. Would anyone with manners have asked a woman then to remove her veil? Indeed a vestige of this practice remains in our wedding ceremonies with the bride wearing a veil only her husband lifts.

No wonder the Muslim world feels under assault from the West. We bomb their countries. We keep men in secret prisons. We say forms of torture are okay. And we interfere with their religious and cultural practices here. Can anyone blame them for feeling angry?

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GIDEON RACHMAN IN THE FINANCIAL POST

“…it has provoked some American neoconservatives, previously firm friends of the Turks, into unrestrained fury.”

Neo-cons and unrestrained fury are old friends.

This group of crypto-fascists has spent years advocating virtually unrestrained use of American power, wars all over the globe, and especially in the Middle East.

Western Asia – a vast region of many proud and ancient peoples – cannot be expected to keep mildly accepting such stuff – piled high as it has been with many genuine atrocities.

Iraq was a ghastly mistake – a million killed and two or three million made exiles, and the United States didn’t even have the decency to accept a good share of the exiles. They left it to poor lands like Syria to stagger under the humanitarian burden.

Afghanistan was another ghastly mistake: only the goal of vengeance describes what has happened there. Any reasonable expectations by the U.S. of justice could have been met through diplomacy and economic pressures and police work.

Pakistan is being bombed on the flimsiest of excuses. Families and poor villagers are being murdered weekly – under Obama’s watch – in the name of trying to get a few “suspected” bad guys. The victims are in the hundreds, and it has terribly increased civil unrest in that land.

Yemen has been bombed. Recent evidence of the use of cluster bombs in the deaths of about fifty people has come to light.

Somalia has been kept under terrible pressure.

Israel has over the last few years called for attacks on Syria and Iran, buzzing the presidential palace in Damascus with jets and weekly making serious threats towards Iran.

Israel has, of course, invaded Lebanon.

It has treated an elected government and a whole people in Gaza to inhumane and anti-democratic pressure.

Somewhere in the heart of every thoughtful person in this region of the world, the idea will have occurred that American policy is just slightly skewed against them, all for the sake of a small new country of immigrants, most of whom have little sympathy with the people or traditions of the place to which they chose to migrate.

Now, most of these events, to one degree or another, center on some concept of keeping Israel going. That certainly, and not oil, was the reason for all that killing in Iraq.

The people of Western Asia are perfectly aware of that. Their views are based on what they see and hear from friends and relatives, not on the sanitized stuff seen on Fox or CNN or ABC.

And then they see Israel behaving even worse than the Somali pirates on the high seas, the pirates generally not killing any of their victims, and they see the United States saying it is just fine.

Well, it is not just fine. It is completely unacceptable.

Of course, coupled with this is everyone’s growing realization that Israel does not play by any rules but its own. It lied, cheated, and stole to build nuclear weapons. It thought nothing of sharing such weapons with a ghastly state like South Africa, all for benefit of some access to strategic materials.

It started the Six Day war to expand its territory, and continues a glacially-paced process of ethnic-cleansing to absorb those captured territories, minus their people. It steals and forges anyone’s passports over and over again to carry out murderous operations. It even ferociously attacked – a two hour assault with every weapon Israel’s air force had – a United States’ military ship in the Six Day war in an effort to drag the U.S. into the war.

And one or two of the most damaging spies in American history were Americans working on Israel’s behalf. Jonathon Pollard was perhaps the worst, yet Israel actually traded in some of the secrets he stole with the Russians and has never stopped asking for his release.

These states see Israel is always forgiven, indeed more than forgiven, Israel being the receiving end of the most extraordinary foreign aid package in history, five hundred dollars per year per Israeli, year after year after year, the virtual subsidy of a society. After all, there are many poor lands where the annual per capita income is not that large.

Erdogan has been friendly and reasonable in the past towards Israel, especially considering the fact that conservative Muslims are a large part of his secular state. But Israel’s behavior kicked him in the teeth, it having been Turkish forces (NATO) that inspected the convoy to make sure there were no weapons. Also, of course, Turkish humanitarians were on board and some were killed, others having been defamed by Israel’s early efforts afterwards to squirm out of what it had done before the eyes of the world.

What is one to make of these events, if you are a reasonable person who loves peace and democratic values?

I can only conclude Israel’s hubris and utterly unethical behavior and America’s unjust favoritism have driven the world pretty close to the brink of despair, and that likely is more keenly felt in those lands than elsewhere.

More unrest would be felt were more of these countries democracies. But many like “moderate” Egypt are hidden dictatorships, and people do not readily express their frustration and disillusion. Ironically, it is a place like undemocratic Egypt where Israel finds its best partner, while never stopping to remind everyone of how Israel is the only democracy in the region (and many might say, judging by acts rather than words, it’s a good thing there are not more such).

The Obama experience also undoubtedly adds to the great weight of these matters. With a name like his, and being the first black man elected president, Obama naturally raised new hopes for justice, and, indeed, Obama sounded good on the Mideast originally, seeming to understand that only American pressure on Israel can produce genuine peace.

But in far less than two years, all that has changed. Obama seemingly accepts every insult (Biden’s treatment on a visit) and bloody excess of Israel’s, just as Bush did, and Obama is the Commander-in-Chief whose orders see Muslims bombed in several countries.

In most important matters, Obama has proved himself little different to Bush, just a more polished and charming version.

He has left all those people with perhaps less hope than ever, a very dangerous situation.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GIDEON RACHMAN IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

“Either way, Israel doesn’t necessarily need Saudi airspace as it has other capabilities”

Do Israel and its apologists ever learn anything?

I think not, because it is the nature of ideologues and extremists virtually to be unable to alter their dark obsessions.

The threat to attack Iran is dangerous, destabilizing, and truly reflects unbalanced thinking.

It only confirms the world’s growing view of Israel as out of control and acting outside all the laws of nations.

First, Iran is in a position to do some very unpleasant things in retaliation for an attack. This is not an impotent little country, possessing as it does some pretty sophisticated missiles and armaments, and it sits on one of the world’s most important arteries of commerce.

Second, it is extremely doubtful for many reasons that Israel has the capacity to carry out its threats.

Only this morning, the Saudis characterized The Times‘ report on use of Saudi airspace as flatly wrong and against national policies. The deception work of Mossad?

Third, Israel, despite its twenty four hour-a-day garrison-state status, has many vulnerabilities, being a small geographical area loaded with possible targets.

Iran does not need nuclear weapons to successfully target places like the Dimona nuclear facility, Israel’s illicit nuclear weapons factory. Or Israeli power plants.

Iran is perfectly able to send not puny homemade rockets with firecracker tips – the dreaded Qassams which provided Israel’s shabby excuse for killing 400 children and a thousand others.

[see:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_NtgXlrcvXZA/SWfEpYDqzwI/AAAAAAAAZm0/v8qp2yKvyVo/s1600-h/ROCKET+qassam37.jpg ]

No, Iran’s arsenal includes missiles like Shahab-3.

[see:
http://www.fas.org/programs/ssp/man/militarysumfolder/shahab-3.html ]

Iran also has capable anti-ship missiles, as Hezbollah demonstrated by nearly sinking an Israeli military ship during Israel’s atrocity in Southern Lebanon.

Fourth, the knowledge for nuclear operations does not go away. They are classic examples of the genie and the bottle.

Fifth, even were a strike possible for Israel, the chance of destroying all of the existing protected and distributed facilities with effect is remote.

Sixth, Iran would certainly set about on its own Manhattan Project after any strike, a priority national program. Indeed, it is quite possible Iran is not working towards nuclear weapons now, but after any strike, it would set them at the highest priority, and they do have the human and material resources to do so.

Seventh, the entire world would react to Israel’s hypocrisy. Only today we have another story in The Guardian about Israel’s proliferation activities with apartheid South Africa.

[see: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/03/south-africa-nuclear-trigger-israel ]

These stories and indeed South Africa’s recent publication of papers concerning its secret dealing with Israel on nuclear weapons reflect changing attitudes towards Israel, for they would previously have been suppressed as Israel tried hard to do.

Israel is an illicit nuclear power – having lied, cheated, and stolen its way to getting there – and it is no longer possible to hide that fact. In the current IAEA talks, Israel as a subject is insisted upon despite the pathetic efforts of the U.S. to suppress the subject.

You can live outside rule of law for a while, as Israel clearly demonstrates, but you cannot sustain an indefinite position of hypocrisy and threat and deception towards much of the world. Even Ghadaffi learned you eventually have to come in from the cold.

The only sensible approach to preventing proliferation in the Middle East is to make the region a nuclear-free zone, and that very much includes Israel.

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GIDEON RACHMAN IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

 

Hillary Clinton has steadily moved down from “crippling” to tamer language, and the simple reason is that at first she was nodding to the Israel Lobby and now she is dealing with the reality of other Security Council members who do not view things the same way.

I believe sanctions rarely work, and rightly so: they are an inappropriate interference, invariably by America, into the economic affairs of others.

The interests of others, especially China and Russia, are not the same as the interests of the United States. Others have incentives to go around sanctions – after all, that kind of effort is the essence of capitalism at work.

There is a very great deal of hypocrisy and hubris in all such efforts as that against Iran.

I would love a world in which nuclear weapons either did not exist or were effectively neutralized by a new technology.

But we do not have such a world, and I am not comforted by the United States – a nation with the world’s worst record of aggression and overthrows and imperial expansion over the last fifty years – claiming for itself the role of God in international affairs.

And I am equally disturbed – as we all should be – by Israel’s aping the American attitude in its area of the world, playing the role of miniature geo-political replica of a superpower, determining everything that happens within a thousand miles of its borders and doing so with an illicit stock of nuclear weapons.

I cannot stress enough that Iran’s entire modern period is one without its ever attacking anyone. Indeed, it fought the aggression of others – egged on by the same United States – and in the 1950s had its democratic government overthrown by the CIA complicit with British oil interests.

And then America supported for many years, and armed to the teeth, a soulless dictator whose secret police, Savak, used to pull out the fingernails of victims in their basement torture chambers.

And today on Iran’s border, Americans, who do not belong there, occupy a neighboring country. Israel is reported to have two or three of its German-supplied Diesel submarines, armed with nuclear-tipped cruise missiles, off the coast. America also has an armada there.

How does that look from the Iranian perspective, the world’s two biggest bullies waving weapons and harsh rhetoric at them regularly? Again, an Iran which has no record of aggression?

I’d want nuclear weapons too, and so long as others are free to brandish them, it is the correct response.

It is almost certain that the rise of another nuclear power in the region will stabilize, rather than de-stabilize, things. Europe reached a peaceful state under MAD, and there is every reason to believe the same would be true in this region.

It would, of course, mark the end of Israel’s mini-reign of terror over the region, but that would be a good thing. As we can plainly see in the Israeli case, bullies do not make peace, and well-armed bullies with no one able to resist them, are downright dangerous and continuously de-stabilizing.

The example of North Korea is extremely important. If ever there were a government which has behaved in odd ways, it is the world’s last Stalinist state. Yet clearly North Korea is not going to use its nuclear weapons to attack anyone: that would be national suicide. But clearly too, America does not treat North Korea with the same contempt it does some other states, and it is not going to invade the place any time soon.

All the Israeli propaganda about Iran is of the poorest kind, effective propaganda always being based on some truth. Iran threatens no one. President Ahmadinejad’s statements in the past have been deliberately mistranslated, and, besides, the President in modern Iran has absolutely no military authority. The man likes to poke fun at the West’s shibboleths, but that makes him neither a criminal nor a danger.

At any rate, when a country like Israel – which has attacked every neighbor that it has, many twice, occupies the land of others for over forty years, imposes whatever rules it pleases such as blockades or check points or identity cards or Berlin walls – shouts continuously about a country with Iran’s peaceful record, it would be laughable, were it not dangerous. In any event, it is not credible in the least.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY GIDEON RACHMAN IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

“The US, terrorism and the European Parliament…”

Sorry, Gideon, a grammatical error has altered the meaning of that statement.

The comma shouldn’t be there.
_____________

The entire post-WWII period is marked by American support for various terrorists – just so long as they were “our” terrorists.

Pinochet, the Shah of Iran, the PRI in Mexico, the Cuban exiles in Florida, and on and on.

Was there any event since the Holocaust that was more of a savage pointless exercise in murder than America’s War in Vietnam?

Three million killed, in often horrific deaths like napalm, for favoring the wrong economic system?

The neutralist government of Cambodia de-stabilized, thus creating the circumstances for the “killing fields”?

The U. S. for decades winked at the IRA , almost enjoying the sense of “up yours” Britain.

Indeed, most of the IRA’s funding came from Americans openly collecting for it.

(So much for the silly idea of a special relationship.)

The U.S. dealt on friendly, helpful terms with every monster from Ceauşescu and Saddam Hussein to Batista and Marcos – just so long as the monsters toed the American line.

During the terror in Indonesia after the fall of Sukarno, workers in the American State Department kept the phone lines humming, suggesting names to the government that was to oversee cutting the throats of 500,000 people on suspicion of being communists, dumping their bodies in the rivers.

The overthrow of elected government after elected government – Iran, Guatemala, Chile – just because they opposed what were viewed as American interests.

The current “war on terror” is actually not about terror at all. It is about people deeply unfriendly to America’s abusive policies abroad and to its tolerance for every abuse Israel cares to commit.

America’s various carpet-bombings and Israel’s savagery towards the Palestinians are unquestionably the world’s most consequential acts of official state terror.

America is no enemy of terror, only of the terrorists it does not like.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

 

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY GIDEON RACHMAN IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

 

“Israel’s alarm at the deterioration in its relations with the US is palpable.”

I don’t know about Israel’s alarm, but the “deterioration” part has elements of delusion.

George Bush was without question the most inept man ever to be president.

Apart from many other bits of evidence supporting that assertion, we have his relationship with that colossal bulk of corruption and murder, Ariel Sharon.

The relationship as perceived under these two had no basis in a real world. Israel got to do everything – every dirty trick, every killing, every arrogant piece of behavior – that its corrupt leader could dream of, and that pathetic lump, Bush, just nodded. That even went so far as the extreme abuse, and distinctly possible assassination, of Arafat.

Well, now we’re back to a more realistic situation so far as the American President goes, a man is in power who, despite serious shortcomings, is intelligent and hardworking.

Unfortunately, on the other side of the relationship, Israel has absolutely hit bottom for the intellectually and ethically squalid in Netanyahu. I’m not sure it is possible to find a prominent Israeli with a more grotesque combination of arrogance, dishonesty, and low-life cunning. He’s fooling no one. His skills as a statesman are zero.

Despite many faults in the American psyche, there is a kind of fundamental decency – which, once aroused, is very powerful. Israel has pushed things to the very limits, and once that deep sense of decency and fairness is aroused, I do think the relationship will rapidly deteriorate, perhaps never to recover.

And whose fault will that be?
________________

“A majority of Israel’s Jewish population is of Middle Eastern and North African origin (including, partly, your commenter). So what ‘White man’s burden’ are you referring to? “

Is that dishonest or naive?

Virtually all the founders and most of the prime ministers have had European or American roots, especially European.

And Israel itself is a secular Western society. Nothing about it – from flag to uniforms or political parties – reflects the Mideast.

The only exception is the Orthodox, a people much despised even in Israel for their imposing values on others and shirking responsibilities like military service.

__________________

Well said, David Seaton.

And not only the United States: Israel has never flinched from doing just as it pleased for its often narrow idea of its interests, everything from creating illegal nuclear weapons to assisting the old South Africa to become a nuclear power briefly.

America has been on a one-way trip to nowhere for decades in its relationship with Israel.

It has suffered oil embargo, been dragged willy-nilly into wars, seen Israel abuse the use of the weapons it sells it, suffered Israeli black-ops like the attack on the USS Liberty, and the most damaging imaginable spies like Jonathon Pollard.

It launched the infinitely costly and largely pointless war in Iraq mainly for Israel’s benefit. Yet all it receives from Israel is arrogance, bad advice, and more abuse.

It has stoked the fury of a hundred million Arabs – and all unnecessarily.

A fair policy calls for a fair settlement. Israel’s idea of peace never changes: it is always, I get this and that and the other thing, and you must recognize me and recognize me as a “Jewish state” and you get pretty well nothing.

Israel and Palestine should resemble all the early maps drawn up as parts of the founding documents, not the grotesque distortion we see now. And ethnic-cleansing in Jerusalem and the West Bank must stop. Israel’s insistence on carrying on that way is breeding more resentment and sense of injustice and future horrors than any of us can imagine, but clearly Israel does not have the basic control over its own affairs to stop. The U.S. must do that for them.
________________________

“That Israel is a Western society–not shooting adulterers and homosexuals, allowing diverse religious practice–should not be held against it. I assume you yourself are not interested in moving to a Sha’aria-run republic.”

Comments do not come much more inaccurate or beside the point than that.

It reflects the kind of one-upmanship thinking that has driven Israel on an insane course for decades.

First, I don’t hold being Western “against” Israel. The writer should point out where I did so before making such a ridiculous statement.

My point, had he read what I wrote before answering, was that Israel very little resembles something natural in the Middle East, a point I made in answering someone’s disingenuous claim that the majority of Israel’s people had Middle Eastern or African roots.

Second, where I live or choose to live has nothing whatever to do with the problem confronting the world. It’s as irrelevant as the atmospheric composition of Neptune.

Several million Jewish people have chosen this place, yet they refuse to make any realistic effort, any meaningful sacrifice, to make what they have stable and realistic and fair.

Right now, Israel is a fantasyland supported by the greatest level of subsidy from abroad in all history. Its current shape reflects levels of abuse and injustice which cannot be sustained, and others are paying the bills.

Israel, as it exists, is not long-term viable. Its economy is a hot-house thing, for example exporting tomatoes after using some of the world’s most expensive water. It’s a garrison state, not sustainable long-term. It has every neighbor hating it, and behaves as though there were no tomorrow or future reckonings. It drifts along on visions of Greater Israel, and everyone else is supposed to be willing to pay the immense bill to make it happen.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY GIDEON RACHMAN IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

There is something almost shameful that an American Secretary of State feels obliged to address the Lobby for Israel on so basic a matter as Israel’s recent behavior towards the United States.

Moreover, Aipac is an organization which has been involved in some very dodgy activities in the past, as reflected in extensive FBI investigations.

Israel publicly insults the Vice president of the United States on a high-level visit and then argues with American officials over their view of the fact.

What other country in the world could get away with such behavior?

And then the prime minister, a man whose intolerance and brutality are a matter of public record, gets a tête-à-tête in the White House?

Israel’s ugly seizure of Arab homes in East Jerusalem violates every international agreement.

Israel’s entire recent behavior – mass murder in Gaza, assassination, brutal blockade, and taking the property of others – is little different to what Serbia was doing when the United States went to war against them.

If you want peace, you talk to your neighbors, you stop abusing your neighbors, and you stop stealing from your neighbors.

But if what you want is other people’s homes and farms, minus the people, in a vast slow-motion ethnic-cleansing, you behave exactly as Israel behaves.

The only nation on earth which can push Israel towards civilized behavior towards its neighbors is the United States, yet because of the campaign-financing efforts of outfits like Aipac under America’s ghastly campaign-finance laws, that needed push is rendered almost politically impossible.

All quite absurd, the most powerful country in the world, a country which has been unbelievably generous towards Israel, has its foreign policy heavily bent by a place with the population of Ecuador.

__________________

When people write about Israel’s additional territorial claims in terms of Hebrew Scripture, for most of the world’s people it makes as much sense as modern Greece claiming Turkey owing to the Iliad.

If you can quote Scripture as authority in Middle East affairs, you can justify anything, including killing all non-Jewish residents, for that is what the Biblical Hebrews were enjoined to do, over and over.

Many countries could have a claim on the territory we call Israel if this approach were valid, including the Egyptians (who long, long ago ruled there, the Lebanese (viewed as the descendants of the ancient Phoenicians who also ruled there), and perhaps even the Iraqis.

The silliness of this claim is made even greater by the important research of an Israeli scholar who says that the Palestinians are, for the most part, the actual descendants of the ancient Israelis.

When Rome conquered territories, it typically did not remove the inhabitants and it did not interfere with their religion, so long as they accepted Roman rule. Just because, after two turbulent millennia of history, most of the Palestinians are Muslim does not invalidate this concept. Moreover, DNA testing is tending to support this view.

So what we are really talking about with Israel’s modern activities is removing the descendants of ancient Israel who have lived there countless centuries in favor of new immigrants from New York or London. If that isn’t imperialism, I don’t know what is.

On still another level, Biblical claims must be rejected simply because they are dangerous and de-stabilizing. Greater Israel as it has been defined by Zionist scholars – and mind you, there are no maps in the Bible – includes the West Bank and Gaza and pieces of Syria and Lebanon. Does claiming that, or any portion of it, resemble anything but a certain formula for endless war and unrest?

Personal religious views and 2,500 year-old books have no place in international affairs.

In the end, if Israel wishes to be regarded as a state like any other state, then it must behave as we expect other states to behave, and that does not include undefined borders which constantly ooze out over the property of others.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GIDEON RACHMAN IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Tough and tireless, yes, but to whose benefit?

“Turn the page” on the coup in Honduras?

When was the last time she or any American Secretary of State talked that way about a coup that the U.S. did not favor?

The Falkland Islands?

They belonged to Britain before Texas belonged to the US.

Before California.

Before Alaska.

And well before the US seized Hawaii against all the natives’ wishes. Their national petition was completely ignored in Washington as the US government annexed the place.

And the people in the Falklands are British in origin and in loyalty.

What you see here is the “special relationship” in action.

Tony Blair spent British lives and wealth on Bush’s pointless crusades, and what does Britain get back?

You might think so elemental a thing as support in the Falklands.

But that’s not how America operates. It takes what it wants from everyone, and blubbers about principles.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GIDEON RACHMAN IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Oh, please, Mr Rachman, “too soft” on China?

That’s pure Richard Nixon circa his first run for office in California, a contest he won by suggesting a fine congresswoman was soft-on.

He along with intellectual and ethical giants like J Edgar Hoover built entire careers on this kind of nastiness.

Let China be China. It is the most remarkable phenomenon of our lifetimes, a miracle perhaps short only of the Internet. China will become a democratic state, with democratic values, just as all Western nations became democratic states. The huge growth of the middle class assures that.

You really have no choice anyway, it is too big and important, although many Americans with a tendency to want to control others still think they can say some words and change a fifth of the planet. Delusional.

And I remind you that the Google business is rather trivial stuff compared with matters like invading a nation and killing a million people.

The United States is almost laughable in the words it uses to defend companies like Google, just as when it makes its ridiculous annual pronouncements about the human rights and democratic behaviors in the world’s other countries, as though it were somehow entitled to pass judgment, which, given its record over the last half century abroad, it most certainly is not.

Google needs to be Google too – leave China if you don’t like it. Don’t go whining back to mommy at the State Department about the bad boys in the school yard.

In a hundred places in this world, the United States stands for abuse and its own privileges, not rights or decency or democracy. Guantanamo continues. Diego Garcia continues. Bagram in Afganistan continues. Every week Hellfire missiles kill innocent people in Pakistan, and in Afghanistan for that matter. Now, in Yemen too. Oh the list is too long to place here.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GIDEON RACHMAN IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

I think you make too much of this.

Yes, the loss of a Senate seat will hurt Obama, but that loss had little to do with Obama despite some glib generalities in the press.

The candidate, Ms Coakley, proved a disaster.

In a six week campaign, Ms Coakley started by taking a week off around Christmas. Simply politically stupid.

She also did not use television to any extent. Again politically stupid.

And she made several blunders during that short time.

Obama would have had to be miracle worker to save her.

Sadly the voters had no third choice, because the empty shirt who won is no prize.

“I didn’t mind when President Obama came here and criticized me – that happens in campaigns. But when he criticized my truck, that’s where I draw the line.”

“I’m Scott Brown, I’m from Wrentham, I drive a truck, and I am nobody’s senator but yours. Thank you very much.”

Pure Sarah Palin. Pathetic pseudo-humility.

Well, you do get pretty much the government you deserve.

Of course, the main trouble when America elects bad government is the rest of the world is made to suffer.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GIDEON RACHMAN IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

I am very proud of the fact that Canada has moved about as far a country can go in the matter of genuinely equal rights.

We have had gay marriage – not gay unions or some other unequal substitute, but marriage – for a few years now, and all forecasts of doom by the Religious Right have proved utter nonsense.

It took little time for this change to settle into the accepted social norm. Today in Toronto – a city that maybe four decades ago was so repressive in tone that it was known by some as the Belfast of the North – the Gay Pride parade is a major event, as big as the Santa Claus parade, with families and public officials attending, a turnout of a million, a big, happy party.

That’s a good measure of how human rights matters can change if some leadership is shown, as it was by our Supreme Court and Prime Ministers Jean Chretien and Paul Martin.

The horrible case in Uganda is interesting for two reasons.

First, the proposed laws were so extreme, involving the death penalty, that a world-wide protest was started. The proposal now at least has had the death penalty withdrawn.

The second reason the Uganda case is interesting is the influence of some of the most extreme Religious Right people from the United States.

A certain American fundamentalist has been very active there in promoting opposition to homosexuality with lectures and meetings.

America itself has a profound problem on this issue, as it does with so many genuine issues of human rights. A large and noisy portion of the population confuses human rights with religious standards, a go-nowhere situation.

But the Religious Right is fighting a rearguard action, just as it does on evolution or abortion rights. It is caught, like a deer in the headlights, by centuries-old notions in a constantly changing world. The direction of human rights in advanced societies has only one path to follow, and sooner or later, all must accept the fact.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GIDEON RACHMAN IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

There has always been a strong distaste for Haiti in America.

When Napoleon sent a French army to put down the revolt of the slaves, Thomas Jefferson actually extended American assistance to him. It was an extremely bloody event, and the French, of course, lost, which Jefferson much regretted.

It was only one of many episodes in Jefferson’s career exposing an extremely dark character under the glossy front of words on liberty.

Jefferson, as was true of so many life-long slave-holders, was terrified of slave revolts. A great many Southerners slept with pistols or daggers near their pillows.

In the earlier decades of the twentieth century, American Marines invaded Haiti and occupied it for a fair time. Its affairs were run by the US.

Only in recent years, the U.S. effectively invaded Haiti and deposed its elected president. The true reason: policies which led to too many Haitian boat people heading towards American shores.

As for Pat Robertson who has made an idiotic comment on Haiti, his career contains a long string of idiotic statements, much in the fashion of that late bulk, Jerry Falwell After terrible hurricanes in the U.S., the good Rev was saying America’s decadence, especially with respect to the behavior of gays, had aroused God’s wrath.

Imagine, this man, Robertson, took a serious run at the Republican presidential nomination.

But then so did Bush.

And there’s that chicken running around the barnyard without a head, Sarah Palin.

Of course, we also have Rush Limbaugh making a tasteless comment. For some reason, mainline media have never held that “big, fat idiot” accountable for his words. Only now, there seems to be some effort to hold his unqualified nastiness up to the light.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GIDEON RACHMAN IN THE FINANCIAL TIMESI agree with most of what you write here, Gideon Rachman. It is a counter-intuitive approach with considerable merit.I take exception to part of one of your statements however – this one:

“The two biggest and most beneficial geopolitical stories of the past 30 years – the spread of democracy and of globalisation – were driven by a succession of states finding their coffers empty.”

Democracy is not a precursor to economic growth, as the case of China, plus many others in history, shows. Indeed, in early stages of “take-off,” democracy can be a genuine liability.

America’s Founding Fathers certainly thought so, because early America was not even modestly democratic. Even of the pool of white, free males, only a small portion – those of a certain means – could vote. Those who had the franchise reflected roughly the same percent we see today as members of the CPC.

Also, much of the early government was not elected. The Senate was appointed until 1913. The general poll for president effectively did not count: only the votes of the Electoral College – again propertied elites – counted.

Globalization itself is ultimately a force for democracy. The rise of globalization – the result of a set of technologies and costs – causes explosive economic growth which in turn creates middle classes. It is the existence of a large middle class which is the sine qua non of democracy.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GIDEON RACHMAN IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Gideon Rachman,

Yours is a very careless way of writing.

How can you lose what you never had?

I am reminded of the paranoid talk within the United States after Mao took power in China.

It was commonly said that certain people had helped America lose China. Indeed, it was used as a serious accusation in the witch-hunts.

Of course, America never had China.

Setting aside that annoying use of language, there is a phenomenon here worthy of study: America clearly is losing prestige and some influence in the world.

There are several things at work in this.

First, America since World War II has made an intense effort at building a world empire, almost dropping its one-time belief in itself as the good scout who stays out of other people’s affairs. The last half-century or so is dotted with American colonial wars, none of which have anything to do with the defense of America.

Indeed, in recent years, the neo-cons in America actually preached the philosophy of dropping the pretences about empire and just using all that military and economic might to shape the world as it wished.

De facto, this is pretty much what America has done, and despite the empty rhetoric of a Bush or even an Obama and the officious stuff from the State Department about who is or is not performing adequately with regard to human rights and democracy, everyone recognizes the fact.

The holocaust in Vietnam (3 million killed for no purpose justifies the word), the pointless invasion of Afghanistan, the slaughter of a million in Iraq, plus countless coups and interventions, including against genuinely democratic governments such as those in Iran, Guatemala, ands Chile, hardly qualifies America to continue as spokesman for rights and democratic values in the world.

And there is the ugly, suppurating wound of Israel-Palestine which only the United States possesses the power to remedy, power it refuse to use – surely a wound that all critically-minded people know is at the heart of the grievances of many Muslims today.

Then again, if we look at the three genuine attempts at genocide in the world since WW II, where do we see the position of the United States?

In Indonesia, after Sukarno’s fall, when the rivers were running red with the blood of half a million people whose throats were cut and bodies dumped, American State Department officials were burning the long-distance lines submitting names for inclusion in the slaughter.

In Cambodia’s killing fields, where was the United States? Its intense secret bombings and armed incursions (much as in Afghanistan now) had toppled the neutral government, effectively bringing the monsters to power. Then it stood by and attacked the Vietnamese who actually helped end the slaughter for proving the domino theory true by entering Cambodia.

In Rwanda, as the best part of a million people were hacked up, the American government pretended nothing was happening: Clinton and the State Department did not want to talk about it.

It is not a very admirable history, to say the least.

And how about America’s other postwar abuses? The devaluing off the American dollar after the Vietnam War? The great recent financial failure which threatened to send the world into another Great Depression? The result of Americans not being able to govern their own affairs, of spending and experimenting mindlessly at the expense of others?

To my mind, these are all just aspects of the decline of the American empire. Imperial over-reach and the demonstrated inability to govern its own affairs, let alone those of others.

The voting population of the United States – less than one percent of the world’s population – is losing its privileged position as de facto world aristocracy. And that is not a bad thing. A multi-polar world is emerging.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GIDEON RACHMAN IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Gideon Rachman,

On the whole, a very perceptive column.

I believe two changes, both quite significant, are needed however.

Concerning the election in Iran, I do believe you have it a bit wrong. Yes, the election made Obama’s wishes more difficult, but no, the election was not illegitimate nor is there yet reason to believe the government is insecure.

You are following the common wisdom of corporate newspapers, a wisdom which seems little more than consistent support for American policy, however wrong-headed it may be on any topic.

“…left a permanent impression of the instability and illegitimacy of the Iranian government.”

We have absolutely no solid basis for saying that the election was illegitimate. Several observers, very knowledgeable about Iran, including one scholar whom I heard interviewed at length, say that result was accurate. A lot of poor people in Iran like the current president.

The disturbances in Iran’s streets have been at least in part fomented by CIA money. Have you forgotten that Bush earmarked $400 million in his late term for inciting trouble in Iran?

I believe that if I gave those who disagree with the government of any country – including certainly Britain or the United States – $400 million dollars towards subversion and propaganda, we would see trouble in any of them. Many Western governments represent minority opinions.

The story you missed, which I think marked a genuine historical turning point, is Israel’s Operation Cast Lead.

Revulsion at the killing of about 400 children is worldwide, and the act further calls into question Israel’s entire structure of unwarranted siege, apartheid, and slow-motion ethnic-cleansing in Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Even the support of some American Jews is beginning to crumble for what is so clearly a brutal government with absolutely no intention of ever seeking genuine peace with its neighbors.