media-ocracy

Anthony DiMaggio

The Gallup survey group reports this month that there is a significant gap in political participation between black and white America, as well as between younger and older citizens.  Disturbingly, this divide has grown in the last two years, despite the severity of the economic crisis and the growth of suffering among middle America and the poor.  This disparity in participation between old and young, black and white, carries with it major implications for democratic representation. 

Minority and youthful voters saw major increases in turnout in the historic 2008 election in which one of the youngest, and the first African American president in history, was elected.  Voting among these groups however has now dropped to previously apathetic levels.  Whereas whites and blacks were just as likely to say they thought about the 2008 election either “some” or “a lot,” the gap between the groups is now 17 percentage points (45% v. 25%) favoring whites.  The current level of attentiveness represents an all time low for the last 15 years for blacks, but also for whites.

While the difference between voting for those between 18 and 29 and those over 30 was relatively small for 2008, that gap grew significantly by 2010.  The gap went from 12 percentage points (favoring older Americans) in 2008 to 23 percentage points this year.  Electoral attention is now at a near 15 year low for the 18-29 age group, and for those over 30 (both groups saw lower attention in only one year: 2004). 

The growing de-politicization among traditionally marginalized groups (the young and minorities) is disturbing in that it raises serious questions about public attitudes going into the 2008 election and today.  There was much self-congratulation among those on the left and among members of disadvantaged demographic groups that the election of Barack Obama constituted a major step toward achieving racial harmony, in fixing an economy in the toilet, and in dealing with the problems left behind from the Bush administration.

Few of these expectations appear to have been warranted in light of Obama’s hawkish escalation of the war in Afghanistan, his abandonment of progressive policy reforms focusing in terms of promoting Wall Street regulation and breaking up banks that are “too big to fail,” and considering the Democratic Party’s tepid response to conservative domestic dogmas regarding the “need” for continued tax cuts for the rich and the “necessity” of cutting social welfare programs such as Social Security.

What the recent Gallup figures demonstrate is the extraordinary naiveté that followed the accompanied the 2008 elections.  Voters thought they could ensure a new era of “hope” and “change” simply by voting a fresh face into the highest office in the land and returning the Democrats to majority status.  This type of reasoning represents identity politics at its worst, and it is the predictable effect of elections that are defined by individual personalities, rather than by real issues.  Identity-politics voting does not bring about democratic change, and assumptions that it will are unwarranted.  Progressive change never comes from the top down, but from the pressure of grassroots protestors and activism demanding a better world.  If “the left” understood this basic point, they would have been busy building social movements over the last two years, rather than sitting back and waiting for Obama to save them.

Those hoping for progressive change this fall are in for a rude awakening.  The Pew Research Center chronicles what will likely be successful efforts to organize Republican supporters and get them to turnout for the 2010 midterms.  The organization reported in August 2010 in anticipation of the November elections that self-described Republicans were “more engaged in the coming election and more inclined to say they are certain to vote than are Democrats.”  Whereas 56 percent of Republicans as of June 2010 were “enthusiastic about voting” in the fall, the number fell to 42 percent for Democrats and Independents.  This was the largest gap between partisans seen in 16 years.  Additionally, 64 percent of Republicans explained that they were closely following campaign news, compared to 50 percent of Democrats.  Finally, 77 percent of Republican voters said they were “absolutely certain to vote,” as compared to 65 percent of Democratic voters

The ascendancy of the Republican right in this election will further seal the deal in preventing reforms on Wall Street or any successful efforts to reduce poverty through increased welfare spending or renewed stimulus.  Republicans (and increasingly most Democrats) don’t care about economic recovery.  They are concerned first and foremost with returning profitability to Wall Street, and that goal was already achieved this year, leaving little incentive to push for broader economic recovery.  There is a very real chance that the economy will further decline over the next year, in light of the increasing intransigence of the Democratic Party, as seen in its opposition to further stimulus spending, and the staunch opposition of Republicans to any increase in federal taxation that could be used to help states fill their budget gaps (and stave off mass firings).  As a result, the road to progressive change may be filled with much hardship in the next few years, as the economy continues to sputter along and more Americans are thrown out of work.  The public, it seems, must continually be reminded that real democratic change is never handed down from above, but has to be fought for through long struggle and sacrifice.

Anthony DiMaggio is the editor of media-ocracy (www.media-ocracy.com), a daily online magazine devoted to the study of media, public opinion, and current events.  He has taught U.S. and Global Politics at Illinois State University and North Central College, and is the author of When Media Goes to War (2010) and Mass Media, Mass Propaganda (2008). He can be reached at: mediaocracy@gmail.com

Robert Parry

President Barack Obama’s instruction to “turn the page” on the Iraq War has set off a new wave of frustration on the American Left, which believes that the architects of this war of aggression should face some accountability for the death and destruction.

But Obama’s non-partisan olive branch – hailing all sides as “patriots” and praising the troops for carrying out a difficult assignment – may reflect his realistic assessment that the balance of national political/media power still tilts sharply to the neocon and right-wing side.

“Liberation,” American Style

Indeed, the biggest controversy around Obama’s speech Tuesday night was not whether the United States should acknowledge war crimes in Iraq but whether Obama should praise former President George W. Bush for supposedly salvaging the war effort by ordering a “surge” of 30,000 more troops in 2007.

In coverage of the speech, every major U.S. news outlet repeated the now-enshrined conventional wisdom that the “surge” turned the tide of the war. For instance, the Washington Post noted that Obama had called Bush before the speech but added that Obama’s aides wouldn’t comment on whether “Obama gave Bush credit for his decision … to order the 2007 troop surge that led to a reduction in violence.”

Though the U.S. press did carry some critical commentary about the overall consequences of the Iraq invasion, particularly its death toll and trillion-dollar price tag, there were no suggestions in the mainstream media that Bush and his neocon aides deserved a long visit with the International Criminal Court at The Hague.

In practical terms, the conventional wisdom on the “successful surge” has meant that there will be no meaningful accountability of any sort against the neocons who used “stove-piped intelligence” on WMD to create a false casus belli, the Bush administration officials who carried out the unprovoked invasion, or the mainstream U.S. journalists who played along with the deceptions to protect their careers.

Rather than any accountability, the neocons and other hawks have retained positions of influence in Washington. Their jobs at prominent think tanks and their access to influential op-ed pages also ensured that when the level of violence in Iraqi violence began declining in late 2007 and early 2008 – from catastrophic to simply horrific – they could quickly give credit to the “surge.”

Although other military factors were of equal or greater importance in this decline, anyone who pointed out the more complex reality was shouted down and made to admit that Bush’s supporters had been “right” about the “surge.”

During Campaign 2008, Democratic presidential nominee Obama was one of the few politicians who tried to make the more nuanced case, placing the “surge” among a number of developments, including some key ones – like the Sunni Awakening – that pre-dated or were unrelated to the “surge.”

However, Obama was browbeaten by mainstream “journalists.” In separate interviews, CBS anchor Katie Couric and ABC’s George Stephanopoulos demanded to know why Obama wouldn’t just admit that his rival, Sen. John McCain, had been “right” about the “surge.”

Finally, Obama chose to surrender to this conventional wisdom, however misguided. He confessed to Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly that the surge “succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.”

Obama’s cave-in allowed the neocons and their sympathizers to further ridicule anyone who wouldn’t go along. But it also demonstrated the real power of the media machine that the Right and the neocons have built over the past several decades. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

A Deformed Conventional Wisdom

To fit with the prevailing conventional wisdom, even the New York Times altered the chronology of events to give the “surge” primacy as the key factor in the declining violence. Although the Sunni Awakening, in which Sunnis turned against al-Qaeda and received U.S. payments, took root in 2006, the Times routinely began to cite the “surge” of 2007 first and the Sunni shift second, as if that were the real order of events.

Still, some military analysts continued to insist that Bush’s “surge” was at best a minor factor in improving Iraq’s security climate. For his book, The War Within, the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward interviewed a number of military officials and concluded:

“In Washington, conventional wisdom translated these events into a simple view: The surge had worked. But the full story was more complicated. At least three other factors were as important as, or even more important than, the surge.”

Woodward reported that the Sunni rejection of al-Qaeda extremists in Anbar province (which preceded the surge) and the surprise decision of radical Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr to order a unilateral cease-fire by his militia were two important factors.

A third factor, which Woodward argued may have been the most significant, was the use of new highly classified U.S. intelligence tactics that allowed for rapid targeting and killing of insurgent leaders. Woodward agreed to withhold details of these secret techniques from his book so as not to undercut their continued success.

Other brutal factors further explained the decline in violence:

–Vicious ethnic cleansing had succeeded in separating Sunnis and Shiites to such a degree that there were fewer targets to kill. Several million Iraqis were estimated to be refugees either in neighboring countries or within their own.

–Concrete walls built between Sunni and Shiite areas made “death-squad” raids more difficult but also “cantonized” much of Baghdad and other Iraqi cities, making everyday life for Iraqis even more exhausting as they sought food or traveled to work.

–During the “surge,” U.S. forces expanded the round-up of so-called “military age males” and locked tens of thousands in prison. Loose rules of engagement also permitted the killing of “MAMS” if they simply looked suspicious, as a video distributed by WikiLeaks revealed. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Watching Innocent Iraqis Die.”]

–Awesome U.S. firepower, concentrated on Iraqi insurgents and civilian bystanders for more than five years, had slaughtered countless thousands of Iraqis and had intimidated many others to look simply to their own survival.

–And, the biggest decline in violence came after it was made clear in 2008 that the Iraqi government was serious about setting a timetable for a U.S. military pullout. As U.S. troops first withdrew from the cities and then started heading for the exits, the number of attacks on Americans dropped to near zero.

In other words, the scaling back (and the promised end) of the U.S. occupation may have been the most significant factor in stanching the bloodshed, although the level of Iraqi political violence remains horrible to this day.

Controlling the Debate

Still, by controlling the “surge” debate, the neocons rehabilitated themselves in the eyes of Official Washington and essentially guaranteed that they would face no accountability, either before some international war crimes tribunal or in their career prospects. They then used their strong position in policy circles to push Obama into another “surge” – for Afghanistan.

Washington’s deformed reality also shaped the debate prior to Obama’s speech announcing the end of American combat operations. The only media question that seemed to get any traction was whether Obama should thank Bush for all he did for Iraq and particularly for the “surge.”

In the end, Obama didn’t go that far, but the American Left should take note that its media weakness – in the face of the neocon/right-wing media powerhouses – is a clear and present danger to American democracy and the security of the world.

Despite the Iraq War’s many disasters, the complicit (or subservient) U.S. news media has continued to let the neocon/Right frame the national debate, and the American Left invests almost no money in trying to restore some balance.

Considering how dependent modern politics is on media — to get out a message or to present a coherent narrative that lets voters put issues into a meaningful context — it remains remarkable how low a priority progressives make building a media infrastructure.

In many ways, this imbalance of media power continues to slip further in the direction of the neocons and the right-wing, as they use their dominance of talk radio and cable news to reach into the homes of working-class people, appealing especially to white men.

And the situation could get worse. Earlier this year, after wealthy progressives pulled the plug on the Air America radio network, the Left’s primary media outlet became MSNBC’s evening line-up of liberal hosts – Ed Schultz, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow.

In other words, the Left is now heavily dependent on General Electric, a charter member of the military-industrial complex, for reaching the American public. And GE only allowed this experimental line-up on MSNBC after trying almost everything else, including an attempt to out-fox Fox News by pandering to the Right.

It’s also not clear what might happen to this fragile oasis of liberal opinion if the Republicans reclaim the Congress next year and thus hold the purse strings to GE’s lucrative military contracts. Or what might change if the deal goes through to sell a majority interest in NBC Universal to Comcast.

To put it mildly, neither GE nor Comcast’s corporate leadership has the kind of ideological commitment to MSNBC’s liberal evening programming that, say, News Corp.’s Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch has toward Fox News’ right-wing content.

Indeed, the “free-market” orientation of CNBC and the more conservative bent of MSNBC’s daytime shows, like “Morning Joe” with former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough, are more in line with GE’s corporate interests.

The Right and the neocons also continue to invest heavily in building up their presence on the Internet, as many worthy independent and progressive Web sites struggle for survival or go under.

So, the Left shouldn’t be surprised when the frame of the national debate is constructed by neocon, center-right and far-right elements – or when President Obama ducks a fight over the accountability that Bush and the neocons should face for a cruel and unnecessary war.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’ are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.

Scott A. Morgan

We have seen the Statements by the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice regarding the horrific rapes that occurred earlier this month in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  There is a investigation underway by the United Nations regarding the actions taken by the Peacekeepers. But what of the United States itself? 

In several instances the rhetoric by the decision makers do not match the actions or lack thereof that have been taken to alleviate the suffering inside the Congo. On the surface itself it appears that not only is the Administration partly to blame but also some of the blame can be directed at the Pentagon and Congress itself.

After the report of the rapes, Several Activist Groups have stated that when Secretary of State Clinton announced that the US was allocating $47 Million for assisting victims of Sexual Assaults that $30 Million was mostly spent. What is even more of a reason for concern is that the amount quoted was allocated in the FY09 Budget by the outgoing Bush Administration.  So why would you promise money that already promised? Unless you were clarifying what the US has done and is doing. Better yet it would be nice what was allocated for FY 10 and FY 11.

Going through some of the numbers brings about some interesting questions as well. It is great to see how grants have been allocated to train the Police of the Democratic Republic of the Congo about how to preserve and collect evidence, and to investigate these matters. Giving the victims access to Legal Aid in these matters is excellent as well. However there were very few specifics given about how the monies allocated for Treatment have been spent as well. Another area of concern is that one Grant for the Police to preserve and protect evidence is due to expire in 2011. This grant needs to be extended.

At this time there is not a sitting Ambassador from the United States to the Democratic Republic of the Congo either. In June President Obama nominated  James Entwistle of Virginia to be the next Ambassador to Kinshasa. With the events that have been occurring in the Country and the lack of movement by the US Senate to Confirm this nominee it makes one wonder if the DRC is of serious concern in Washington.

Another Area of concern is the lack of Enforcement of Public Law 109-456. This law which is known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo Relief, Security and Democracy Promotion Act entered into Law when signed by President Bush but has not been enforced since. One Key Area that needs to be enforced is the appointing of a Special Envoy to the region. There is an “acting” envoy but other parts such as withholding funds to countries destabilizing the DRC such as Rwanda and Uganda are not being enforced. As Homer Simpson would say “D’oh”.

At this time the US Military is conducting training for Elements of the Congolese Army to respect Human Rights. It is indeed possible by the end of the year that a Covert Operation against the LRA could Operate on Congolese Soil. This appears to be a Cookie Cutter Solution imposed by an outside force.

The Congolese People deserve better from the United States………

By Rodolfo F. Acuna

A friend wrote that my piece on “Why the Right Will Win” overstated the strength of the Tea Partiers and the nativists. He stated that Arizona was not the rest of the country, dismissed Sarah Palin as an airhead and the Tea Partiers as a passing fancy, and punctuated his statement by saying that he tended to look at things through a more theoretical framework. Based on my epistemological understanding, I could not disagree more. Theories and accepted truths of the past cannot be applied to the period we are passing through.

In the past the more intense forms of racist nativism subsided when economic times improved. This is not the case today; times have changed. If you haven’t read Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado’s “No Mercy: How Conservative Think Tanks and Foundations Changed America’s Social Agenda,” you should. “No Mercy” documents how the New Right Conservatives have set the country’s political agenda, successfully targeting English Only, Immigration Reform, Race and Eugenics, the abolition of Affirmative Action, Welfare Reform, Tort Reform and multiculturalism.

Since the Nixon years, the right has consolidated its power through the funding of conservative think tanks and foundations, and taken political power through buying elected officials and judges. Tax and inheritance laws have helped this accumulation of wealth and power, even making their donations tax-free. This year’s Supreme Court ruling that held that campaign finance limits on corporation violated their free speech delivered the final blow.

Reminiscent of Supreme Court rulings after the Civil War that held the 14th Amendment applied to corporations, shielding them from state regulation by giving them standing as persons, the Court’s 5-to-4 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission holds that limiting the amount that individuals and corporations can contribute to political campaigns violates their free speech. The consequence is that the rich are free to vote with their dollars. Witness: Rupert Murdoch just donated a million dollars to the Republican Governor’s Association (RGA).

The August 30, 2010, issue of The New Yorker carried an article titled “Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama.” The title is misleading since, like with Richard Scaife Mellon, the stakes are much higher than the Obama or the Clinton presidencies. “Covert Operations” is about the brothers Charles and David H. Koch, who have a combined fortune of thirty-five billion dollars, most of it in energy. They donate freely to the arts and right-wing causes. They are not ordinary billionaires; they own Koch Industries, the second-largest private company in the country. They liberally fund right-wing causes.

According to The New Yorker article, a Republican campaign consultant said, “The Koch brothers gave the money that founded … [the Tea Party Movement]. It’s like they put the seeds in the ground. Then the rainstorm comes, and the frogs come out of the mud – and they’re our candidates!”

The Koch brothers are thus at the epicenter of the anti-Obama movement, playing the same role Scaife Mellon did when he funded the anti-Clinton campaign. Charles and David Koch are ideologues. Like their father before them, they were members of the John Birch Society.

They are members of the Libertarian Party, a precursor of the Tea Party Movement. Conservative William F. Buckley, Jr. called the LB movement “Anarcho-Totalitarianism.” Public tax records show that between 1998 and 2008 the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation spent more than forty-eight million dollars on political causes. The probability is that they gave a lot more.

Much of the money is funneled through subsidiaries such as Americans for Prosperity, which purportedly has controlling interest in the Tea Party. The Koch brothers are in the energy business; they invest heavily in influencing energy policy – denying global warming.

Through organizations such as the Institute for Justice, they have funded suits opposing state and federal energy regulations. Money buys considerable influence in the cash-strapped Halls of Ivory where learned scholars sell their posteriors and write “position papers that are subsequently quoted by politicians and pundits.”

The Koch brothers launched the Cato Institute in the 1970s and regularly buy studies from the Heritage Foundation that argue that “scientific facts gathered in the past 10 years do not support the notion of catastrophic human-made warming.” According to The New Yorker’s article, the jewel in the Koch’s arsenal is the highly influential Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

Fourteen of the twenty-three regulations that President George W. Bush placed on a “hit list” were concocted by Mercatus scholars. The Koch’s method is organized chaos. They, and other chaos agents, have disrupted the Obama presidency. As soon as Obama was elected the Americans for Prosperity launched “Porkulus” rallies against Obama’s stimulus-spending measures.

They orchestrated a Greek chorus of Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Fox News and other conservative outlets. Arizona is the epitome of this organized chaos. Americans for Prosperity has announced that it will spend an additional forty-five million dollars before the midterm elections. The objective is to slow down Obama’s momentum and make him ineffective.

Chaos is very important in this time that the late historian Tony Judt called an “age of forgetting.” The agents of chaos are rewriting history, absolving George W. Bush and deregulation and praising the tax cuts, while the wars and the bankers’ role in the economic disaster are all mythicized. In this scenario British Petroleum, Halliburton and the Kochs are the champions of Main Street. They are not Robber Barons but “Captains of Industry.” The problem is much larger than Palin and the Tea Party.

The Center for Responsive Politics reported that in 2009 the Robber Barons spent $3.47 billion lobbying government. This sum does not include what they can now legally contribute to political campaigns. I don’t need theory to inform me that I am being had.

As a Californian it is repugnant that states such as Alaska, Wyoming, North Dakota and a host of others can block legislation that will benefit the citizens of this state and favor special interests. I cannot forget that the US Senators from states that have smaller populations than the San Fernando Valley receive ninety percent of their campaign financing from people like the Kochs.

I know enough about history to recognize Robber Barons. I know enough about history to know who my enemies are and know that I cannot compromise with them. I know enough about history to know that a silver bullet will not solve our problems. And I know that Palin and her ilk are part of the chorus and not the conductors.

By Jonathan Cook in Hura, the Negev

Nuri al Uqbi’s small cinderblock home in a ramshackle neighbourhood of Hura, a Bedouin town in Israel’s Negev desert, hardly looks like the epicentre of a legal struggle that some observers say threatens Israel’s Jewish character.

Inside, the 68-year-old Bedouin activist has stacks of bulging folders of tattered and browning documents, many older than the state of Israel itself, that he hopes will overturn decades of harsh government policy towards the Negev’s 180,000 Bedouin.

For the past few months, Mr al Uqbi has been in court pursuing a case that has pitted his own expert witnesses against those of the state.

Mr al Uqbi claims the right to return to a patch of 82 hectares in the Negev, close to the regional capital, Beersheva, that he says has belonged to his family for generations. But as both the government and the judge in the case, Sarah Dovrat, seem to appreciate, much more is at stake.

Should Mr al Uqbi win his case, tens of thousands of Bedouin, who long ago had their properties confiscated, could be entitled to repossess their agricultural lands or seek enormous sums in compensation.

Theoretically, it might also open the door to claims by millions of Palestinian refugees scattered across the Middle East. 

The Negev, constituting nearly two-thirds of Israel’s territory, has been almost entirely nationalised by the state, with the land held in trust for world Jewry. But the Bedouin have outstanding legal claims on nearly 80,000 hectares of ancestral property.

Tom Segev, an Israeli historian, observed that the historical documents presented by Mr al Uqbi raise a fundamental question: Who does this country belong to?

The lawyers and witnesses in the case, Mr Segev added, were not just arguing over a plot of land. They are arguing over the justness of Zionism.

Such high stakes may explain why over the past few weeks, as Ms Dovrat has been considering her verdict, the authorities have sped up plans to plant over Mr al Uqbi’s land a “peace forest”, paid for by an international Zionist charity called the Jewish National Fund (JNF).

Until now the main obstacle in their way has been a small village, Al Araqib, re-established a decade ago by several Bedouin families who, rather than pursue Mr al Uqbi’s legal route, have simply reoccupied the land.

Last week, about 300 Bedouin were again evicted when the police destroyed the village’s 40 homes for the fourth time in less than a month.

Mr al Uqbi, a father of eight, said that five years ago after years of challenging the land confiscation with protests and appeals to the authorities he launched the lengthy legal process that has finally reached the Beersheva court. 

I realised that the authorities were simply waiting for me to die. When all the old people are gone, who will be left to come and testify?”

Mr al Uqbi said his father, Sheikh Suleiman al Uqbi, and the other villagers were tricked by the authorities in 1951. They were told that they would have to relocate temporarily while military exercises were carried out in the area.

Mr al-Uqbi, who was nine at the time, remembers the tribe being forcibly moved to a new site, next to Hura, where they have lived ever since, although their neighbourhood has never been recognised by the state.

All these years later, Mr al Uqbi’s home, like his neighbours, is still illegal, and they are all denied water, electricity and other services.

The only option they had been offered to make their lives legal again, Mr al Uqbi said, was to move to one of seven government “townships” set up in the 1970s. All are sunk at the very bottom of Israel’s social and economic tables.

The families have refused, protesting that they would also have to renounce both their claim to their ancestral lands and a pastoral and agricultural way of life known by the Bedouin for centuries. The Uqbi tribe’s fate is far from unique. Tens of thousands of other Bedouin were also moved by the army and have been faced with a similar, stark choice.

Today, 90,000 Bedouin, or half the Negev’s Bedouin population, live in unrecognised communities, according to a human rights group.

 Mr al Uqbi’s court case has set two noted Israeli geography professors in sharp opposition.

 The state’s position is represented by Ruth Kark, of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who claims that the Negev Bedouin were nomads with no ties to the land. Instead, she argues, most of the Negev was considered mawat, or dead, and its ownership passed to Israel in 1948 as the new sovereign ruler.

On these grounds, the state has long classified the Bedouin as “trespassers” and “invaders”.

But Mr al Uqbi’s expert, Oren Yiftachel, of Ben Gurion University in Beersheva, has countered that there was a well-established system of Bedouin land ownership and crop cultivation in the Negev long before Israel’s creation.

He says Bedouin deeds though never formally recorded were recognised by the Ottomans, the British and even early Zionist organisations such as the JNF, which bought land from the Bedouin.

 A 1921 document from the public records office in London unearthed by Mr Yiftachel shows that Winston Churchill, the colonies minister, signed an agreement with Bedouin in the Beersheva area that exempted them from registering their lands and set up a special tribal court to settle land disputes.

 Mr al Uqbi has kept a large store of documents passed on to him, showing that his father cultivated crops on the land and paid regular tithes on the profits to the Ottoman and British authorities.

 He also has a copy of the treaty signed in 1948 between 16 Bedouin tribes, including the Uqbi, and the new Israeli army, pledging loyalty in return for a guarantee that they could continue living on their lands.

 Mr Yiftachel said the legal battles of the Bedouin should be compared to those waged by other indigenous peoples in countries such as Australia, Canada, South Africa, India and Brazil. “Like them, they are fighting for recognition of ‘native title, he said.

 Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East”(Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair”(Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.

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Anthony DiMaggio

 The anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is supposed to be a time of celebration – a time to reflect upon how far we’ve come in fighting racism in the U.S., and soberly assess how far we still have to go before a “post-racial” society is achieved.  Glenn Beck, however, didn’t travel to D.C. for a rational discussion of current-day racism.   The Beck-Palin rally at the Lincoln Memorial this last weekend drew tens of thousands (perhaps hundreds of thousands) of right-wing activists, and few of them were interested in hearing about the structural , institutionalized system of racism that continues to operate under the noses of America’s “colorblind” conservatives. 

The American right traveled to D.C. to cheer a Fox News icon who believes that the only racism in America is that shared by Obama and liberal allies – those with a “deep hatred” of white people (in Beck’s words).  Conservative paranoia and reverse-racism conspiracy theories have long been the norm on the right, but they are taking on an even more perverse tone in light of Glenn Beck’s efforts to rebrand the legacy of Martin Luther King under the banner of the Tea Party and the right wing “populist uprising.”  During his “restore America” event, Beck attacked Obama as “a guy who understands the world through liberation theology” – an interpretation of Christianity explicitly based on combating poverty through the promotion of social justice, empowerment of the poor, top-down redistribution of wealth, and the dissemination of socialist ideology.  Beck told his audience that “people aren’t recognizing his [Obama’s] version of Christianity” – characterized by a dichotomy of the world into “oppressor and victim.”

Beck claims that Obama’s alleged liberation theology traces back to his onetime pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who has preached the need for the African American community to throw off oppression and promote social justice.  What Beck appears to have missed (assuming he’s not simply a pathological liar) is that Obama divorced himself from Wright long ago, rejecting his former pastor as divisive and unhelpful (perhaps detrimental is more accurate) in his run for the White House.  Also missing from Obama’s rhetoric is any sort of association of Christianity with socialism, or support for grassroots rebellion as a cornerstone of his policy agenda.  This is largely beside the point for Beck, however, who is more interested in increasing his ratings through demagoguery and manipulation than he is in facts. 

While I’m correcting blatant misinformation and propaganda from the right, a few other points are in order.   The idea that Beck’s partner-in-crime Sarah Palin could somehow draw upon Martin Luther King in her defense of U.S. militarism should be appalling to those who know anything about the civil rights hero.  In her calls for a campaign to “restore America,” Palin declared that the U.S. military is “a force for good in this country, and that is nothing to apologize for…here today, at the crossroads of our history, may this day be the changing point…look around you.  You’re not alone.  You are Americans!  You have the same steele spine and moral courage of Washington and Lincoln and Martin Luther King.  It is in you.  It will sustain you as it sustained them.”  Palin’s manipulation was greeted with adulation from a crowd that chanted “USA! USA! USA!,” apparently too ignorant to know that MLK himself was an avowed anti-imperialist, and one of the strongest opponents of U.S. militarism and foreign aggression. 

MLK famously attacked the Vietnam War as part of a larger effort by the U.S. to further an imperial agenda in yet another “American colony.”  He condemned his country for being “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” and distrusted the U.S. for sharing “no concern for the social betterment” of poor countries.

King understood unchecked militarism to be one of the greatest threats to the American people.  He warned that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”  He supported an end to the bombing of North and South Vietnam, recognized that the Northern Liberation Front was a legitimate representative of the Vietnamese people, and sought a total withdrawal from Vietnam, in accord with the demands of the anti-war movement.

Beck and Palin’s attacks on social justice are equally insulting to those who have even a minimal knowledge of Martin Luther King.  King was an advocate of socialist ideals.  He spoke out against the shallowness of materialist, consumer culture, and sought a renewed empowerment of unions (which were seen as vital in terms of easing African American suffering), while also supporting policy initiatives such as the living wage, affirmative action, and massive redistribution of economic resources from the rich to the poor.  While Glenn Beck is ardent in his rhetorical defense of individualism and his attack on the welfare state, King stressed the vital importance of collectivity in the black community, the necessity of strengthening black communal institutions, and the value of “building a greater economic base” to fight poverty in poor black and white communities.  He highlighted the problem of “Negroes [who are] pressed into the proliferating service occupations – traditionally unorganized and with low wages and long working hours.”

King was deeply suspicious of capitalism.  He condemned “the dislocations in the market system of our economy and the prevalence of discrimination” for “thrust[ing] people into idleness and blind[ing] them in constant or frequent unemployment against their will.”  King wondered: “why are there forty million poor people in America?  When you begin to ask that question you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth.  When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy.” 

The Beck-Palin attempt to co-opt Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement is, simply put, a wretched Orwellian hoax that has been played upon the people of America.  It represents an inversion of everything Martin Luther King stood for.  This campaign also blatantly misrepresents the policy goals and worldview of the Obama administration.  The reversal of reality is really quite stunning: whereas Martin Luther King was a socialist who opposed U.S. imperial wars, Obama is the exact opposite, explicitly disavowing socialism in his bailout of the banks, his support for corporate friendly health care reform, and his spearheading of an escalation of U.S. violence in Afghanistan.  It takes a massive victory for propaganda for Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin to convince millions of Americans otherwise. 

I probably don’t have to remind my readers that the perversions discussed above are only possible because of a larger media and educational system that purposefully misinforms Americans about the real Martin Luther King.  King’s identity as a militant anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist is deemed too “controversial” for America’s youth to learn about in their history classes; as a result, it’s scrubbed from textbooks and public commentary – yet another casualty in the war to wipe from the American mind any critical consciousness or serious challenge to current systems of corporate-capitalist cronyism and unchecked imperial aggression. 

Beck and Palin are merely the most recent political opportunists who exploit American ignorance for personal fame and fortune.  What we should really be calling for on this anniversary of Martin Luther King’s speech is a renewed commitment to critical inquiry and social dissent.  It’s no pipe dream to say that we can push for real educational reform, in which the public is educated enough to reject out of hand the falsehoods and distortions perpetuated by those with active contempt for the ideals in which King fought and died for.  When all is said and done, we deserve better than the fake revolution being offered by the Glenn Becks of America.

Anthony DiMaggio is the editor of media-ocracy (www.media-ocracy.com), a daily online magazine devoted to the study of media, public opinion, and current events.   He has taught U.S. and Global Politics at Illinois State University and North Central College, and is the author of When Media Goes to War (2010) and Mass Media, Mass Propaganda (2008). He can be reached at: mediaocracy@gmail.com

Guanajuato, Mexico and the Confessional Rule

César Morales Oyarvide

Translated by David Holmes Morris

Guanajuato is a state in central Mexico, in the region known as El Bajío. Famous as the birthplace of independence – it was in the small town of Dolores that the armed struggle against the crown began – it has also been the birthplace of several movements of a reactionary nature, like sinarquismo, a proto-fascist political movement which developed from the cristero rebellion and that was the enemy of the government that resulted from the Mexican revolution.

The bastion of the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) since the 1991 accession, it was governed by Vicente Fox before he was president. When his successor, Carlos Romero Hicks, took power in 2001, he proceeded to change laws and policies, particularly on matters of sexual education and reproductive rights, with the aim of harmonizing them with the Roman Catholic notions of Guanajuato’s leaders and of the PAN. One example is the famous elimination from natural science textbooks of drawings showing male and female genitalia. Later, when the federal government responded to protests from several parts of the country by requiring Guanajuato to issue the students the original science books from the Public Education Secretariat, with drawings intact, some of these books were burned in a public square by Catholic citizens of Guanajuato.

Guanajuato Governor Juan Carlos Romero Hicks

During the administration of Romero Hicks there was also a determined campaign against the use of condoms and other contraceptives. Better publicized perhaps was his brother, Eduardo Romero Hicks, mayor of the state capital – famous for an alley known as “The Alley of the Kiss” – who in January, 2009, honored accepted custom by prohibiting kisses in public places, among other things, making them punishable by fines and even jail sentences.

As part of Romero’s efforts, in 2001 abortion, of any kind, was criminalized – voluntary or involuntary, spontaneous as a result of malnutrition or any other physical limitation or illness, or resulted from rape – and was made punishable by 15 to 30 years in prison. According to the Guanajauto law, abortions are “homicide of a family member by injury to a product of gestation.”

The serious consequences of this nineteenth-century style government, which, in the words of Arnoldo Kraus, “has made vileness its flag, mediocrity its modus operandi, injustice its creed, and stupidity its way of life,” have surfaced in the form of six young indigenous poor women who are in prison for this new crime.

They aborted involuntarily (probably because of the extreme poverty they live in, as does a large portion of the population of Mexico), they were turned in by relatives, neighbors or doctors and they are facing sentences of more than 25 years in jail. All of them are prisoners for no other reason than the religious prejudices that those who govern Guanajuato have made into law. They all have in common the fact that when they arrived at public hospitals gushing with blood and emotionally devastated, the doctors considered it their first duty to call agents of the Public Ministry to report them before giving them medical attention.

They all also share the frustration resulting from the impossibility of paying for access to justice, for a lawyer who will represent them and take their cases to the Supreme Court of the nation.

One of them, Susana Dueñas, suffers from “lack of intellectual resources, psychological disturbances and retardation and mental insufficiency.” This woman has been sentenced to five years by a judge who omitted the results of psychological tests that revealed her condition. “I did nothing to make the baby come… It’s just that that day my stomach and my back hurt and when I went to the bathroom the baby came,” the young woman said in her statement, made, of course, without the presence of a lawyer.

All this is now known by South Korean Kyung-wha Kang, United Nations deputy high commissioner for human rights, despite the fact that, as journalist Jaime Avilés reports, the public security secretary for Guanajuato forced four of the prisoners to sign a document asking not  to be interviewed by the press.

Meanwhile, the state government of Guanajuato has not backed down one inch: the local police have been carrying out investigations in clinics and hospitals to find a pattern among pregnant women in the area of Apaseo with the goal of locating as soon as possible a woman who aborted a four-month-old fetus that was found on Friday in the municipal garbage dump in Apaseo el Alto so they can charge her criminally. On another front, their efforts are also being directed at the closing of an NGO called “Centro de los Adolescentes de San Miguel de Allende,” which serves as a school by professional midwives, with 20 years experience, dedicated to providing sexual education and distributing birth control to young people in rural communities in the area.

Faced with this, the federal administration of Felipe Calderón has remained totally silent; the National Human Rights Commission has once again demonstrated its ineffectualness and its reluctance to broach certain topics; and the Instituto de la Mujer Guanajuatense… well, you can’t expect much from an organization whose head, Luz María Villalpando, by profession an interior decorator, declared recently in an official setting that women with tattoos are responsible for the decadence and the loss of values of society, and for whom the best defense against family violence is the “Three Rs”: resignarse [resign themselves], reír [laugh] and rezar [pray], and who, according to a La Jornada correspondent, believes that at the moment they are being raped women secrete a spermicidal fluid that protects them against pregnancy, for which reason the charge that they have been impregnated through rape would necessarily be false.

Among other conventions, Mexico has signed the “Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.” And in fact, from the federal point of view, abortion is not considered a crime in the country if pregnancy results from rape, takes place by accident or through an imprudent act, if it puts the woman’s life at risk, occurs through nonconsensual insemination or if the fetus is deformed (data from the Secretariat of Health: every six hours a woman dies of pregnancy in Mexico, meaning the death of a pregnant woman at any stage of gestation or during birth or as long as 42 days after giving birth.)

Nevertheless, as journalist María Julia Mayoral of Prensa Latina has reported, in 18 of the 31 states of the country, women who interrrupt their pregnancies can be treated as criminals; there is punishment for them varying from fines to years in jail, with the addition that these sentences can be doubled or tripled if they have bad reputations, hide their pregnancies or become pregnant because of an “illegitimate union” or outside matrimony. In some regions, legal reforms to “protect life from the moment of conception” also serve as a prohibition against the use of contraceptive methods like the birth control pill or the intrauterine device.

While a few kilometers away, in the Federal District, a woman can control maternity freely and voluntarily, in Guanajuato, where, according to statistics from the Secretariat of Health, in the past four years there have been 53,400 pregnancies among women younger than 19, of which 1,580 were not even 15 when they became pregnant, she can go to jail for almost half her life. Of course, the probability of that happening increases in cases of women living in areas of extreme poverty, with no education and lacking in health services.

The message seems clear. In Guanajuato, but not just there, the ideology of some politicians and the Catholic creed carry more weight than the lives of women, their sexual and reproductive rights and the principle of secularism of the Mexican state.

The predicament of Araceli Camargo, Susana Dueñas, Yolanda Martínez, Ana Rosa Padrón, Ofelia Segura Frías and Liliana Morales, although it is the best known case, is not the only one. According to data by journalist Jaime Avilés, there are now 166 other women in Guanajuato also reported to the police by their doctors. Of them, 43 are under court jurisdiction awaiting criminal trial. In the face of this systematic violation of human rights by the state in the name of religious prejudice, ¡libérenlas ya!

Lawrence Davidson/RSN

Between the 23rd and the 25th of August, Yale University held a conference on “Global Antisemitism: A Crisis of Modernity.” It was sponsored by the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism. Therefore, this was a university event and not one brought in from the outside to use Yale facilities. On the surface there is nothing wrong with this. Anti-Semitism is an age-old form of racism and it calls for ongoing academic study. The problem is that this particular conference approached the subject from the ideologically driven position of radical Zionism. In other words, many of the assumptions upon which the conference was built were unfortunately tainted with bias. Indeed, in at least one instance (a panel on the “self-hating” Jew), one might suggest that the event was itself promoting a particularly virulent form of anti-Semitism. Very odd indeed.

The way you initially judge an academic conference is from the reputation of its participants and the nature of its panels. Philip Weiss, the co-editor of the blog Mondoweiss, has looked at both these categories and he concludes that this conference was “dedicated to the idea that any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic.” It appears he is largely correct. Many (though not all) on the participant list are the sort of strident supporters of Israel who confuse Zionism with Judaism and criticism of Israel with “demonization.” Some of the panels were dedicated to problematic issues as “Jewish Self-Hatred” and “Confronting and Combating Contemporary Anti-Semitism in the Academy.” Itamar Marcus, who was a conference keynote speaker and is also a leader of the West Bank settler movement, lectured the participants on “The Central Role of Palestinian Anti-Semitism in Creating the Palestinian Identity.” Putting many of the participants (regardless of their academic credentials and affiliations) into the context created by these panels, what you get is not an academic conference in toto. Parts of it were more like an attempt to assert ideology as truth.

Let’s take a look at some of the assumptions that appear to be behind at least a part of the conference.

1. Criticism of Israel/Zionism, somehow smacks of “demonization” and this constitutes a “contemporary form of anti-Semitism.” (This seems to be the opinion of Charles Small, the Yale Initiative director. See the Weiss link above). If you think this assertion through, you find that it is illogical. Leaving aside the fact that not all Zionists are Jews and not all Jews are Zionists, it is nonsensical to claim that criticism of a political state and its idiosyncratic ideology is the same as criticism of a worldwide religion and people. The only way those at the Yale conference could fall into this confusion is by taking Israel’s description of itself as the “Jewish state” and then uncritically accepting that this warrants the conflation of an entire people and religion with that state. This is an enormous leap, and one that does not reflect reality.

Indeed, it is even logically suspect to assume that criticism of Israel or Zionism is anti-Israeli, much less anti-Jewish! By way of analogy, one can point to the fact that there are millions of Americans who have consistently criticized US domestic and foreign policy at least since the 1960s. The only folks who accuse them of being anti-American are the fanatics on the far right. Is that the sort of company the Yale Initiative academics want to keep? Maybe so. The Zionist version of such fanatics certainly showed up for their conference and seemed to fit right in.

2. Public Jewish criticism of Israel is a form of self-hatred. This is one of those defensive positions Zionists throw up to protect themselves from what they see as the most dangerous attack of all, that from fellow Jews. You will note that when they use this epithet, they will most often put in the proviso that to constitute “self-hatred” the criticism must be made “in public.” What does that mean? It means that if you make the criticism in private, no non-Jew will hear it and the Israeli/Zionist claim to represent all Jewry is not called into question. That being the case, there is no need to intimidate the critic with nasty name-calling. However, if the criticism is made in public, non-Jews do hear it and the Israeli/Zionist claim of representation is called into question. And, since they insist that they stand in for all Jews, that makes you, the Jewish critic, a “self-hating” anti-Semite. In the end, this gambit is nothing but a form of intimidation used to stifle criticism.

Yet, by persistent repetition, year in and year out, the Zionists have convinced many of their supporters that there is something to this otherwise nonsensical assertion that those Jews who stand against them are “self-haters.” So, you can now find Israelis who complain about the “rot in the diaspora,” and describe their Jewish critics both inside and outside of Israel as not only “self-haters,” but also as “traitors to their people.” This is what ideology taken too far can do. The room for critical debate disappears and you start to see those who disagree as mortal enemies.

3. Anti-Semitism plays a central role in Palestinian identity. Here I shall tell a story. I once met Yasir Arafat. From the subsequent interaction I concluded that he was no anti-Semite. He saw the state of Israel as an enemy because of what it did to the Palestinian people, but he did not ascribe blame to the Jewish people as a whole. He even talked endearingly of Yitzak Rabin, his “partner for peace.” I thought that latter opinion naive of him, but it certainly was not the mark of an anti-Semite.

While Arafat was in forced exile in Tunisia the Israelis managed to tap his phone. There they allegedly recorded Arafat saying some bad things about “the Jews.” I say allegedly because the Israelis are not above having forged the whole incident. Real or false, the statements appeared in The New York Times the next day and many people said, “Aha! You see. The leader of the Palestinian people is anti-Semitic.” Assuming, for the moment, that Arafat did make the comments, I do not find that surprising (though I do not think such a single incident would make him an anti-Semite). Actually, what I would find surprising is if he did not occasionally make such comments. Do the Palestinians hate all Jews? The vast majority does not. But, given Israel’s barbarous treatment of them, and its simultaneous insistence that it is the institutional incarnation of the entire Jewish people, it is a small miracle that most Palestinians, including Yasir Arafat, have never fallen into the trap of blaming all of Jewry for the actions of only some of them.

It is not the Palestinian national character that has been shaped by anti-Semitism. Rather, it is the Israeli national character that has been shaped by a fear and loathing of all Arabs, and Palestinians in particular. If you doubt this just go to Israel and keep your ears open. There you will find that too many of its Jewish citizens see Arabs as dirty, promiscuous, untrustworthy, and all the other things that we Americans once ascribed to Irishmen, Italians, Poles, African-Americans and the Jews as well. Quite frankly, I have never run into anything approaching this level of racial animosity in an Arab country.

If this past week’s conference is indicative of anything, it is that Yale’s Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism is in danger of falling from academic grace. That is, it is in danger of ceasing to be a center for the objective study of an age-old form of racism, and instead tying itself to an ideological view of the world that is itself racist. Why are they apparently doing so? Is it because they are funded by wealthy Zionist ideologues who have influenced the choice of leadership and therefore the parameters of what here passes for “research?” Maybe. Whatever the reason, if this keeps up the Yale Initiative is doomed as a legitimate academic venture. I recommend that Yale University correct the situation or rapidly distance itself from the entire project.

Lawrence Davidson is a professor of Middle East history at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, and author of the works listed below.

To read more stories from RSN, see: http://readersupportednews.org/opinion/134-134/2827-yale-university-and-anti-semitism