SOME HARD FACTS ABOUT TERROR

John Chuckman

 

We are having an outbreak of reports in the Canadian press about “home grown” terrorists, “radicalized” young men of Muslim faith traveling out of the country to participate in extremist groups abroad, a relatively insignificant phenomenon which has received inordinate publicity. In any event, if you give the matter some thought, you realize that this “news” is a kind of empty publicity, noise about something as old and familiar as human life itself, although it has been bestowed with a new name intended to frighten us into supporting measures outside the framework of a society of laws.

The truth is that young men, at least a certain portion of them, have always traveled abroad to join causes and wars. It’s about as ordinary a phenomenon as playing team sports or joining clubs. In many cases, we end up praising them for their bravery and idealism, as was certainly the case with the many thousands of Europeans, Americans, and Canadians who traveled to Spain in the 1930s to volunteer in the civil war against General Franco. In other cases, we condemn and imprison them and sometimes even execute them as part of the losing side, as America has been doing in its rampage through the Middle East.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the emergence of new, independent nations from the British Empire drew thousands of young men to Africa to fight as mercenaries or volunteers. Apartheid South Africa used to run classified ads in newspapers abroad to attract young men in its battle against the African National Congress. Young Jewish men in the past went to Israel to join the IDF out of some sense of brotherhood, and they do so still. The French Foreign Legion gained almost mythical status as a place for young men to leave things behind, embracing an undefined sense of purpose and brotherhood. Young European adventurers, often young noblemen with hopes of gaining glory, sailed across the Atlantic in the 1770s to volunteer in the American colonies’ revolt against the British Empire, far more of them than Washington’s meagre army could use.

Magnetic leaders like Napoleon or Castro or Nasser attracted countless volunteers from abroad in their heyday. Our history books don’t dwell on the fact but large numbers of young men from many countries volunteered for Hitler’s invading legions. The phenomenon does not depend on the high or noble nature of the cause, although the luster and publicity around grand causes undoubtedly attracts a still wider range of young men.

Young men often just want to escape from every-day, humdrum life, a boring marriage, a nothing job, or, as in the case of the Foreign Legion, to leave a criminal or failed past behind in hopes of high adventure, a new identity, and a fresh start in life. The genuine nature of a cause often matters little because young men’s fantasies convert grubby deeds into mythic stuff at least for a time. Young men in the Foreign Legion were actually fighting for a brutal imperialism in North Africa. Volunteers to the IDF only assist in the oppression of an abused people, not in the protection of the Jewish people. Those who joined Napoleon thought they were spreading liberté, égalité et fraternité across a mummified old-order Europe, but they were helping one of history’s great bloody soldier-conquerors glorify himself and do what it was he lusted after doing.

Mental illness also intrudes into terrorist matters, all things unusual or different being grist for the big dumb mill of the press. In Canada, during the wave of empty chatter about “home-grown terrorists,” there were two isolated incidents of murder in different parts of the country, one of a policeman and one of a reservist in the military. Immediately the press began a completely uninformative and patience-exhausting round of speculation about the dark nature of the perpetrators, complete with interviews of various self-proclaimed “terrorism experts,” men, as it generally turns out, who run security firms and are out drumming up business. In both cases, we finally learned through the fog of misinformation generated by the press, that the young dead men were deeply mentally disturbed, their acts having no more political significance than the crazed men set on suicide who first kill their wives or children or the boys who periodically show up heavily armed at school, shooting their way through classmates.

And of course, it is almost invariably males who do these things, our prisons containing about ten men for every woman. The violence we see in professional football, hockey, or boxing being almost an exclusive male domain. Woman rarely commit murder, males being responsible for almost all of it, with young males being responsible for an extraordinarily disproportionate share.

Aside from the psychotic and deeply depressed, there is a certain segment of young men in every society who are simply attracted to opportunities for legal killing, rape, and mayhem – this being the truly ugly side of every war and conflict that we never mention in our sentimental world-war memorial services or high school textbooks. These men are variously termed sociopaths or psychopaths, and they appear to exist naturally in some proportion in any population. They enjoy killing, inflicting pain, and the sense of supreme power over the lives of others, and they are incapable of sympathy for their victims or remorse for their acts. They only fear being caught, and war provides a wonderful legal playground for them.

The bloodiest, most brutal and pointless war of the last half century, America’s grotesque slaughter in Vietnam, attracted thousands of volunteers from other countries to join in the gruesome fun – acts which included everything from raping girls and then shooting them to throwing men out of helicopters. Even then-peaceful Canada, whose prime minister, Lester Pearson, bravely turned down Lyndon Johnson’s bullying demands to send troops (charmer that Johnson was, he is said to have grabbed our Nobel Peace Prize-winning leader by the lapels during a meeting and pushed him against a wall), saw hundreds of adventure-seeking young men, on their own, join the American holocaust, which would see three million horribly slaughtered, countless wounded, and an ancient agricultural land overwhelmed with America’s landmines, cluster bombs, and poisons.

Today we call people terrorists as easily as we more accurately might have called them reckless or mad. The word terrorist has been given an almost frightening, superstitious connotation much resembling the word witch in the seventeenth century when any poor old soul who suffered from a mental illness like schizophrenia might be burnt alive for her mumblings and delusions. Today, the same people we once burnt would be sent to a homeless shelter or a psychiatric hospital. Another aspect of the word terrorist is related to what Stalin used to say when he expected his officials to launch a new purge to keep the country terrorized into submission. The Vozhd would say something about “wreckers” or “wreckers of the revolution” and his minions would busy themselves demonstrating alacrity in finding large numbers to consign to prison or death. All of our press and government spokespeople now use terrorist with those two meanings, and to the extent that they do, we should recognize the foolishness of their speech and its danger to a free society.

Of course, anyone who commits violent crime needs dealing with, and we do have laws covering every form of violent crime and what is judged the degree of culpability. But creating a special class or type of crime, somehow understood to be different in nature from other crimes, and thereby requiring extraordinary measures of espionage and policing and imprisonment and standards of evidence, is a shabby, dishonest, and cowardly political act. It is a political act in exactly the sense best explained by George Orwell.

The template for this kind of state activity comes directly from Israel. It long ago succeeded in changing the outside perception of events since 1948 from that of a relatively powerless people having their homes and lands taken with great brutality. Everyone knows instinctively that people treated in that fashion have every right in international law and custom to fight their oppressors. We call them at various times and circumstances freedom fighters, guerillas, resistance fighters, or irregulars. But in this case, they were transformed into terrorists who seek only to destroy law-abiding, democratic Israel – unspeakably evil beings intent on attacking the imported Ozzie-and-Harriet peacefulness of white-picket fence neighborhoods constructed on other people’s property. It truly is a case of the world turned on its head.

It does make things so much easier when you shoot someone or bulldoze their home or send them to prison indefinitely with no trial and subject to torture, if you first have demonized them, much as in the case of witches or wreckers, with terrorist being this generation’s choice demonizing word. And when Israel kills some people whose identity as “terrorists” might be seen as very doubtful, the victims magically become militants, a Newspeak word which strives to make the killing of anyone from boys to grandfathers palatable, our shabby press in the West having adopted the word in its reportage without so much as blinking an eye, much less asking a question. This has been Israel’s day-in, day-out pattern of government for decades, but now it has managed to export to the United States the same pattern of behavior. The United States, after all, is a nation given to Captain Ahab-like obsessions, as it has demonstrated many times in its history, Muslims now having displaced the Communists it pursued with relentless fury for decades at home and abroad. And when the United States embraces a new obsession, its dependants in Europe, Canada, Australia, and other places are bullied into embracing it too. America has many avenues for pressuring the acceptance and recognition of its latest craze or special interest or dark operation and to quiet the criticism which would naturally flow from those who disagree and think for themselves.

Were America not enthralled with this voodoo about terror, Europe and others would quickly fall away, and Israel’s ugly behavior would be left in a glaring spotlight, much as South Africa’s once was.

It is the force of these considerations in part which leads so many to question the true nature of what happened on 9/11, for that set of events was pivotal in having American public opinion embrace extraordinary, anti-democratic, and anti-human rights measures. I do not subscribe to the (not-uncommon) conspiracy notion that the American government was complicit in 9/11, using it as a kind of Nazi Reichstag Fire to ignite the mindless war on terror and a crusade through the Middle East to overturn governments unfriendly to Israel. I do very much believe though that the full story of that event has never been told, and, as always, that can only mean highly embarrassing or compromising facts are being suppressed. The immense body of confidential information in Washington on all matters of state – literally tens of billions of documents – would largely disappear if it weren’t for considerations of embarrassment and compromise, the need for genuine government secrecy being much rarer than many assume.

A free society does not recognize crimes deemed in some way to be different or more heinous or extraordinary: it maintains and enforces sensible, well-reasoned laws which apply equally to all. It does not create criminal laws which reflect political pressure or special interests. The United States, now on a new hunt for a great white whale, has virtually re-created East Germany’s dreaded Stasi, only in a much more sophisticated and far-reaching form. It meshes with the all-pervasive secret state police apparatus Israel has constructed in the Middle East with infinite care since 1948. Now, over all our lives there is something, not answerable to any electorate, working to dissimulate, to intimidate, and to generate fear as nothing of which the Soviet Union was remotely capable. It influences all of our laws and customs, even attempting to shape the way we speak and think.

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

I don’t know how anyone given the task could draw a map of Israel: it is likely the only country in the world with no defined borders, and it actually has worked very hard over many decades to achieve this peculiar state.

 

It once had borders, but the 1967 war took care of those. It has no intention of ever returning to them because it could have done so at any time in the last forty-three years (an act which would have been the clearest possible declaration of a desire for genuine peace with justice and which would have saved the immense human misery of occupation), but doing so would negate the entire costly effort of the Six Day War whose true purpose was to achieve what we see now in the Palestinian territories.

As far as peace, in the limited sense of the absence of war, Israel already has achieved a kind of rough, de facto peace without any help from the Palestinians. The Palestinians have nothing to offer in the matter of peace if you judge peace by the standards Israel apparently does.

Israel has the peace that comes of infinitely greater power, systematic and ruthless use of that power, the reduction of the people it regards as opponents to squatters on their own land, and a world too intimidated to take any effective action for justice or fairness.

Genuine peace anywhere, as Canadian physicist and Holocaust survivor Ursula Franklin has observed, is best defined by justice prevailing. But you can have many other circumstances inaccurately called peace; for example, the internal peace of a police state or of a brutally-operated colony.

Israel appears to have no interest or need for the kind of peace that the Palestinians can offer. What then can the Palestinians give Israel in any negotiation?

There are many “technical” issues to be settled between the Israelis and Palestinians, such as the right of return, compensation for property taken, the continued unwarranted expulsions from East Jerusalem, the Wall and its location largely on Palestinian land, but in a profound sense these are all grounded in the larger concept of genuine peace as Ursula Franklin defined it, something we have no basis for believing Israel is, or ever has been, interested in.

Israel wants recognition, not just as a country like any other, but as “the Jewish state,” whatever that ambiguous term may mean, given the facts both of Israel’s rubbery borders and the definition of Jewish, something which Israelis themselves constantly fight over – reformed, orthodox, ultra-orthodox, Ashkenazi, Sephardic, North African, observant, non-observant, and still other factions and divisions in what is quite a small population.

I very much think that the reasons Israel wants that particular form of recognition are not benevolent: it is the kind of term once put into a contract which opens the future interpretation of the contract to pretty much anything. After all, recognition of Israel as a state is something Arab states have long offered Israel in return for a just settlement, but Israel has never shown the slightest interest.

If recognition of Israel as “the Jewish state” were granted, what would be the status of any non-Jewish person in Israel? I think we can guess, given the awful words of Israel’s foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, or the even more terrible words of Ovadia Yosef, founder of the Shas Party, a Netanyahu ally, and Israel’s former Chief Rabbi.

After all, about nineteen percent of Israeli citizens are non-Jews, mainly the descendants of Palestinians who refused to run from the terrors of the Irgun and Stern gangs in1948. They carry Israeli passports, but are not regarded as citizens in the same sense as Jewish citizens, and there are even laws and restrictions in place creating the kind of deadly distinction George Orwell wrote of in Animal Farm, “Some animals are more equal than others.”

The new talks do not include even the most basic requirement of a legitimate voice to represent the Palestinians, a desirable situation perhaps from Israel’s point of view, one Israel’s secret services have long worked towards with dark ops and assassinations. How do you negotiate with opponents you allow no voice?

Mahmoud Abbas, an almost pitifully shuffling character who is the man supposedly representing Palestinian interests, is now approaching two years of playing president without an election: he has zero legitimacy with the Palestinians and the outside world. Even at that, his assumed authority extends only to parts of the West Bank of the territories.

Hamas, despite the shortcomings found in any leadership of a heavily oppressed population (after all, it is often forgotten that the African National Congress in South Africa was communist-affiliated), is nevertheless the elected government of Gaza territory, but Israel has pressured the United States – and through it, effectively the world – to regard Hamas as a coven of witches, ready to unleash dark powers if only once Israel relaxes its stranglehold.

It would be far more accurate to talk of a settlement or an accommodation with the Palestinians than peace, but any reasonable agreement requires intense pressure on Israel, which holds all the cards, pressure which can only come from Washington. Accommodation involves all the difficult “technical” issues Israel has no interest in negotiating – right of return, compensation, the Wall, and East Jerusalem. Israel’s position on all of them is simply “no.”

But we know that Washington is contemptibly weak when it comes to Israel. The Israel Lobby is expert at working the phones and the opinion columns and the campaign donations. It even gets Washington to fight wars for it, as it did in Iraq, and as it now is attempting to do in Iran – surely, the acid test of inordinate influence on policy.

Most American Congressmen live in the same kind of quiet fear of the Israel Lobby as they once did of J.Edgar Hoover’s special files of political and personal secrets. Hoover never even had to openly threaten a Congressman or Cabinet Secretary who was “out of line.” He merely had a brief chat, dropping some ambiguous reference to let the politician know the danger he faced. It was enough to keep Hoover’s influence going for decades.

You never heard a thing in the press about the quiet power Hoover exercised in the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s, but it was there. Just so, the Israel Lobby today.

So where does the impetus for a fair accommodation come from?

Nowhere. Israel goes right on with its calculatedly-unfair laws taking the homes and farms of others, slowly but surely pushing out the people with whom it does not want to share space.

Anywhere else, this process would be called ethnic-cleansing, but not here, not unless you want to be called a bigot or an anti-Semite.

One says this about the impossibility of a settlement with a reservation. It is possible that the weak Abbas, locked in a room in Washington, could well be browbeaten and bribed into signing some kind of bastard agreement, giving Israel every concession it wants in return for a nominal rump Palestinian state composed of parcels Israel doesn’t want or hasn’t yet absorbed. It wouldn’t be worth the paper it was written on, but Israel would then undoubtedly assume its perpetual validity and in future interpret it as it wished.

After all, the history of modern Israel involves agreements divvying up the land of others without their consent, but even those historical divisions – look at the maps attending the Peel Commission (1937) or the UN decision on partition (1947), and you see roughly equally divided territory – today are ignored by Israel or given some very tortured interpretation. So what will have changed?

There simply can be no genuine peace with justice where there is no will for it.

DROWNING IN FILTH

John Chuckman

“We are all drowning in filth…I feel that intellectual honesty and balanced judgement have simply disappeared from the face of the earth.”

George Orwell (diary entry for 27 April, 1942)

I’ve given the date of Orwell’s words lest someone think they were written by a contemporary bearing the writer’s name. Recent events surely qualify the United States to claim some sort of title from the Guinness Book of Records such as the world’s largest moral and intellectual open sewer.

A man by the name of Ed Klein has written a vile book called The Truth about Hillary. Perceptive readers may require no more information about this book than the fact that Klein is a former editor for The New York Times. The Times reputation as a newspaper upholding genuine liberal values exists only in the minds of those who regard rolling on the floor and babbling in tongues as divine inspiration. For decades, The Times has demonstrated enough dissembling, unwarranted personal attacks, subtle omissions, and tweaking of words to qualify many times over for a J. Edgar Hoover Official G-Man Helper Award. So what would you expect from a former editor?

You must give Klein his due, he knows his market: America always loves vile books about successful women. I could ask, how does a man with any self-respect, any sense of decency – claiming to be a responsible figure in journalism to boot – write a book retailing trashy gossip about a living, former first lady’s sex life? The subject would be off-limits for anyone possessing some integrity. But remember, this is America, where literally almost anything goes to make a fast buck or a vicious political point.

How does writing such a book differ from the behavior of thirteenth-century tribesmen stoning women for presumed transgressions? Why, not a bit, of course. Never mind that swill about women’s rights and freedoms America pitches out there. That’s only for consumption by ignorant turban heads. When it counts in America, when something untoward occurs like an independent-minded woman seeking high office, stoning remains completely acceptable.

One good measure of any book is the nature of those who promote it. Well, here is Rush Limbaugh – America’s pill-popping television clown for lads stuck in the onset of puberty, almost certainly America’s greatest living authority on the threatening qualities of women – slobbering over the volume:

“I’ve got some interesting, juicy details on this book on Hillary by Ed Klein, but I’m not going to be the first to mention them. I’m not going there. It will come out eventually. It has to do with sexual orientation, and I’m not going to be the one. That’s the book that everybody says is going to be presenting a firestorm.”

Klein’s intent of course is to poison political prospects for Mrs. Clinton, who is frequently mentioned as a future presidential candidate. We knew Mrs. Clinton had a fine intelligence, but she also has demonstrated her steel, rising from the most savage treatment ever accorded a President’s spouse to success in the Senate. And she is richly hated for precisely that reason.

It was a fine moment recently when the American Senate offered an apology for about five thousand American lynchings. The number came in at a mere five thousand because limits were placed on the time span covered. The Senate is punctilious about details if nothing else. The Senators’ gesture was reasonable and fair, wasn’t it? A privileged body totally neglects its duty and plain human decency for a century and then says it is sorry five thousand corpses later.

Note that the number of lynching victims counted (and there were many more in the previous century) is roughly double the number of people killed in 9/11. The population of the United States was much smaller when lynching was a regular source of family-values entertainment in the South, so the number killed actually represents a far greater proportion of population than those consumed in 9/11.

The families of those lost in 9/11 were overwhelmed with donations, many even became multi-millionaires, but never mind compensation for the descendants of people savagely lynched by their neighbors. America’s not of a mind for that sort of thing as the sponsor for the apology explained.

Now that an autopsy has proved the late Terri Schiavo was blind, missing half her brain, and showed no signs of abuse, you’d think the American politicians who made complete asses of themselves trying to have the courts interfere in the private affairs one poor citizen would shut up.

But not Governor Jeb Bush of Florida. He now has a prosecutor looking into the original reporting of the injury Terri suffered fifteen years ago. Her poor husband not only lost his wife, endured years of marriage to a vegetable, years in the courts trying to bring a decent end to the misery, he has been reviled, abused, and threatened by America’s Christian Right who claim they cherish life while cheering their troops in Iraq murdering, maiming, and torturing thousands.

At Terri’s death (a natural and peaceful one following the legally-authorized removal of life support), her husband actually had to go into hiding for fear of his life. So the Governor of his state, confronted by scientific facts and embarrassed by the idiocy of his party’s behavior, launches a witch hunt against the only real victim in the whole terrible saga, Terri’s husband. It is difficult to imagine a more vicious and dishonest action by government authority than this of Jeb Bush.

The American House of Representatives is to vote for the sixth time on a Constitutional Amendment to make defacing the flag a crime. My, here’s a cause right up there with ending slavery or defining high treason: the horrifying act of defacing a piece of cloth with red and blue dye.

I just wonder about all those cheap little flags that went up on car aerials after 9/11, you know the ones that were shortly reduced to millions of faded gray rags or fluttered down in the thousands like autumn leaves to be ground into the pavement? Are drivers with ragged, dirty bits fluttering from their aerials or stuck to their tires to be regarded as felons?

How about all those “Made in America” flag labels they love at Wal-Mart? Would you go to jail for soiling your Jockey shorts or disrespectfully crumpling used Dixie Cups? Would spilling coffee on your star-spangled track suit in the privacy of your recreational vehicle become a crime? How do you handle American flag mud flaps?

Considering the monstrous things in which America now is engaged, both at home and abroad, this political farce borders on pornography.

We have the revelation in a New England Journal of Medicine article that American doctors attending prisoners at America’s torture chamber in Guantanamo Bay give confidential patient information to the CIA and other agencies so that they can assess which of their efforts proves most effective. I guess you could call it a system of continuous improvement in torture using information collected by doctors sworn to do their patients no harm. Psychiatrists and psychologists treating prisoners work as part of an integral system of punishment and rewards to keep prisoners under stress. I wonder whether they tell their victim/patients “Have a Nice Day!” as they leave each session.

A ministerial letter leaked in the U.K. confirms not only that American Marines used napalm-type weapons in Iraq but that the American government lied to its British ally when asked whether it was doing so. America’s napalm weapon is now innocuously named MK-77 to avoid tripping memories of roasting villagers alive in Vietnam. The MK-77 consists of a dumb bomb containing a mixture of jet fuel and polystyrene, a compound which clings to the flesh of victims like barbecue sauce as it burns white-hot. The letter claimed it was only used away from civilians, but dumb bombs do have a way of going astray, and I’m not sure any person of conscience can accept poor conscript soldiers being treated that way. There are many unconfirmed reports that this hideous weapon also was used by Marines on Fallujah.

The Downing Street Memos – Eyes-Only, Secret documents also leaked in the U.K. – are irrefutable proof that Bush had the invasion of Iraq planned almost a year before it occurred, before all his phony outrage about weapons or support for terror. They point, too, to intelligence and diplomacy being deliberately bent to the purpose.

It is rare for historians to have such evidence of plans and intentions, especially at so early a date after an illegal war. The only other example I can think of is the Nazi government’s papers falling, completely intact, into the hands of the Allies. Yet the American press has minimized these revealing documents by misrepresenting them, under-reporting them, and playing with words when they are reported.

Instead, we were treated to a sentimental love-in over memories of two cub reporters at the Washington Post three decades ago during the last days of Richard Nixon. It followed the revelation of just who Deep Throat was, a high-level government source for the reporters at the time. It was re-assuring that the Washington Post managed one act of serving the public thirty years ago. They certainly have done nothing worthwhile since. One of those daring cub reporters, Bob Woodward, has since gone on to such meaningful work as singing the praises of America’s current brutish-thug President.

Last, we have a genuine investigative reporter, one of America’s last, a remarkable man named Seymour Hersh, telling us that sadistic horrors are contained in tapes from Abu Ghraib prison never released to the public. They contain, among other things, pictures of young boys being sodomized and the soundtrack has their screams.