Duration
Dollars
Deaths - US
Deaths - Iraqi (civilian and police)

Over the past few years surprisingly many Jews, Persians, Palestinians, and Syrians have come through either my lab or neighboring labs, enough so that I often get an earful about these issues, so much so that I get a little tired of seeing more of the story here....But anyway, back in 2002 one palestinian (2nd generation) undergraduate, who often used the lunch room to pray to the east (remember, state university, Ohio and federal taxpayer-funded) complaining all the time about Israel, Israel, Israel.  I asked her, "What's wrong with the Jews?"  She said, "I have no problem with the Jews, it's just the Israelis I have a problem with."

Now, when the whole Mel Gibson thing broke, I thought, "Mel, Mel, Mel, just say 'Israelis' instead of Jews and there would be no problems."

Scottie mentioned the Mel thing and that reminded me...I think some kind of declaration needs to be made to save some effort on everybody's part.  It is fair to criticize one country's policy without being call racist, even if that country is Israel.

All right, so, Israel.  Probably before trying to digest all those beautiful pearls Scottie wrote, I have to ask this:  Post WWII, what do you do with the Jews? 

We may not want to play monday morning quarterback on history, so let me ask a different question.  Is it breaking U.N. resolutions and Israeli policy in the occupied territories that is the problem, or is it simply unfair that Israel exists because it displaces Palestinians etc.?  I guess I'm wondering whether Israel "has a right to exist" or not (to the extent that countries have rights...what do you think I'm a linguist?)

Because the central problem with Hamas and Hezbollah, is that they don't recognize Israel's "right to exist".  The Palestinian government is propped up with U.S. and Israeli funds.  Hamas wants to destroy Israel.  That's pretty clear.  Taking the high road for democracy is all well and good but Israel shouldn't fund it's own demise, and the U.S. doesn't have to chip in on that one either.  That's a big difference from running a coup.  Big difference.  That's dollar diplomacy, not CIA black ops.  W even said (astonishingly) he's willing to deal with Hezbollah as a political party if they disarm (a la Ireland).

I had a few thoughts today while returning from the DMV office in Lafayette.

    "What is liberty if it is accompanied with vast propaganda?"

    "What is democracy when governments pursue actions in direct opposition of the will of the people?"

    So let me hitch-hike on these ideas for a while, and hopefully I will have met Butch's criterion for being a blog member on his site ....

    GNN and CommonDreams reported the other day that 50% of Americans believe today that Iraq did, in fact, possess WMD's, thus justifying the 2003 US invasion and current occupation. Never mind that NO WMD's were found, the poll suggested that 50% of Americans believed that they were found there.

    One of the many arguments given to the American sheople pre-war was that Iraq had WMD's and intended to use them against the US. Well none were found. Another argument offered was that Saddam Hussein was in violation of UN resolutions, therefore the US had the unique right to invade the country and make him comply. This was an interesting argument because the measure went to the UN and the UN voted to pursue diplomatic means to resolve the problem, effectively vetoing the US's intentions of pre-emption. But the US invaded anyway. In retrospect, the US defied the will of the UN to punish Saddam Hussein for being in non-compliance with the UN .... Never mind that Israel has historically defied more UN resolutions than any other member country. Israel is still in defiance of UN 242, and this is a resolution which is almost 40 years old. A third argument meant to hammer the point home was the that US should free the oppressed Iraqi people from its ruthless dictator, and the US should establish a "free and democratic" Iraq.

    So let's look at some obvious questions to raise:

1. If the US is so supportive of installing the democratic ideal in the Middle East, why did the US government and its corrupt representatives decide to punish the Palestinian people for voting Hamas into power?

    So let's amend the US agenda : the US supports democracies if and only if it likes the outcome of democratic elections abroad. When the US does not support the outcome, it supports measures to disenfranchise and disempower those elected governments. The obvious case in point recently is with the Hamas rise to power in Palestine. Historically, there have been other examples of the US sounding the trumpets of democracy until a person or group comes to power with agendas not in complete alignment with the US's : e.g. the Arbenz-Guzman government of Guatemala in 1954, the Mossadegh government of Iran, before the 1953 coup by the CIA after Mossadegh decided to nationalize Iranian oil, which incidentally has much to do with the current propaganda concerning Iran.

The inescapable conclusion that reasonable people should arrive at is that if the US supports democracies, then it must also abide by the will of the respective peoples upon which it has imposed the democratic ideal.

2. Currently, 60% of Americans are opposed to the Iraq war, given the revelations of the last 18 months or so, namely that the intelligence was manipulated by the US government to pursue its geo-political strategies worldwide, that the Neo-Cons have wanted a war with Iraq since 1999, and have persuaded the government in charge, whether Clinton or Bush, to find reasons to pursue such a course of action. And yet even though a plurality of Americans do not support this invasion and occupation, there we are still. So the obvious point is that if democratically-elected governments do not respect the collective will of the people, should these governments be described as democratic?

3. Since the summer of 2002, which I will describe as the time of my political awakenings, I have been telling friends and colleagues of the underlying reasons for 9-11, and I have since witnessed that there have been no serious discussions by the mainstream media or the US government on how to rectify the situation, i.e. how to correct the root sources of the problem.

Here enters the monolithic power of propaganda, which certainly exists in most democratic countries but especially reigns in the US :  GNN recently reported that a high-ranking member of the 9-11 commission, Governor Tom Keane of NJ, said publicly that the findings of the 9-11 commission report pointed to the US-Israel alliance as the chief motor of Al-Queda aggression directed at the US. And the propaganda machine has effectively failed to report this, on purpose mind you, due to the agendas of the major media outlets.

And now take the current Lebanon crisis : The US could have stopped the Israeli agression against Lebanon literally after day one. But they did not.

Forget about the law that prohibits countries receiving US military aid from using US weapons for offensive measures, which is what Israel precisely did, let's just examine the role of propaganda in this affair.

Here are the facts.

2 Isareli soldiers were captured on Lebanese soil (an overlooked fact if you watch CNN), and Hezbollah said immediately that they wanted to exchange prisoners. Israel currently holds 9,000 prisoners (Palestinian and Lebanese), 1000 of which are being held without any charge or access to a court, prisoners labeled "administrative detainees". Before any rockets were fired by Hezbollah into Haifa or Israel proper, Israel called the "kidnapping" of Israeli soldiers an "act of war" even though Israel routinely does the same in the Occupied Territories and elsewhere. Israel immediately bombed the Beirut airport. After more bombings by the IDF of Lebanon then and only then did Hezbollah resort to sending rockets into Israel. Israel bombed bridges, schools, hospitals, orphanages, apartment complexes, and a well-known UN compound, and it claimed while doing so that all were "Hezbollah strongholds" . Joke.

Yet if a disinterested observer had wandered into the conflict mid-stream they would have witnessed the actions on the Israeli side as "self-defense", which is what the Israeli and US presses suggested; a suggestion, mind you, that is not consistent with the facts ....

So how did Hezbollah come to be in existence in the first place?
Good question ...

Israel illegally invaded Lebanon in 1982, and illegally occupied that country until 2000. Hezbollah was a grass-roots resistance movement that grew from Israel's illegal and non-UN-mandated actions. In fact, this author can produce a multitude of UN resolutions concerning the Lebanon invasion of 1982 that Israel defied and never complied with.
Yet the presses rolled on during the month-long conflict, and Israeli ambassadors and spokespeople told cameras about UN 1559, which called on Hezbollah to disarm.  Why do I bring this up?
Well if Israel wishes to invoke the UN 1559 resolution, which has a favorable conclusion with respect to the Israeli agenda, then Israel should be equally willing to abide by UN 242, UN 139, and others : see below:

http://www.mediamonitors.net/michaelsladah&suleimaniajlouni1.html#israelsdefiedresolutions

just cut and paste the above link and read with horror and shock !

And Israel quotes UN 1559 when it defies and has defied more UN resolutions than Hezbollah and Iran and Iraq combined ....

And now I mention Walt and Mearsheimer's landmark expose of AIPAC in its famous paper. For those unaware of the 2 professors (where have you been), they are not fringe, they are not wackos, but mainstream academics from Harvard and the University of Chicago who questioned if the US-Israel alliance really does have the US best interest at heart. This duo was quickly maligned by the power apparatus as being anti-semitic, but upon closer inspection, those charges are completely unfounded and simply a smokescreen.

I have become quite knowledgable about the inner workings of AIPAC and if someone on the blogsite has a question, please feel free to send it to me.

Enter the spin and propaganda ...

Yes it's true that Mel Gibson is an anti-semite.
No it's not true that any conscience-minded reader who criticizes Israeli policy in the OT or its master US's approval orders is also anti-semitic.
This point has been argued by the likes of Noam Chomsky (Jewish), Norman Finkelstein (Jewish), Uri Avnery (Israeli former member of the Knesset), Michael Lerner (Rabbi), Gideon Levy(Israeli), etc etc etc

I can produce a plethera of Jewish academic voices who criticize Israeli policy and the US's unconditional support thereof, and it is clear that those policies should be criticized based on their merits.

So the US has become even more threatened, and that is due in large part to its policy of letting Israel do whatever it wants. And now US citizens are spied on by its government. Its government is controlled by special interest groups at the exterior, and small think-tanks, which are frequently run by pro-Israel idealogues and Israel apologists, at the interior. The same think-tanks arranged for the Iraq war, even when Dick Clarke and George Tenet said confidently that 9-11 was perpetrated by Al-Queda and not Iraq. Yet through it all, it seems that Wolfowitz and Perle and Feith and Abrams and Cheney and Rumsfeld will still get away with all their lies and deceit and vast propaganda.

Sadly, 50% of Americans will tomorrow still believe that Iraq had WMD's, even though reality cannot comply with the outcome of that poll.

So where are we now?

As I think back over my first weekend in Jakarta, I have a couple of observations that I'd like to put down here.

I was struck by the level of security here. In America, the citizenry would be up in ARMS if we instituted the same level of checks and counter checks that they have here. Every hotel that I've been to (and that's where most of the bars/restaurants are) literally have a checkpoint where your car is stopped and armed guards come, look inside the glove box, the trunk, under the car with mirrors and profile the passengers. If the passengers are bule (white people), we are typically admitted without a fuss. I am told that if they are dressed in traditional Indonesian or muslim garb, they may be asked to step out and endure a pat-down.

After negotiating the security checkpoint, you are allowed to proceed to the entrance where you pay your cabbie the 20,000 rupiah or so that the ride costs (around $2 USD) and then pass through a metal detector and your lady has her purse examined. After that, you are home free and can enter the establishment. This is done not only at hotels, but also at the shopping malls and many restaurants.

I asked myself - what if this were America? I still feel somewhat violated when I am patted down at a baseball or football game. I am somewhat outraged at the car blockades around the Capitol and White House. I can't help but feel sometimes that the terror "alerts" are timed politically. Yet here, the threat is real - and no one seems to mind the extra security. In fact, if anything, the ex-pats I've run into will only frequent places with the extra security for safety.

Very interesting.

For more, visit www.dcoffline.com

Also, many of you have asked me for pictures. I am putting pictures up this afternoon on my Ringo site. If you are connected to me, you will get an automatic update. If not, reply to this post and request to be added to my network. I'll do my best to process the requests quickly.

News Analysis: 'Islamic fascists'? Bush sees a war of ideology - Americas - International Herald Tribune

Every morning here in Jakarta, I wake up and head up to the 18th floor to eat breakfast, drink some excellent coffee and read the International Herald Tribute - a fascinating paper out of London that you can find online at www.iht.com. One of the articles today that cought my attention I have linked to above.

A critical debate in the United States today - among political candidates and among national security experts - is whether five years of war declarations and war-making have helped to make the country more secure. Or, even in the absence of a major attack on the United States since Sept. 11, 2001, has this strategy created greater danger by providing terror groups with exactly what they crave: the sense that they are a unified army of jihadists? And has the strategy radicalized large swaths of the Muslim world in ways that were not imaginable as recently as 2003?

For more, visit www.dcoffline.com.

I read the whole debate before I say anything on the previous post.  I don't want to enrage anybody, but a story just came out today which discusses the conflict between business and religion, and law each supports.  Wal-mart and co. are pushing for more and more alcohol in it's stores, including political campaigning in dry counties throughout the south.  It is increasingly difficult to talk about any religious beliefs in any sphere without bumping into government regulation and control.  Here in Ohio there has been a long sustained push for gambling, you know, to help the children.  The only groups organized enough to fight gambling (i.e. a calculated extraction of cash from typically the poor that goes straight to big business with a cut to the state) are the churches.  If Christians, etc. are model citizens but sit on their hands politically, they may find family members in debt and broke, and that affects them personally too.

That being said it is tacky to have jets flying and an American flag in a church.

http://thinkprogress.org/2006/08/10/cheney-ct/

Cheney reaches new depths of lunacy as he outlines why Lieberman's loss Tuesday actually helps the terrorists.

Is it me, or is his fear-mongering actually becoming transparent? Is he saying the democrat voters of Connecticut should be ashamed of themselves for helping the terrorists?

I guess the new mantra is "Vote for Bush policies or DIE."

Read more at www.dcoffline.com

E

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1110AP_Underage_Sex_Pact.html

Fear you'll lose your boyfriend while recuperating from surgery? Do you (a) play upon his sympathy, (b) have doctors give your scars sexy dressings, or (c) arrange for your 15-year-old daughter to have sex with him for a couple months?

Life's all about the tough choices, I guess . . .

I'm going to have to give this woman the Dumbass award of the day.

Read more at www.dcoffline.com

E

Ok, I just want to lay down a rule, right here in public, for all the world to see.  If you fill a 12 oz. glass with Vanilla Ice Cream before you even put the root beer in, that is not a "small" root beer float, and other people should not be obligated to finish it.  This is a deep koan on so many levels.

This guy may be my new hero. Since I grew up in a conservative church, this speaks to me on several levels. I'd love to get your feedback.

Visit www.dcoffline.com for more . . .

E

Disowning Conservative Politics, Evangelical Pastor Rattles Flock

By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

Correction Appended

MAPLEWOOD, Minn. — Like most pastors who lead thriving evangelical megachurches, the Rev. Gregory A. Boyd was asked frequently to give his blessing — and the church's — to conservative political candidates and causes.

The requests came from church members and visitors alike: Would he please announce a rally against gay marriage during services? Would he introduce a politician from the pulpit? Could members set up a table in the lobby promoting their anti-abortion work? Would the church distribute "voters' guides" that all but endorsed Republican candidates? And with the country at war, please couldn't the church hang an American flag in the sanctuary?

After refusing each time, Mr. Boyd finally became fed up, he said. Before the last presidential election, he preached six sermons called "The Cross and the Sword" in which he said the church should steer clear of politics, give up moralizing on sexual issues, stop claiming the United States as a "Christian nation" and stop glorifying American military campaigns.

"When the church wins the culture wars, it inevitably loses," Mr. Boyd preached. "When it conquers the world, it becomes the world. When you put your trust in the sword, you lose the cross."

Mr. Boyd says he is no liberal. He is opposed to abortion and thinks homosexuality is not God's ideal. The response from his congregation at Woodland Hills Church here in suburban St. Paul — packed mostly with politically and theologically conservative, middle-class evangelicals — was passionate. Some members walked out of a sermon and never returned. By the time the dust had settled, Woodland Hills, which Mr. Boyd founded in 1992, had lost about 1,000 of its 5,000 members.

But there were also congregants who thanked Mr. Boyd, telling him they were moved to tears to hear him voice concerns they had been too afraid to share.

"Most of my friends are believers," said Shannon Staiger, a psychotherapist and church member, "and they think if you're a believer, you'll vote for Bush. And it's scary to go against that."

Sermons like Mr. Boyd's are hardly typical in today's evangelical churches. But the upheaval at Woodland Hills is an example of the internal debates now going on in some evangelical colleges, magazines and churches. A common concern is that the Christian message is being compromised by the tendency to tie evangelical Christianity to the Republican Party and American nationalism, especially through the war in Iraq.

At least six books on this theme have been published recently, some by Christian publishing houses. Randall Balmer, a religion professor at Barnard College and an evangelical, has written "Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America — an Evangelical's Lament."

And Mr. Boyd has a new book out, "The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power Is Destroying the Church," which is based on his sermons.

"There is a lot of discontent brewing," said Brian D. McLaren, the founding pastor at Cedar Ridge Community Church in Gaithersburg, Md., and a leader in the evangelical movement known as the "emerging church," which is at the forefront of challenging the more politicized evangelical establishment.

"More and more people are saying this has gone too far — the dominance of the evangelical identity by the religious right," Mr. McLaren said. "You cannot say the word 'Jesus' in 2006 without having an awful lot of baggage going along with it. You can't say the word 'Christian,' and you certainly can't say the word 'evangelical' without it now raising connotations and a certain cringe factor in people.

"Because people think, 'Oh no, what is going to come next is homosexual bashing, or pro-war rhetoric, or complaining about 'activist judges.' "

Mr. Boyd said he had cleared his sermons with the church's board, but his words left some in his congregation stunned. Some said that he was disrespecting President Bush and the military, that he was soft on abortion or telling them not to vote.

"When we joined years ago, Greg was a conservative speaker," said William Berggren, a lawyer who joined the church with his wife six years ago. "But we totally disagreed with him on this. You can't be a Christian and ignore actions that you feel are wrong. A case in point is the abortion issue. If the church were awake when abortion was passed in the 70's, it wouldn't have happened. But the church was asleep."

Mr. Boyd, 49, who preaches in blue jeans and rumpled plaid shirts, leads a church that occupies a squat block-long building that was once a home improvement chain store.

The church grew from 40 members in 12 years, based in no small part on Mr. Boyd's draw as an electrifying preacher who stuck closely to Scripture. He has degrees from Yale Divinity School and Princeton Theological Seminary, and he taught theology at Bethel University in St. Paul, where he created a controversy a few years ago by questioning whether God fully knew the future. Some pastors in his own denomination, the Baptist General Conference, mounted an effort to evict Mr. Boyd from the denomination and his teaching post, but he won that battle.

He is known among evangelicals for a bestselling book, "Letters From a Skeptic," based on correspondence with his father, a leftist union organizer and a lifelong agnostic — an exchange that eventually persuaded his father to embrace Christianity.

Mr. Boyd said he never intended his sermons to be taken as merely a critique of the Republican Party or the religious right. He refuses to share his party affiliation, or whether he has one, for that reason. He said there were Christians on both the left and the right who had turned politics and patriotism into "idolatry."

He said he first became alarmed while visiting another megachurch's worship service on a Fourth of July years ago. The service finished with the chorus singing "God Bless America" and a video of fighter jets flying over a hill silhouetted with crosses.

"I thought to myself, 'What just happened? Fighter jets mixed up with the cross?' " he said in an interview.

Patriotic displays are still a mainstay in some evangelical churches. Across town from Mr. Boyd's church, the sanctuary of North Heights Lutheran Church was draped in bunting on the Sunday before the Fourth of July this year for a "freedom celebration." Military veterans and flag twirlers paraded into the sanctuary, an enormous American flag rose slowly behind the stage, and a Marine major who had served in Afghanistan preached that the military was spending "your hard-earned money" on good causes.

In his six sermons, Mr. Boyd laid out a broad argument that the role of Christians was not to seek "power over" others — by controlling governments, passing legislation or fighting wars. Christians should instead seek to have "power under" others — "winning people's hearts" by sacrificing for those in need, as Jesus did, Mr. Boyd said.

"America wasn't founded as a theocracy," he said. "America was founded by people trying to escape theocracies. Never in history have we had a Christian theocracy where it wasn't bloody and barbaric. That's why our Constitution wisely put in a separation of church and state.

"I am sorry to tell you," he continued, "that America is not the light of the world and the hope of the world. The light of the world and the hope of the world is Jesus Christ."

Mr. Boyd lambasted the "hypocrisy and pettiness" of Christians who focus on "sexual issues" like homosexuality, abortion or Janet Jackson's breast-revealing performance at the Super Bowl halftime show. He said Christians these days were constantly outraged about sex and perceived violations of their rights to display their faith in public.

"Those are the two buttons to push if you want to get Christians to act," he said. "And those are the two buttons Jesus never pushed."

Some Woodland Hills members said they applauded the sermons because they had resolved their conflicted feelings. David Churchill, a truck driver for U.P.S. and a Teamster for 26 years, said he had been "raised in a religious-right home" but was torn between the Republican expectations of faith and family and the Democratic expectations of his union.

When Mr. Boyd preached his sermons, "it was liberating to me," Mr. Churchill said.

Mr. Boyd gave his sermons while his church was in the midst of a $7 million fund-raising campaign. But only $4 million came in, and 7 of the more than 50 staff members were laid off, he said.

Mary Van Sickle, the family pastor at Woodland Hills, said she lost 20 volunteers who had been the backbone of the church's Sunday school.

"They said, 'You're not doing what the church is supposed to be doing, which is supporting the Republican way,' " she said. "It was some of my best volunteers."

The Rev. Paul Eddy, a theology professor at Bethel University and the teaching pastor at Woodland Hills, said: "Greg is an anomaly in the megachurch world. He didn't give a whit about church leadership, never read a book about church growth. His biggest fear is that people will think that all church is is a weekend carnival, with people liking the worship, the music, his speaking, and that's it."

In the end, those who left tended to be white, middle-class suburbanites, church staff members said. In their place, the church has added more members who live in the surrounding community — African-Americans, Hispanics and Hmong immigrants from Laos.

This suits Mr. Boyd. His vision for his church is an ethnically and economically diverse congregation that exemplifies Jesus' teachings by its members' actions. He, his wife and three other families from the church moved from the suburbs three years ago to a predominantly black neighborhood in St. Paul.

Mr. Boyd now says of the upheaval: "I don't regret any aspect of it at all. It was a defining moment for us. We let go of something we were never called to be. We just didn't know the price we were going to pay for doing it."

His congregation of about 4,000 is still digesting his message. Mr. Boyd arranged a forum on a recent Wednesday night to allow members to sound off on his new book. The reception was warm, but many of the 56 questions submitted in writing were pointed: Isn't abortion an evil that Christians should prevent? Are you saying Christians should not join the military? How can Christians possibly have "power under" Osama bin Laden? Didn't the church play an enormously positive role in the civil rights movement?

One woman asked: "So why NOT us? If we contain the wisdom and grace and love and creativity of Jesus, why shouldn't we be the ones involved in politics and setting laws?"

Mr. Boyd responded: "I don't think there's a particular angle we have on society that others lack. All good, decent people want good and order and justice. Just don't slap the label 'Christian' on it."