'They might snap'

In a recent exchange on lenin’s tomb, Sean Coleman, Ireland Campaign Manager, Sudan Divestment Task Force, wrote,

Now imagine the US military unveiled a new strategy in Iraq: …attacks will be conducted without any reference to civilians, merely to say that if you're a civilian killed by an American bomb, it was your own fault for your proximity to the insurgents and your lack of "protection". Any such policy would be decried as a murderous and monstrous way to prosecute a war. That is because it is. Supporting it - as in the case of those who lend support to Iraqi resistance - is, I think, concurrently lacking in moral sense.

Now, writes Tina Susman, the April murder of the teenage son of a Los Angeles Times employee in Baghdad has provided an opportunity to see what is really going on there.

The 17-year-old had been struck by a bullet in the chaos that followed the explosion and was bleeding heavily. Within two hours, the boy was dead. Witnesses charge he was killed by U.S. troops firing randomly.

U.S. military officials say troops are trained to avoid civilian casualties and do not fire wildly. Iraqis, however, say the shootings happen frequently and that even if troops are firing at suspected attackers, they often do so on city streets where bystanders are likely to be hit. Rarely is it possible to confirm such incidents…With more troops on the ground as a result of President Bush's "surge," U.S. military officials acknowledge that there are greater chances for civilian casualties.

"Being that we are doing more operations in places where we were not before, and doing operations in large numbers, there is just more contact with the enemy and therefore more chance of people on the periphery being involved in that," said Army Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a military spokesman in Baghdad.

According to counterinsurgency expert Kalev Sepp, "you just end up with another group of foreign occupation troops shooting civilians who they feel threaten them when their car drives too close to them."

If the anecdotal evidence is an indication, such deaths often occur after troops are shaken by roadside bombs, as occurred when The Times employee's son was killed April 17.

"They were confused and angry and suspecting anyone around," Mohammed said. "If a bird had passed by, they would have shot it."

The U.S. military said troops shot in self-defense after being targeted first by the bomb and then by gunfire, but Mohammed and other witnesses denied that anybody shot at the soldiers.

"It's a psychological thing. When one U.S. soldier gets killed or injured, they shoot in vengeance," said Alaa Safi, who said his brother, Ahmed, was killed April 4 when U.S. troops riddled the streets of their southwestern Baghdad neighborhood with bullets after a sniper attack.

"I can't tell you that nobody got killed in that specific incident," Garver said. "In some instances, we're not able to know what really happened."

"You must be reasonably certain that your target is the source of the threat," the rules state.

Military officials have acknowledged, however, that the rules are sometimes broken in the heat of combat…troops "become stressed, they become fearful" on a battlefield where it is difficult to tell civilians from insurgents…"But I would say it's stress, fear, isolation, and in some cases they're just upset. They see their buddies getting blown up on occasion and they could snap."

And who could blame stressed and frightened kids from snapping under such conditions? Clearly they need to be disarmed and removed from harm’s way. At least if a concern for innocent bystanders is the point. What always seems to get lost in these news reports is that the IEDs and the snipers wouldn’t be attacking American troops if they weren’t there in the first place. Garver speaks of the insurgents as ‘the enemy’. But in reality, he and his troops are the enemy. The insurgents can’t just pack up and go home. They are home.

Last year, retired Lt. Col. Andrew J. Bacevich, a Vietnam veteran who is a professor of international relations at Boston University, estimated that U.S. troops alone had killed "tens of thousands" of innocent Iraqis, either by accident or through carelessness.

Even the troops directly involved in incidents often cannot say if civilian casualties have occurred.

So it’s no surprise that nobody is doing body counts. Furthermore

The challenge of reaching an accurate tally has become more acute since the military surge began.

The Iraqi government, eager to show that the security plan is working, has stopped releasing monthly civilian casualty figures to the United Nations, arguing that Cabinet ministries collecting the numbers were inflating them for political purposes.

The U.S. military rarely issues public reports on civilians it has killed or wounded. It did not respond to requests for information on civilians killed this year by U.S. troops.

And yet nobody wants to believe the estimates of excess deaths resulting from the invasion and occupation of Iraq from the only reliable source there is – the cluster survey carried out last July by a team from Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health and Al-Mustansariya University Medical School and published by Burnham et al. in the eminent British medical journal The lancet last October.

Susman writes, for example, ‘Estimates of civilians killed…range from tens of thousands to as many as 600,000.’ In reality, Burnham did not estimate civilian deaths at all for quite sound reasons. For one thing, they thought it could endanger the interviewers to probe too deeply into such matters. For another, in this context, it is simply not possible to distinguish reliably between civilians and combatants. And since the resistance only exists as a response to the occupation, those killed fighting the occupation are absolutely no less victims of the occupation than those who die without taking arms against their oppressors.

In contrast, Iraq Body Count’s (IBC) claim that it can rely on the mainstream media - i.e. 65 journalists holed up in the Green Zone or 'embedded' with Coalition troops - to distinguish reliably between combatants and non combatant deaths in each and every case is beyond naive. It is wilfully dishonest.

In this connection, I want to emphasise a point Eli Stevens always makes.

In the news today, a car bomb in Baghdad killed 23 people and injured 68 others, while later, a second killed 17 people and wounded 55 others. Will you ever hear what happened to those 123 injured people (or the others who were injured in incidents where the numbers of dead didn't reach double-digits, and weren't even "newsworthy" by the standards of American reporting on Iraq)? Not a chance. Will some, maybe even the majority, die later today in the hospital, or tomorrow, or next week? Quite likely. But according to the Western press (and those such as Iraq Body Count), 40 people died in those two incidents, a number which will never change.

So it never contributes to the IBC count. Obviously, this is not an issue with the Burnham team’s methodology.

Furthermore, Burnham et al did not estimate ‘as many as 600,000’ dead. They estimated about 655,000 excess deaths, although for statistical reasons, the true number could have been as low as 400,000 or as high as 940,000. And that was a year ago, a year moreover that has seen Iraqis dying at an accelerating rate. The current number of Iraqis who have died because of the occupation of their country is almost certainly a million or more.

While on the subject of Burnham et al again, apologists for the invasion have made a clumsy attempt to discredit their findings by suggesting that the sampling methodology deployed in the survey is subject to ‘main street bias’ (MSB). Interviewers were instructed to select a ‘residential street’ intersecting a main street, to select a dwelling at random, and to interview the household residing there and the next 39 households.

The MSB hypothesis relies on the assumption that the interviewers would have interpreted ‘main street’ as ‘principal thoroughfare’ and selected the first household in a street intersecting one of these that was itself a main street. It also assumes that car bombings and other killings would occur on these secondary main streets where markets are thought to be located. This is of course irrelevant, as those killed at a bazaar are not just those residing whose in the flat above it. Anybody buying or selling there is equally vulnerable, whether they live in the same building, in the same street, or somewhere else in the neighbourhood, or anywhere.

The 17 year old son of the LA Times employee lived

…in a middle-class neighborhood of split-level houses with balconies, driveways and cerise bougainvillea draping garden walls. The stroll took him down his quiet street to a commercial strip with small stores, butcher shops and cafes. Parallel to the strip is a median and then a highway, which passes beneath a concrete tangle of overpasses before heading to the airport. Blackened blotches are evidence of the frequency of attacks on troops patrolling it.

One tragic incident showing, among other things, that in a city full of rampaging stressed and frightened US troops armed to the teeth, you don’t have to live on a main street to be a victim of the violence they have unleashed.

Capitalism, gun crime and ideology

Here are some extracts from lenin’s superlative analysis of the criminal justice system and the response to the Virginia Tech massacre: Capitalism, gun crime and ideology.

The Virginia Tech massacre continues to attract commentary…You cannot extricate the lone nut from the total prior circumstances, and those extend well beyond the availability of potentially damaging anti-depressants or even the availability of guns...the system - including not only the courts and police, but also the process of lawmaking - is designed to fail at reducing crime…

They have created a heavily privatised penal system, knowing that this gives an incentive to providers to ensure that they do not have any effect in reducing recidivism, since high crime equals high profits. …that system is integrated into a capitalist society in which the very definition of crime results from an ideology appropriate to claims of 'property rights'…large amounts of harmful activity, which involve intent (inasmuch as the agents of it, usually corporations, cannot reasonably be unaware of the harmful effects their conduct has), is not criminalised…

The reality of incarceration of mostly young, mostly working class, mostly male, and disproportionately black, people in America is a result of a process of decision-making mediated by ideology, that runs the whole gamut of the system. It runs from the decision as to what constitutes a crime, inflected as it is by class power and the lobbies and basic assumptions that append to it…to the enforcement of cops, often racist ones, but less famously often hostile to the working class and poor; to the decisions of magistrates and parole boards, whose decisions reflect the same basic biases…

…every time a new substance like that comes into the market, there is a similar struggle for control before it becomes routinised: this accounts for some of the acute increases in violent crime, while the routinised control by violent gangs and the necessity of paying for the stuff through robbery and so on accounts for a part of the ongoing high rates of crime...

…Aside from being exploited and oppressed, their lack of control over the means of production, never mind the means of state rule, means that they are denied adequate healthcare, and often killed by the companies they pay to cure them; are often killed by their work, if they can find employment; are often killed by the food that they eat, especially if it happens to be low-cost food. They are criminalised, often for harmless behaviour, imprisoned, often for nonviolent offenses and petty crimes. Others are incorporated into illicit economies that operate through coercion….

Read the whole thing!

Toll dwarfed?

A few days ago, lenin had a piece quoting extensively from Anthony Arnove’s article on Tomdispatch drawing a comparison between the treatment of statistics of the tragedy in Darfur and in Iraq. According to Arnove,

Since 2003, according to UN estimates, some 200,000 have been killed in the Darfur region of Sudan in a brutal ethnic-cleansing campaign and another 2 million have been turned into refugees.

How would you know this? Well, if you lived in New York City, at least, you could hardly take a subway ride without seeing an ad that reads: "400,000 dead. Millions uniting to save Darfur." The New York Times has also regularly featured full-page ads describing the "genocide" in Darfur and calling for intervention there under "a chain of command allowing necessary and timely military action without approval from distant political or civilian personnel."… celebrities on Good Morning America talking about their commitment to stopping "genocide" in Iraq.

The point of this post is not, however to discuss the reasons for the discrepancy between all the noise about Darfur and the silence about Iraq. Apart from those two articles, Arnove cites ‘The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency’ by Mahmood Mamdani in the latest London review of books. In a later piece, lenin returns to the theme, citing Ed Herman’s recent article on the ‘“Worthy-Genocide” Establishment’.

One of the ironies is that the emphasis on the Darfur crisis is not related to its scale. While the latest UN assessment, cited by Arnove, claims ‘More than 200,000 people have been killed and at least 2 million others forced from their homes since 2003’, estimates of Iraqi deaths and displacement are much higher. According to the latest information on their website,

UNHCR estimates there are some 1.9 million Iraqis displaced internally, and up to 2 million in neighbouring states, particularly Syria and Jordan...in 2006 Iraqis had become the leading nationality seeking asylum in Europe…By early 2007, internal displacement was estimated to be continuing at a rate of up to 50,000 a month.

In other words, the US occupation of Iraq has displaced nearly twice as many people as the situation in Darfur, universally condemned as genocide. In another cruel irony that I’ve covered before, the US has only accepted as refugees 466 of the two million Iraqis it drove from their country.

What really prompted this post is that while Arnove and others continue to cite the Johns Hopkins study estimate of 655,000 excess deaths published in the Lancet last October, Information Clearinghouse posted an article entitled ‘Deaths In Iraq Have Reached 1 Million’, dated 22 March. Attributed to an ‘Alan Jones’ but not linked to any source, it starts out by claiming,

THE number of deaths in Iraq since the start of the conflict could be as high as one million, it was claimed yesterday.

On the fourth anniversary of the invasion by Allied troops, an Australian scientist insisted the true death toll dwarfed previous estimates.

Dr Gideon Polya said: "Using the most comprehensive and authoritative literature and UN demographic data yields an estimate of one million post-invasion excess deaths in Iraq."

The article does in fact link to Dr Polya’s Global Avoidable Mortality blog, where the most recent post, dated 16 May 2006, relates to Israeli and Palestinian deaths.

In reality, the ICH article appears to relate not to anything published on 21 March, but to Dr Polya's 1 March editorial on his Media With Conscience site. He actually presents the same analysis in a 7 February Countercurrents article.

In the 7 February article, Polya writes, ‘the post-invasion excess deaths (avoidable deaths, deaths that did not have to happen) total 1.0 million (ONE MILLION)’. This is his reasoning,

Consider the following estimate from the Johns Hopkins medical scientists of "annual death rate per 1,000 of population" of 13.3 (post-invasion Iraq) as compared to (a) 5.5 (for pre-invasion Iraq after 12 years of crippling Sanctions) and (b) 4.0 (for Iraq's resource-poor but peaceful neighbours Syria and Jordan; UN Population Division data: http://esa.un.org/unpp/).

The "post-invasion excess death rate/1000 of population" was 13.3 - 5.5 = 7.8 (Comparison A) or 13.3 - 4.0 = 9.3 (Comparison B). Assuming an average population of 27 million, the "post-invasion excess deaths" total (over 4 years i.e. as of February 2007) (A) 7.8 x 2,700 x 4 = 842,000 and (B) 9.3 x 2,700 x 4 = 1,004,400 i.e. ONE MILLION.

In other words, the estimate of one million is arrived at by multiplying the difference between the Johns Hopkins study’s estimate of deaths per 1000 in Iraq over the 40 months to July 2006 and the UN estimate of deaths per 1000 population in Syria and Jordan at an unspecified date. Note that the link he provides is to a database that provides population projections. There probably are UN crude mortality rate (CMR) data for Syria and Jordan available, but not at any of the URLs he cites in either the MWC or the Countercurrents articles.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s not really outrageous to compare the post invasion Iraqi crude mortality rate with the rate for a neighbouring country. The rationale is that preinvasion mortality in Iraq was already inflated by the twelve years of sanctions. But by using the Syrian data as the benchmark, Polya is effectively factoring in the sanctions’ effects rather than isolating the effects of the invasion and occupation. Apart from that, there may be any number of other factors that might render the mortality rate in Syria or Jordan not comparable with that in Iraq. Perhaps more importantly, there is no possibility of the mainstream media treating a comparison like this seriously. So the relevant estimate is really his ‘Comparison A’, which, based on the Lancet study’s estimate of crude death rates in Iraq before and after the invasion, arrives at a figure of 842,000 (not 1 million!) for the four years to March 2007.

I’ve made attempts to update the Lancet estimate before, but the Lancet data are now eight months old and we know the slaughter has proceeded, by all accounts at an accelerating pace, we need some new estimates. The report of Polya’s estimate has prompted me to take it a little further. This is not to cast aspersions on Polya’s method, but I have adopted a different approach.

The Lancet estimates published last October cover the period March 2003 through June 2006. The estimated average monthly crude death rate for the fourteen months through April 2004 was 7,017. For the thirteen months from May 2004 to May 2005, the average was 15,115 per month, and for the last thirteen months June 2005 to June 2006, 27,710.

The method I am using is to assume that the Lancet estimates are correct as a starting point and increment them for the eight months since July 2006 based on monthly averages. I have calculated projections using three assumptions. As I am not actually weighting new data, but just projecting from the July 2006 data on the basis of some assumptions about the probable average monthly rate of increase, I will round the figures to the nearest thousand.

First, if we assume that the monthly rate of deaths over the last eight months was equivalent to the average of the forty months from March 2003 to July 2006, 16,373 per month, the current toll would stand at about 786,000. I regard this as highly improbable, as it would mean that the average monthly crude death rate had decreased by 41% from the 2005-2006 average.

Second, if we assume that the monthly rate has remained at the average for the 2005-2006 period, the total would now come to 877,000.

Third, if we assume that the current average monthly crude death rate has increased proportionally by as much over the 2005-2006 average as that average increased over the previous thirteen month period, by about 83%, the monthly average would now be 50,801 and the total to date, 1,061,000.

Bear in mind that these are based on statistical estimates each of which represents the approximate midpoint of a range of values. Principally because the size of the sample in the Johns Hopkins study, the confidence interval is wide. The claim the authors, Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doocy, and Les Roberts, made was that they were 95% confident that the true number of excess deaths in July was between 393,000 and 943,000. Using the same confidence interval proportionally, in the first and least likely scenario, where the monthly rate had decreased, we would be talking about a range of 472,000 to 1,131,000. In the second scenario, where the rate had remained constant from last year, it would be between 526,000 and 1,262,000. Finally, if the average monthly crude death rate has increased as much as it did between 2004-05 and 2005-06, the range is 637,000 to 1,528,000.

The following table may clarify the results.

		Estimate	95% Confidence interval
			Minimum	Maximum
Lancet estimate to 2006 07		654,965	392,979	942,636
Polya’s estimate	Iraq baseline	842,000	n/a	n/a
	Syria baseline	1,004,400	n/a	n/a
My projection assuming increase at:	Per month
A. 2003-2006 average rate	16,373	786,000	472,000	1,131,000
B. 2005-2006 average rate	27,710	877,000	526,000*	1,262,000
C. 83% above B.	50,801	1,061,000**	637,000	1,528,000

* The true death toll is almost certainly more than 526,000.

** The probable death toll is 1,061,000.

From all reports, the rate of increase has been increasing itself, so even these highest projections are likely to be on the low side. Conservatively speaking, I think you could claim with nearly 100% confidence that the crude mortality rate over the last eight months has certainly not decreased from the average of the previous thirteen month period and that the US invasion and occupation has cost at least 525,000 Iraqi lives over the last four years. If, as seems probable, the CMR has in fact increased since last July, the figure is very likely to be over a million and could exceed a million and a half.

The central point is that, horrific though the situation is in Darfur, estimates based on similar methods demonstrate that it is in fact much much worse in Iraq, where the US, UK, and Australian governments bear direct responsibility for the catastrophe.

An ancillary point is how we use these statistics. At the top of the daily ICH email and the ICH site it asserts, ‘Number Of Iraqi Civilians Slaughtered In America's War On Iraq - At Least 655,000 + +’. I thought that the Johns Hopkins University team did good work under dangerous conditions and have done the peace movement a big favour by publishing their results in the prestigious and impeccable Lancet journal. Sorry to split hairs, if that’s what it is, but I think it would be fair to treat their findings as if we believed what they said.

What they actually found was that there were 654,965 excess deaths in Iraq over the 40 months to July 2006. Specifically, they were 95% certain that the number of people who had died since the 20 March 2003 invasion who would not have died otherwise, was in the range 392,979 to 942,636. As I have pointed out before, Burnham et al. do not say that at least 655,000 civilians were slaughtered.

For one thing, if there is an ‘at least figure, it is not 654,965, but 392,979. For another, the Johns Hopkins study is absolutely explicit that, ‘Separation of combatant from non-combatant deaths during interviews was not attempted…’ So their research provides no basis for any claim specifically about ‘civilians’. Finally, these estimates are for deaths from all causes. The relevant estimate of specifically violent deaths to July 2006 is 601,027 (i.e. in the range 426,369–793,663). Presumably, that would be the number slaughtered.

It’s not as if the Lancet study’s findings were not sensational enough. There’s no need to distort them as ICH continues to do, much less to headline Polya’s 1 million figure, which explicitly includes sanctions effects with the invasion and occupation.

In my view, the safest, most responsible approach remains to be to cite ‘the July 2006 estimate of about 655,000’. Alternatively, as Eli Stephens of Left I on the news points out, the confidence that the true figure is above 393,979 is nearly 98%, so it would be even more accurate to assert that the invasion and occupation of Iraq killed ‘at least 394,000’ by July 2006. However, I am fairly comfortable that my projections provide a sound basis for asserting that the current death toll definitely exceeds half a million, is probably much higher, and possibly three times that number.

The first Jewish anti-Semites

It must be time I jumped on the bandwagon. If truth be told, I’ve already been talking about the statement by Independent Jewish Voices. According to their website,

A new initiative, Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) was launched on Monday 5 February 2007, with an advertisement in the Times Newspaper, incorporating the Declaration and List of Signatories. At the same time, launch articles appeared in the Guardian Newspaper…

The initiative has raised quite a ruckus, with criticisms from the right and the left, as well as support from many quarters. There’s a page on their site listing 9 international newspapers and 14 blogs that have covered their statement launch so far.

The statement itself is nothing special. Basically, all it says is that the signatories support human rights, even in Israel and the occupied territories,

Human rights are universal and indivisible and should be upheld without exception. This is as applicable in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories as it is elsewhere.

And implicitly, that the UK’s Jewish Board of Deputies, ‘The Voice Of British Jewry’, does not speak for them,

These principles are contradicted when those who claim to speak on behalf of Jews in Britain and other countries consistently put support for the policies of an occupying power above the human rights of an occupied people.

So what’s the big deal? Why is this initiative more important than the American Jewish organisations that distance themselves from the Zionist apologists of the American Jewish Committee and the like – organisations like Jewish Voice for Peace or Brit Tzedek v’Shalom? Why is it more important than the Australian Jewish Democratic Society? Or indeed, existing UK organisations with similar perspectives, like Jews for Justice for Palestinians?

There was a bit of excitement back in October when George Soros announced that he was going to fund an alternative to AIPAC. But whatever happened to the initiative of which Richard Silverstein wrote,

For someone like me who's been fighting in the trenches for 40 years to promote Israeli-Palestinian peace this could be a revolutionary development. Many groups promoting such an agenda have come and gone since I first started working on this issue. Almost all were grass-roots focused and insurgent in nature. They had barely enough funding to make a ripple in the pond of American politics. Israeli government officials treated such groups as mere gnats which they swatted away impatiently.

It’s really kind of a mystery. Is it just the high profile release and the high profile signatories? Even I recognised some of these prominent British Jews: Dr Uri Davis, Harold Pinter, Leon Rosselson, Mike Leigh, Mike Marqusee, Musa Moris Farhi, Prof Avi Shlaim, Prof Eric Hobsbawm, Prof Jacqueline Rose, Prof Tony Kushner, and many, many more.

I guess it might be as simple as that. Now everybody knows that whatever the Board of Deputies may claim, there’s a whole bunch of famous Jews who were prepared to shell out 30 quid for the privilege of publicly announcing – ‘Those bastards don’t speak for me!’

In case you don’t know who the Board of Deputies are, they’re the mob who organised a rally to support Israel’s bombardments of Lebanon and Gaza last year. Anyway, I’m optimistic that this initiative will succeed in depriving the Board of the hegemonic voice it’s enjoyed since 1738. Maybe now, when they issue a statement, everyone will know that they are only speaking for the hard core Israel right or wrong crowd.

And I’m not the only one. Mark Elf, of Jews sans frontieres, calling the move ‘encouraging’, writes that ‘over 100 high profile Jewish Brits signing up for an alternative voice to the Board of Deputies, which is seen as simply a mouthpiece for Israel’. Lenin writes,

this is an important and timely development. The founding statement from Independent Jewish Voices is far from an attack on Zionism but nor does it commit signatories to Zionism or to any specific solution to the occupation of Palestine. Its spare assertions about the rights of Palestinians and about the fact that the fight against antisemitism is undermined when criticism of Israel is branded antisemitic, if taken seriously and logically, entail a challenge to Jewish nationalism.

On the other hand, Israeli born jazz saxophonist, Gilad Atzmon ‘was rather disappointed with the views expressed by the group’, writing

Once again it was an ‘image’ of moral thinking rather than an authentic ethical commitment. Once again it was a glorifying exposition of Jewish righteousness rather than simply acknowledging the Palestinian cause, i.e., the ‘right of return’. Disappointingly, the declaration wittingly avoids confronting the kernel of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Since it is rather established that the Palestinian cause is largely orientated around the mass expulsion of the indigenous Palestinians in 1948 and the failure to resolve the refugee catastrophe, avoiding the issue is nothing less than denying the Palestinians the most elementary human right: the right to live on one’s land. Avoiding the refugee issue is nothing less than dismissing the Palestinians of the most basic human rights.

Which prompted me to respond,

There's more than one way to skin a cat

Gilad has a valid point in criticising the IJV ‘Time to speak out’ statement. It does not explicitly address the right of return.

But he is mistaken to assert ‘it is rather established that the Palestinian cause is largely orientated around the mass expulsion of the indigenous Palestinians in 1948 and the failure to resolve the refugee catastrophe’. The sad fact is that much of the support Palestinians receive from supporters around the world concerns itself exclusively with the plight of those Palestinians living under the boot of Israeli military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, paying lip service at best to the refugees. The whole approach of partition and a two state ‘solution’ rests crucially on ignoring the interests of the 1948 Arabs living as twelfth class citizens within what is euphemistically known as ‘Israel proper’, and of the refugees who have spent nearly six decades languishing in squalid camps.

It was almost certainly with an eye to the movements and individuals who continue to harbour illusions in the validity of a Jewish ethnocratic state that the IJV statement is silent on these crucial matters. Their objective was apparently to garner signatures from a broad spectrum of prominent Jews on the simple basis that they agree that the Israeli government is violating Palestinian human rights and that the Board of Deputies does not speak for them in its uncritical advocacy for every Israeli atrocity. A truly principled document that rejected the ‘right to exist’ of a Jewish state based on ethnic cleansing and demanded the right of return and a state of all its citizens would not have succeeded in gaining the support of the range of prominent Jews that the IJV statement has. It would therefore have no impact on the credibility of the Board of Deputies. I would like to see more people take an explicit stand against racism and ethnic cleansing at least as much as Gilad would. But the approach that IJV has taken is a valid one.

Gilad is also mistaken to suggest that the IJV statement does not express opposition to ‘racism in general’. It states, ‘There is no justification for any form of racism, including anti-Semitism, anti-Arab racism or Islamophobia, in any circumstance.’ As I read it, this formulation actually implies a rejection of ethnocracy and ethnic cleansing, even if the drafters of ‘Time to speak out’ were too cagey to make it explicit.

Anyway, we’ll see what happens. I’m hoping that with initiatives like this and more and more people coming out explicitly against partition of Palestine, as Dr Saree Makdisi did recently; with articulate and knowledgeable people like Ilan Pappe gaining a reception, space will open for a qualitative change in discussion of Zionism.

And while I’m on the topic of Jewish anti-Semitism, Antony Loewenstein had an article in the Sydney Morning Herald the other day that led me to the AJC site, where I found this new pamphlet on ‘”Progressive” Jewish thought and the new anti-Semitism’. It turns out that ‘when it comes to getting noticed by the media and getting “traction” for their views, it is the so-called progressive” Jewish anti-Zionists who receive the lion’s share of the attention.’ Yeah, right!

Anti-Zionism, in fact, is the form that much of today’s anti-Semitism takes, so much so that some now see earlier attempts to rid the world of Jews finding a parallel in present day desires to get rid of the Jewish state.

Over on Muzzlewatch, Andrew Schamess, has discovered the biblical antecedents of today’s Jewish ‘antisemites’.

Take, for example, the prophet Jeremiah. Keep in mind that he preached during a very dangerous time in the history of the original Jewish state. Jerusalem then - as now - stood as an island of civilization in the Mideast, surrounded by a sea of dangerous enemies. The Jews were just a few generations past a Holocaust, the destruction of the Northern Jewish Kingdom by the Assyrians. Now, Jerusalem was besieged by the Babylonians…

Surely, in such a time, any self-respecting Jewish patriot would have rallied to the support of the state. But not Jeremiah! …Jeremiah piled one criticism on another - it was as if he couldn’t find enough bad things to say about the Jewish state. He even said that the Chaldeans, the attackers of the Jewish state, were carrying out the will of the Almighty - that our enemies were meting out divine justice by attacking us.

While I was visiting the AJC site, I couldn’t help noticing the results of the ‘2006 Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion’ they conducted September 25 – October 16, 2006. As with most surveys of this kind, the response categories offered seldom exhaust the possible answers and force respondents to shoehorn their views into inappropriate forms. They seem to take it as read that all respondents accept the existence of a Jewish ethnocracy in Palestine, because they sure don’t ask anything that doesn’t assume it. Although 65% responded that the US should never have invaded Iraq in the first place, 81% agreed with the statement ‘The goal of the Arabs is not the return of occupied territories but rather the destruction of Israel’ and 55% approve ‘of the way the Israeli government has handled the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon’.

But what struck me most of all, although not really surprising, was what looks to me like a clear case of cognitive dissonance. Only 38% support ‘the United States taking military action against Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons’, but a whopping 57% support ‘Israel taking military action against Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons’!

Naima

Last night I was looking at Dissident Voice and learned that tenor saxophonist Michael Brecker had died. There was a link to a performance of Coltrane’s classic ballad, ‘Naima’, over nine minutes of tenor solo on YouTube. After I watched it, it occurred to me to search for Coltrane on YouTube, and came up with this classic 1965 performance, with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones. Call me an old fogey, but I confess I still prefer Coltrane’s version. I’m not sure why. Maybe Brecker’s version is too busy for a ballad? It didn’t bring tears to my eyes.

Anyway, if you need a break from reading leftwrites or lenin’s tomb, there’s heaps of great video on YouTube, like this Coltrane Quartet performance of ‘Afro Blue’.

Every time someone tells me that they spent $80 going to a gig, I reckon, yeah, I’d pay $80 if Coltrane came back from the dead. That was a while ago. Eighty bucks is probably a cheap gig these days. Anyway, if you don’t mind the small screen and the lag between the video and the audio, you don’t have to wait for Coltrane to return from the grave, and it’s free!