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!

What's the hurry?

In an extraordinary performance of cognitive flexibility,

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Monday that Iran was “acting in a very negative way” in the Middle East and that the United States was building up its forces to demonstrate its resolve to remain in the Persian Gulf... “We are simply trying to communicate to the region that we are going to be there for a long time.”

Iran, which conventional maps place in the Middle East, is a negative influence in its own region. The US military, shipped in from thousands of kilometres away, not only is not ‘acting in a very negative way’ as it slaughters its way through Iran’s immediate eastern and western neighbours, but can pontificate about its views of the way the locals behave. And the vast military buildup and the Patriot missiles – just a message.

And speaking of messages, it seems US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice doesn’t even have one of those, averring, “I’m not coming with a proposal. I’m not coming with a plan.”

I just thought it would be nice to take a trip. Have a cup of coffee and a yarn with my mate Tzipi. See how things were going around here.

Plan? We have a plan! What plan? The Roadmap, of course! I know it said Israel would immediately halt settlement expansion. But think of it this way. The bigger the settlements and the more ‘outposts’ there are, the more we can dismantle. So it’s actually better for the Palestinians. Israel will be conceding more.

Sure, the refugees have been languishing in camps for the last 60 years. Sure, the Israelis occupied the rest of Palestine 40 years ago. Sure, we started the ‘peace process in 1993. What’s the big hurry? We said in the Roadmap that we’d ‘reach final and comprehensive permanent status agreement that ends the Israel-Palestinian conflict in 2005’. So? That was only two years ago. We’re still following the map. It’s just that all the signs are in Hebrew and we keep taking wrong turns.

“I think there are openings now that are there as a result of this alignment, there as a result of the obvious desire of Prime Minister Olmert and President Abbas to move forward,” she said. “So I think the opening is there, but I can’t really judge until I’ve had a chance to really talk to all the interested parties how we can accelerate the road map, how quickly we can accelerate the road map and how we begin to talk about the political horizon that everybody is interested in.’

Now we’ve decided to hire a driver who can read Hebrew, and we’ll move forward, accelerating right on down that roadmap highway until we reach…the horizon!

A comrade was once giving a talk about Michael Moore’s book, Stupid white men and pointed out that one of Moore’s problems was that he didn’t understand that class was the issue. Sometimes the enemy appears in the form of a smart black woman.

Further to yesterday’s ‘Crosswords’ piece, a reader advises that King Faisal II of Iraq was overthrown not in 1957, as I wrote, but 1958. Sorry about that. I actually meant to double check, and it slipped my mind.

It must be the crossword

In their now famous apology for their reporting in the lead up to and early stages of the war, published 26 May 2004, the NY Times’s Editors confess, ‘we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been’. Not much of an apology really, especially when hedged with ‘we found an enormous amount of journalism that we are proud of. In most cases, what we reported was an accurate reflection of the state of our knowledge at the time’, as if they had never heard of Scott Ritter, or Hans Blix, for that matter. The fact is, the Times one of the world’s most prestigious papers, ‘the newspaper of record’, featured article after article, particularly, but not only, those by Judith Miller, effectively promoting Ahmed Chalabi’s agenda to get the US to invade Iraq. There was probably no single agency putting forward the neocons’ agenda for ‘regime change’ in Iraq more enthusiastically than the NYT. And yet their agenda was no secret. The Project for a New American Century was articulating it quite clearly from its inception in 1997. In the notorious 26 January 1998 letter to Clinton, John Bolton, William Kristol, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and James Woolsey, among others, wrote,

We urge you to articulate this aim, and to turn your Administration's attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam's regime from power. This will require a full complement of diplomatic, political and military efforts. Although we are fully aware of the dangers and difficulties in implementing this policy, we believe the dangers of failing to do so are far greater. We believe the U.S. has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf. In any case, American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council.

We urge you to act decisively. If you act now to end the threat of weapons of mass destruction against the U.S. or its allies, you will be acting in the most fundamental national security interests of the country.

It’s all there – regime change, WMD, ‘preemptive strikes’, ignore the UN… - for the Times to have known about and borne in mind when they were fact checking Miller’s contributions. But it seems they were asleep at the wheel. Either that or they were really on the PNAC bandwagon and didn’t want to exercise the kind of journalistic professionalism that war hysteria calls for.

You’d think they’d be embarrassed about their failure, and about their grudging apology, as if even a sincere apology could compensate for the damage they’ve done. But no.

In yesterday’s editorial, ‘Picking Up the Pieces’, they write,

It was surreal how disconnected President Bush was the other night, both from Iraq’s horrifying reality and America’s anguish over this unnecessary, mismanaged and now unwinnable war.

What’s really surreal is a few paragraphs later where they claim, ‘we opposed Mr. Bush’s invasion’! It’s as if they think readers have already forgotten the shameful role they played. But that’s not all they believe we’ve forgotten. They criticize Bush for

…sending some 20,000 additional troops in an attempt to impose peace on Baghdad’s vengeful streets. He proposes to do that without any enforceable commitments from the Iraqi government that it will take the necessary political steps that are the only hope for tamping down a spiraling civil war.

Do they really think we’re that stupid? Countries do not send troops to impose peace, for crying out loud, their function is to impose war. And the quisling ‘Iraqi government’ is supposed to take some steps, when it is the US occupation that calls every move. Bush, they claim,

would mortgage thousands more American lives and what remains of Washington’s credibility in the region to a destructively sectarian Shiite government that he seems unwilling or unable to influence or restrain.

It goes without saying that American lives are the issue. The economic conscripts that populate the US Armed Forces do not deserve the fate that Bush and the neocons, in league with the Editors of the Times, have sent them to. But death and injury are widely accepted occupational hazards in their job. Granted, the military ought to have more rigorous health and safety standards, but the 655,000 Iraqis by and large just happened to be in the way.

And where did this credibility come from? The US has done nothing but swagger and throw its weight around the Middle East at least since they overthrew Mossadegh in 1953 and installed the bloodthirsty Shah. They’ve supported, well, not every brutal dictator in the region, but apart from Nasser and the Assads, just about. Certainly not excluding Saddam himself. And then there’s the little issue of that Jewish and Democratic State sitting there – the ‘rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism’, as Herzl put it. Whatever anyone thinks about Israel and whatever anyone thinks about Walt and Mearscheimer, there’s no disputing that US support for Israel, no matter what they’ve done to the Palestinians, over the last six decades has not won the US any ‘credibility in the region’.

And here’s that pesky sectarian government again, completely out of control. It’s as if ‘we’ squandered all those American lives for nothing. So ungrateful. I guess the Arabs really aren’t ready for the gift of democracy. Or could it be that ‘we’ are the ones who aren’t ready for them to exercise democracy. Just like we weren’t when the Iraqis chucked out Britain’s pet monarch in 1958. Yeah, everybody’s talking about Bremer’s big mistake, ‘deba’athification’. But nobody’s talking about the original ‘Ba’athification’, when ‘we’ couldn’t handle their democracy, just like ‘we’ couldn’t handle the Iranians’, or the Guatemalans’, or the Nicaraguans’, or the Haitians’... Anyhow, how can the most powerful country on earth expect to keep a bunch of Shi’ites in line with only 150,000 troops?

But even knowing all that, America cannot simply wash its hands of Iraq and go home. The region’s problems, many of them made worse by this war, are unavoidably America’s problems as well. For starters, Iraq is in imminent danger of violently breaking apart, driving millions of refugees across its borders — who will bring with them their ethnic grievances, and in some cases their weapons — and potentially unleashing a chain reaction of regional conflicts that could draw in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran and perhaps others as well.

Imagine, the region’s problems actually exacerbated by war! Who would ever have expected that? After all, every other war has just been jolly. You know, I had an email responding to that piece I wrote about HRW the other day saying, ‘One has to wonder what human institution does have the moral authority to discuss human rights. Seems we need someone from another planet to take on that task!’. Well, it looks like we’ve found a candidate, because these editors sure don’t have any connection with Earth.

It was before the war that a lot of people were talking about a plan to break up Iraq. There was talk of a merger between the predoiminiantly Shi’ite oil rich south of Iraq and the oil rich Shi’ite regions of Saudi Arabia to form an oil rich Arab Shi’ite sheikhdom. Meanwhile, the oil rich Kurdish north would have the independence ‘we’ promised them in 1915 or so and the intransigent Sunnis could join Jordon, or just get nicked. Who cares, anyway – they wouldn’t have any oil? Wasn’t that the plan? Now they’ve gone all nostalgic about Iraqi unity.

Some of us are already concerned about the estimated two million refugees, and the nearly two million more estimated to be displaced within Iraq. We’re thinking about their welfare. Not the Editors. Much too subtle and discerning for that stuff, they’re worried about the guns.

It’s also a little late to start worrying about drawing in Turkey and Iran – I don’t know about Saudi Arabia. Just Friday, didn’t ‘we’ throw diplomatic protocol to the wind, along with the rest of the unlamented ‘quaint’ Geneva conventions, when ‘we’ invaded the Iranian consulate in Erbil? The justification for that was supposed to be precisely that Iran was already drawn in. As the Times itself reported on Saturday,

A recent series of American raids against Iranians in Iraq was authorized under an order that President Bush decided to issue several months ago to undertake a broad military offensive against Iranian operatives in the country, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Friday.

As for Turkey, also on Friday, Reuters reported,

Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan on Friday reaffirmed Turkey's right to send troops into Iraq to crush Kurdish rebels there and chided U.S. officials for questioning it.

"The Turkish Republic will do whatever is necessary to combat the terrorists when the time comes, but it will not announce its plans in advance," Erdogan told a news conference after a meeting of his ruling AK Party.

In any case, as far as I’m aware, Turkish troops have been crossing the border with impunity all along, anyway.

I’m afraid it doesn’t end there.

The expanding power of a revolutionary, Shiite Iran is profoundly unsettling to the conservative Sunni-led governments in most of the Arab Middle East, which have been America’s traditional allies in the region. If the United States is to recoup any of its standing and influence there, it will have to find a way to contain the chaos in Iraq. And it will have to do a lot more to address other concerns of these governments and their people, starting with a genuine and sustained effort to mediate a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.

‘America’s traditional allies’, you know, those nice Arabs. The ones with the neatly trimmed goatees and the long white gowns and veil things with the rope around their heads. Kind of like angels. The ones who have those moderate democratic countries, where women don’t have to vote, or even drive, and they chop your hands off if you steal stuff.

Another thing I’m planning to return to, probably in a separate post, is Israel and the Palestinians. Suffice it to say at this point that the Editors must be on something awful powerful if they think the US can pretend that it is some kind of impartial arbiter to ‘mediate’ between those squabbling children. Or maybe not. They got away with it in Angola.

And so long as any American troops remain in Iraq, Mr. Bush must put serious pressure on Mr. Maliki to support the troops’ efforts with a genuine program of national reconciliation. That must include, at a minimum, ridding the police and other security services of killers, torturers and criminals and disarming all sectarian militias.

‘Disarm those militias!’ Now where have I heard that before? Oh, yes, it was Mr Sharon laying down conditions for the ‘government’ of Palestine, that country that only exists in the future.

And check this out – the comrades down at the Times put in a lot of work on this editorial,

The government must also assure that Iraqi oil revenues are fairly shared out among the entire Iraqi population.

I was surprised, too. I had no idea those guys were socialists. Or could it have been a slip of the keyboard? It’s not often they saying anything that makes any sense. But wait a second. That doesn’t make sense either. Didn’t that ‘government’ just pass some kind of decree giving all the oil revenues to foreign oil companies?

Its provisions are a radical departure from the norm for developing countries: under a system known as "production-sharing agreements", or PSAs, oil majors such as BP and Shell in Britain, and Exxon and Chevron in the US, would be able to sign deals of up to 30 years to extract Iraq's oil… Saudi Arabia and Iran, the world's number one and two oil exporters, both tightly control their industries through state-owned companies with no appreciable foreign collaboration, as do most members of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, Opec.

That’s right, even those nice, moderate, traditional American allies in Saudi Arabia won’t give the oil giants the amount of control the democratic government of Iraq have decided to, entirely of their own free will, even if, according to today’s Independent, ‘the US government has been involved in drawing up the law’.

It’s kind of funny that the Times can write of a sovereign government of Iraq while stipulating a whole range of conditions that the US government must lay down for that government to comply with, or else.

…These benchmarks should be accompanied by fixed timelines. And they must be accompanied with a clear message that the United States is prepared to withdraw its troops if the Iraqis continue to refuse to take responsibility for their own future.

Withdraw the troops! Oh, no! After all the wonderful things they’ve done for the Iraqi people, like the big cull. I’m confident the sectarian Shi’ite government will come to heel when faced with a threat like that.

Sometimes I wonder what keeps people buying the NY Times when they seem so intent on insulting their readers with blatant, transparent bullshit, day after day. I guess it must be the crossword puzzle.

US credibility undermined

On Friday, Human Rights Watch released its World Report 2007,

With US credibility undermined by the Bush administration’s use of torture and detention without trial, the European Union must fill the leadership void on human rights, Human Rights Watch said today...

So what’s wrong with this picture?

For one thing, this is the same organization that just last month was forced to retract it’s 22 November statement criticizing Palestinian non violent resistance. Although Norman Finkelstein and others called them on their innocent mistake, I thought Jonathan Cook offered the most cogent critique.

It’s going to take a lot more than a retraction to clean their tarnished image. They have made a pretty good start by debunking the Qana ambulance hoax myth. And they have more recently criticized the trial and execution of Saddam Hussein. But I think it’s worth examining the mentality they had to adopt to condemn nonviolent resistance in the first place. And I think it’s obvious where it comes from.

First of all, groups like HRW and Amnesty believe that they have to maintain an ‘apolitical’ appearance. It would be ‘political’ to assert that there is no symmetry between the violence of the oppressor, the occupier, the coloniser...and the resistance. So they have to adopt the fallacious 'even handed' approach.

In a more recent example, in the media release for the new report itself,

Israel launched indiscriminate attacks in Lebanon and littered southern Lebanon with cluster bombs during its war with Hezbollah. For its part, Hezbollah attacked Israeli cities without distinguishing between military and civilian objectives.

They start off by accepting Israeli claims at face value, as if it weren’t patently obvious that Israel’s war was not against Hizb’allah, but Lebanon. And they must immediately follow their criticism of Israel with criticism of some Arab entity. According to all reports, Hizb’allah, using comparatively primitive rockets that are difficult to target, somehow managed to hit military targets with considerably more consistency than the Israeli military, equipped with all the latest gadgetry. Unless the Israeli military are really quite exceptionally incompetent with all their toys, it seems that the attacks they launched were not indiscriminate at all. They deliberately targeted civilians. And ambulances. And those fleeing at the Israelis’ own behest. As for the cluster bombs, there is no doubt who they were intended to harm.

At a more venal level, these organisations rely a great deal on donations. I believe they are rather acutely aware of what happened to the American Civil Liberties Union in 1977, when they defended the Nazis' right to march through the predominantly Jewish Chicago suburb of Skokie and lost some 25% of their membership and a third of their funding base. Arieh Neier, now president of the Soros Foundation of all things, was then the ACLU boss. He went on to found and direct...guess what...HRW.

Obviously, there is no real parallel between Nazis with an ideological principle of exterminating Jews and Palestinians fighting for the most basic rights against an implacable colonial oppressor. But Zionists have spent the last six decades trying, with considerable success, to create the widespread impression that the Jewish people and the Jewish religion are indistinguishable from the Zionist state, and that any threat – even mild criticism of a specific policy – is tantamount to a new Holocaust. So human rights groups concerned to retain their existing levels of donations are probably prudent to adopt the pretense of ‘balance’. And we are absolutely right not to let them get away with it.

So the first question is who the hell are these hypocrites to get up on a high horse and evaluate not just the human rights performance of individual states – and non state actors, when they feel the need – but also which states provide ‘leadership’ on human rights issues.

The second question is where on earth did they get the impression that the US has ever been in a position to provide such leadership? Leaving aside such little matters as the brutal ‘white man’s burden’ Philippine war and the Indian wars and stuff that they carried out before the invention of human rights in 1948, it takes considerable imagination to place the mantle of human rights leadership on the country that oversaw, just to take a few examples, the Pinochet dictatorship, the counterinsurgencies in Guatemala and El Salvador, the Contra war against Nicaragua…the genocidal sanctions on Iraq. HRW seems to think that the US could provide human rights leadership by training the hemisphere’s torturers at the School of the Americas – now renamed to the innocuous sounding ‘Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation’ (WHISC) – since 1946. And now, all of a sudden, the victims of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib have blotted the US’s copybook. The victimization of Jose Padilla is a human rights issue that has deprived the US of the credibility it retained while victimizing Mumia abu Jamal and Leonard Peltier?

The third question is: the EU? Wasn’t the EU one of those unscrupulous and hypocritical mobs who, along with Russia and the UN, signed on to Bush’s bogus ‘road map’? Isn’t that the same EU that has cut off funding to the PA on the grounds that the electorate voted for the wrong candidates, making their very own little contribution to starving the Palestinians into submission? And they have the credibility to provide ‘leadership’ on human rights? Yeah, right!

Hobbes spins

Michael Tomasello, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig reports that the reason human eyes, unlike those of any other primate, have visible whites, is to allow others to know where we’re looking.

In a recent experiment, our research team has shown that even infants — at around their first birthdays, before language acquisition has begun — tend to follow the direction of another person’s eyes, not their heads. Thus, when an adult looked to the ceiling with her eyes only, head remaining straight ahead, infants looked to the ceiling in turn. However, when the adult closed her eyes and pointed her head to the ceiling, infants did not very often follow.

Obviously, betraying what we’re looking at is not in the interests of a competitive organism. Why should we signal others that there’s a food source or danger in a particular direction?

If I am, in effect, advertising the direction of my eyes, I must be in a social environment full of others who are not often inclined to take advantage of this to my detriment — by, say, beating me to the food or escaping aggression before me. Indeed, I must be in a cooperative social environment in which others following the direction of my eyes somehow benefits me.

So now we have evidence – not conclusive by any means, but persuasive – that human beings actually evolved specifically to cooperate with each other. All the bullshit ‘human nature’ arguments against socialism bite the dust and Hobbes can just spin in his grave.

Lawyers beware!

Close on the heels of the Saddam trial, where the defense team justifiably feared for their lives – that is, those who survived – now the Bush team has launched not so veiled threats against law firms that represent ‘detainees down there’.

Speaking this week on Federal News Radio, a Web site and AM radio station offering helpful hints for bureaucrats and helpful news for the administration, Cully Stimson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, tried to rally American corporations to stop doing business with law firms that represent inmates of the Guantánamo internment camp.

… when corporate America got word of this dastardly behavior, “those C.E.O.’s are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms.” He added: “We want to watch that play out.”

Would those be reputable firms like KBR and Halliburton?

…Mr. Stimson’s message to corporate executives that lawyers “are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line in 2001.”

It seems not, because those firms have done a roaring business in the wake of 9/11. To their credit, the NY Times’s editorialists have come down on the right side just this once:

Not only do we find Mr. Stimson’s threats appalling, we differ with him about 9/11. The tragedy and crime of that day was that thousands of innocents were slaughtered — not that it hurt some companies’ profit margins.

Istanbul

After a late night and lots of rakı New Year’s Eve, Nur and I caught the 7AM bus to Istanbul to meet Ali and Ayla who were coming to visit for a fortnight. As their arrival coincided with Kurban Bayramı (Eid al-Adha), some of the sightseeing destinations were closed, but we got to Ayasofya and the Blue Mosque and the ancient cistern.

On Tuesday, we caught the ferry to Büyükada ‘Big Island’, also known as Prinkipo Island, where Trotsky lived for four years immediately after his expulsion from Russia in 1929. We took the horse and buggy ride, but didn’t bother visiting Trotsky’s house. He actually lived in two different houses, but one burnt down. I think that’s why he moved to the second. When we were there in 2004, we met a guy who told us this story: When he was a little kid, he was sick and the doctor came around. The doctor had just come from a house call to Trotsky. He told them that when he reached into his pocket to get out his stethoscope, Trotsky drew a gun on him. Which only goes to show, just because they’re really out to get you, doesn’t mean you’re not paranoid. Anyway, we managed to locate the place where Trotsky had lived. I was half expecting some kind of shrine, like Marx’s tomb in Hampstead Heath. But no, the place is rather hard to find. It’s kind of behind another place. It’s completely overgrown with weeds and prickles and has no roof or windows. It came as a bit of a relief that the Trots weren’t into that kind of fetish.

On Wednesday, they reopened Topkapı Sarayı ‘Artillery-Gate Palace’. I had never been there before. There was quite a forbidding queue to get in to the Harem section, so we just wandered around the less crowded galleries of the Treasury. It’s quite amazing how they get all those little pieces of diamonds and rubies and emeralds and stuff to fit together into patterns to decorate the sultan’s water bottle. What’s even more amazing is that people would spend their brief, miserable lives destroying their eyesight doing that kind of stuff for their oppressors. I can hardly imagine what kind of conditions the sultan’s jewelers must have worked under.

I once read this novel, My name is red, by Orhan Pamuk – he got the Nobel Prize for it. It’s quite a strange novel, in my limited experience of reading fiction. It’s kind of a mystery about the murder of some of the sultan’s manuscript illuminators, all narrated in the first person by a wide range of characters, including a sketch of a tree and the colour red, whence the title. There’s a lot of deliberation over whether an illuminator should allow any trace of individuality to creep into his (yes, always his) work. A difference of opinion over this momentous question appears to have been the motive. Anyway, Pamuk describes how he imagines life must have been like for those guys, and I’m sure he comes a lot closer than I could. Now doubtless paper and ink and the gold leaf and stuff they used for the illumination were real precious and all, but I expect those actually working in gold and jewels would have been outright prisoners.

I guess jeweled water bottles and ornate ceilings don’t quite fit into my aesthetic.

What ever happened to Nuremberg?

If you’re wondering where I’ve been, well, for one thing, I got caught up in some discussion on Lenin’s tomb. And I’ve been away. I had to get away from the internet for a few days to read Ilan Pappe’s The ethnic cleansing of Palestine and Ali Abunimah’s One country, which I intend to write something about pretty soon. Actually, I hope at least to review Abunimah before we head off again early Monday.

I’ve always thought everybody knew about the Nuremberg Principles. Even people who had no idea where Nurenberg is were at least aware of the fourth principle:

The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him [sic] from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him [sic].

Anyway, yesterday I followed a link to this remarkable article in the Forward. It transpires that former Israeli army chief of staff, Moshe Ya’alon, while on a fellowship at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy in Washington

was sued by a group of Lebanese citizens who either lost family members or were injured in the April 1996 shelling of the United Nations compound in the Southern Lebanese town of Qana. In the incident, an errant Israeli artillery shell killed 100 civilians and United Nations workers who were in the compound. Israel later apologized.

Errant? Yeah, right! Somehow I had formed the impression that the perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity were subject to ‘universal jurisdiction’. Probably something I picked up when the Spanish were trying to extradite Pinochet from the UK a few years ago. Well, that turns out to be wrong. Universal jurisdiction is quite the controversial principle and only a few countries actually think they can prosecute anybody who commits crimes against humanity. It goes without saying that the US is not among them. After all, the US doesn’t even recognize the jurisdiction of the ICC.

Well, that’s not all, because a couple of weeks ago, on 14 December, Judge Paul Friedman ruled

“If General Ya’alon’s actions were taken in an official capacity, he therefore was acting as an agency or instrumentality of the foreign state, and is immune from suit,” Friedman wrote in his opinion, citing the Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act, which prevents lawsuits against individuals who were acting as part of their official duty.

So what about the Nuremberg Principles?

Is it really possible that the Pulitzer Prize winning ex NY Times journo, Chris Hedges, thinks he’s saying something new? Granted, it’s only today that I got his 18 December article from Jewish Voice for Peace, but it was pretty old stuff even then. His central point appears to be that what the Palestinians are facing is, in the words of his title, ‘Worse than apartheid’. But it was two years earlier, on 15 December 2004, when JVP sent around Moshe Machover’s article, from which I take the liberty of quoting,

To be sure, the two have many features in common. Both are perniciously racist; both impose a degree of separation between ethnic groups. And this is no accident: both are instances of the genus colonial settler state…

But the point is that they belong to two distinct species of the genus. All colonial settlers' societies built themselves up on exploiting the resources of the country that they colonized: primarily its land, which they wrested from the indigenous people, who became dispossessed. The decisive difference between the two species was what was to become of the dispossessed natives.

In one model of colonization, their labor power became one of the indigenous resources - indeed, the main resource - to be exploited by the settlers. The ethnic conflict between the two groups thus assumed the nature of a kind of class struggle. This model is represented, in almost pure form, by apartheid South Africa.

In the other model, the native population was to be eliminated; exterminated or expelled rather than exploited. Israel is an active instance of this model. If you wish to find an instructive parallel, look not at South Africa. Rather, read Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West.

Hedges is also concerned about the prospect of transfer. He correctly points out that the fundamental point of Israeli policy in the occupied territories – the closures, the lockdowns, the invasions, the roadblocks, the missile strikes, the ‘targeted assassinations’, etc. – is precisely to make life for the Palestinians so unbearable that they will pack up and leave. But this is nothing new, either.

Israel…has been given the moral license by the Bush administration to carry out what is euphemistically in Israel called "transfer" and what in other parts of the world is called ethnic cleansing. …the architects of transfer, who once held the equivalent status in Israeli society of the Ku Klux Klan, have wormed their way into positions of power in the Israeli government.

But ethnic cleansing is one of the founding principles of Zionism. Everyone knows the passage from Herzl’s diary in 1895 where he is quite explicit that ‘the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly’. And it has played a central role in Zionist thought ever since. But much more importantly, the state of Israel is founded upon a deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing actually carried out over the 1947-1949 period, as conclusively documented in Ilan Pappe’s new book, The ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

The principal difference between Lieberman – of the KKK – and Olmert is that Lieberman is more honest about his intentions. The whole Zionist establishment is obsessed with the ‘demographic time bomb’ and are determined to shed as much of the non Jewish population as they can by whatever means necessary. Every ‘peace plan’ since UN Security Council Resolution 242 has incorporated the concept of ‘the principle of equal exchange of territory’. So what’s that all about? The whole idea is to incorporate areas of the West Bank with high concentrations of Jewish settlers into the Jewish state and to turn over the areas of ‘Israel proper’ with high concentrations of ‘Israeli Arabs’ over to ‘the Palestinian state’ to defer the day when the non Jewish population becomes the majority as long as possible. Exactly what Lieberman says explicitly.

If it’s only now that this is all coming to light for Hedges, maybe he’s right to think, ‘The stark reality of Gaza, however, has failed to penetrate the consciousness of most Americans’.

Meanwhile, over at the NY Times, the editorialists are at it again. I suppose they’ve been partying hard in honour of the festive season. In their editorial sagely concluding

Toppling Saddam Hussein did not automatically create a new and better Iraq. Executing him won’t either.

they write

What might have been a watershed now seems another lost opportunity. After nearly four years of war and thousands of American and Iraqi deaths, it is ever harder to be sure whether anything fundamental has changed for the better in Iraq.

A lost opportunity for what? To ‘bring democracy to the Middle East’? (In this connection, I highly recommend allocating 46 minutes to checking out Robert Newman’s History of oil.) Anyway, it’s nice of them to acknowledge that Iraqis have had to give their lives in the service of ‘our’ great civilizing mission, even though ‘we’ never asked them whether it was what they wanted, much less whether they wanted to sacrifice their lives and their relatives’ lives for it. Obbviously the poll results aren’t reaching the editorial room, because the Iraqis are pretty damn sure that things have gone from bad to worse. Life was better even under the genocidal sanctions, that ‘we’ imposed in their interests for all those years.

About 90 percent of Iraqis feel the situation in the country was better before the U.S.-led invasion than it is today, according to a new ICRSS [Iraq Centre for Research and Strategic Studies] poll.

The editorial continues,

A carefully conducted, scrupulously fair trial could have helped undo some of the damage inflicted by his rule. It could have set a precedent for the rule of law in a country scarred by decades of arbitrary vindictiveness.

You might not be surprised to learn that the scarred country is not the US, but Iraq. But wait, wouldn’t a scrupulously fair trial have brought to light the involvement of the US government in bringing Saddam to power in the first place? And providing him with all kinds of armaments and all the fixin’s for WMD? No telling who he might implicate. Better hang him quick! [PS – A few minutes ago, the Washington Post announced that they’d already done the dirty deed.]

According to Ha’aretz, two Belgian UN peacekeepers became the latest victims of Israel’s fabled ‘purity of arms’ when one of them stepped on one of the estimated 1 million unexploded cluster bomblets the retreating invaders left behind in August. As they both survived, they will not contribute to the toll of 28 killed so far from Israel’s little surprises.

In his latest article in defense of Carter, Norman Finkelstein appears to have really gone a bit over the top. What he seems to be trying to do is to justify Carter’s refusal to debate the abominable Alan Dershowitz at Brandeis University. Carter has been widely quoted, "I don't want to have a conversation even indirectly with Dershowitz, There is no need for me to debate somebody who, in my opinion, knows nothing about the situation in Palestine."

It’s true that ex presidents often speak at public events without the requirement that they debate someone who has slandered them. I think it may also be true that universities don’t always provide a platform for authors promoting their books. Brandeis appears to sport a wide range of academics specializing in the Middle East in general and Israel in particular. Given the wealth of in house expertise at Brandeis, why truck in this torture justifying hoodlum from Harvard Law School? But Dershowitz, to be fair, is probably no more ignorant of the issues than Carter himself. And if he’s really so ignorant as Carter makes out, why not just clobber him. It’s not as if Dershowitz doesn’t deserve the humiliation.

Anyhow, then Finkelstein goes on at quite some length rehearsing the story of Dershowitz’s well documented (by Finkelstein himself) plagiarism of a widely acknowledged hoax – Joan Peters’s 1984 best seller From time immemorial, his attempts to prevent publication of Finkelstein’s Beyond Chutzpah, in which he documents the plagiarism and the hoax, and his refusal to debate Finkelstein. He seems quite justifiably peeved that the plagiarized crap Dershowitz churns out, or perhaps has his students and assistants churn out, receives accolades in the mainstream press while he can’t get his own work reviewed anywhere in the US, were it was published. But what does that have to do with Carter? If Carter had articulated the view that Dershowitz was a charlatan and a plagiarist and an apologist for ethnic cleansing and torture and that he wasn’t about to provide him with yet another platform, or the credibility that would come from debating a recognized expert like himself, that would probably be defensible. But I reckon he’s just being a wimp. I think he’s scared that Dershowitz is more articulate than he is, when he comes out with stuff like, ‘I’ve never and would imply that Israel is guilty of any form of apartheid in their own country’, quite apart from the dodgy substance. Anyway, by endorsing a two state ‘solution’, he implicitly accepts Israel’s ‘right to exist as a Jewish state’, which ultimately makes him an apologist for ethnic cleansing, too.

On a lighter note, check this out – a victory for freedom of expression in Britain!

We’re not winning

Writing in today’s NY Times, Jim Rutenberg reports,

Now that President Bush is seeking “a new way forward” in Iraq, he is embracing a new verbal construction to describe progress there: “We’re not winning. We’re not losing.”

The latest shift in the official language of the war is begging the question: Well, which is it? A tie? A draw? Something else?

Well might he ask. But more to the point, in the entire 630 word article, he never gets to the real point – who are ‘we’ and what would it mean to win?

Of course it goes without saying that ‘we’ are the US government. No newspaper anywhere would so much as raise an eyebrow before identifying itself 100% with the rulers of whatever country it happens to be. This is ultimately one of the reasons I always insist that nationalism is the most insidious divisive ideology around. Nationalist assumptions – identification of the people with the state and the elision of class interests – are so ubiquitous they just pass under the radar without anyone even noticing most of the time. Now if Rutenberg had written ‘we white folks’, or ‘we blokes’, it probably would have raised an uproar. But we American imperialists – no problem.

It doesn’t really matter that he doesn’t tell us what winning would entail, because his colleague Sheryl Gay Stolberg quotes the decider on exactly this in another article.

“Victory in Iraq is achievable,” Mr. Bush said, addressing reporters in the ornate Indian Treaty Room across the street from the White House, in a historic office building once used by the Navy. He added, “Our goal remains a free and democratic Iraq that can govern itself, sustain itself and defend itself and is an ally in the war on terror.”

A free and democratic Iraq that can govern itself will become a real possibility just as soon as the invaders leave. It might even be able to sustain itself if the bastards who wrecked all the infrastructure give them a chance to fix it. Reparations might just be in order, if he were serious about this. But clearly, until Iraq has its own nuclear arsenal, it will never be able to defend itself from threats like the US, Israel, or the ‘Coalition of the willing’, maybe not even then. Naturally it must be an ally in the war against terror, but on the face of it, you’d think that actually contradicted the first two of the Decider’s goals. If Iraq is free and democratic in any meaningful sense, then I guess Iraqis will decide who to ally themselves with in which military adventures.

So if ‘victory in Iraq’ means achieving all of those goals, some of which are patently unachievable, then Mr Bush is lying about its achievability. Either that or he’s lying about the goals. Or both. Now it transpires that nobody knows how the Indian Treaty Room got its name, according to the White House website, but anyway, can you imagine a more appropriate place to be talking out the wrong orifice?

"These People Are Capable of Anything!"

Susie Day in CounterPunch a couple of days ago reported the tragic shooting of a rich white kid at an East Hampton country club on the day of his wedding.

"Face it, prosperous white people own the corporations; they break unions; they're behind environmental degradation; they got us into Iraq--they're nothing but little Eichmanns," declared a professor of Equality and Justice Studies at Red Hook Community College. Victim advocates say this mentality has wormed its way into the police force…"I couldn't stand to see more people suffer because of lost jobs, lowered salaries, the privatization of our infrastructure," the officer stated. "That's why I joined the police force--I wanted to help."

Follow the link for a good laugh.

The blind leading the blind

Ever since I left the states and encountered the sensible practice of using different size banknotes (‘bills’) for different denominations, I’ve thought, you wouldn’t want to be blind in America. Well it seems Judge James Robertson of Federal District Court has finally come to the party, ruling in a case brought by the American Council of the Blind that ‘United States currency discriminates against blind people because bills are all the same size and cannot be distinguished by touch.’ So, what’s so strange about that is that Marc Maurer, president of the National Federation of the Blind, has written an op-ed in the NY Times arguing that it doesn’t discriminate at all. It is just an inconvenience and the blind are responsible for sorting out their difficulties if someone shortchanges them!

It reminds me of that line in Love and death on Long Island, where the main character expresses his bewilderment at the strange US dialect to Irv, the proprietor of Chez d’Irv’s diner, ‘Here in America, you ask for the check and pay with a bill, while we English ask for the bill and pay with a cheque!’

Thumbs up

In my dotage, I have come to realize that there are people who don’t seem to mind entertaining contradictory ideas at the same time. A lot of people. Most people. Not you of course. I still don’t understand how they learned this cognitive feat, or why they’d want to. It would embarrass me if I got caught talking out both sides of my mouth.

I first noticed this when I heard people denouncing terrorism, blowing up innocent civilians in cafes and such, and then saying Israel had a ‘right to exist’, as if the very existence of the Zionist state didn’t come about through exactly such tactics. I thought it was something to do with people just having special blinkers when it came to Israel. But eventually it dawned on me that the phenomenon is really much more widespread and general than that.

And now I read that the eminent former Israeli Supreme Court president Aharon Barak, has passed down his final ruling, which, according to Ha’aretz ‘is expected to serve as a legal precedent in international law and war crime law’. It’s a historic event, right? He’ll be remembered for this for a long time to come. You wouldn’t want to look foolish under those circumstances.

For starters, ‘The court ruled that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian terrorist organizations has the characteristics of armed international conflict, and therefore is subject to international law.’ Now there are some who imagine that international law applies to how states treat the human beings over whom they exercise state power, particular those whose territory they have occupied by force and so forth. But clearly Justice Barak can see through such rubbish. And with his superior perception he can also discern that the war between the State of Israel, with the fourth biggest arsenal on the planet, including a now acknowledged nuclear weapons cache, a very respectable arms industry of its own, and billions of dollars a year in no strings attached US aid, and a few bands of Palestinians with slingshots and home made rockets ‘has the characteristics of armed international conflict’.

To his credit, he ‘rejected the state's argument that international law currently recognizes a third category comprising "unlawful combatants."’ Which I think says a lot about the state of ‘justice’ in the US.

But ‘the court ruled that civilians involved in terror activities are not afforded the same protections granted to innocent civilians under international law.’ And fair enough, too.

The court also ruled that, since a targeted killing is essentially an attack on a civilian that is engaged in hostile activities, the attack is only justified if carried out against a civilian currently involved in terrorism. Therefore the IDF cannot target former terror operatives who have distanced themselves from terror activity. [my emphasis]

As I read this, what the judge means by currently is ‘nowadays’, rather than ‘at the moment’. Presumably, former terror operatives who have not distanced themselves from terror activity are fair game. It’s not necessary that a target actually be engaged in combat, or a ‘terror’ act at the time.

A ‘targetted killing’, or ‘extrajudicial execution’, as we call it in English, is ‘justified’ if four criteria are met,

First, "well based, strong and convincing information" regarding the individual's terrorist activities.

Second, "a civilian taking a direct part in hostilities cannot be attacked if a less harmful means can be employed."

Third, an independent, thorough investigation must be conducted after the attack to determine "the precision of the identification of the target and the circumstances of the [targeted killing]."

Fourth, every effort must be made to minimize harm to innocent civilians, and "harm to innocent civilians caused during military attacks (collateral damage) must be proportional."

So, for example, it would be ok to launch a missile at a known Islamic Jihad member having lunch in a Gaza restaurant when there is reliable intelligence that they fired a rocket that morning and were expected to do so again the next day. Obviously, a less harmful means cannot be employed. It would be way too dangerous and difficult to apprehend the suspect, gather evidence against them and prove to a jury that they were guilty as charged. Israeli authorities couldn’t do that anyway; Palestine is a foreign country, right?

Now, imagine an Israeli soldier, in uniform, enjoying lunch in a restaurant in Tel Aviv. By Justice Barak’s criteria, wouldn’t it be ok to ram a car bomb into that restaurant, assuming of course that you didn’t happen to have a precision guided missile on hand, and provided there was a thorough investigation after the fact? Wouldn’t we condemn that soldier for ‘hiding among civilians’?

According to YNet,

The Public Committee against Torture in Israel, which petitioned to the High Court to cancel the targeted killing policy was disappointed that the verdict did not set clear guidelines on how the policy should be used.

which I find decidedly implausible. I certainly hope that the Public Committee was disappointed that five years after lodging their petition on the matter the verdict did not ban extrajudicial murder outright.

Anyway, like I say, I don’t know how they manage it, but I’m confident that Justice Barak will enjoy a serene retirement with a clear conscience.

Just sign here

Every couple of months or so, Jewish Voice for Peace sends me a petition to sign. Sometimes I think I’d like to sign, if only they weren’t so lame. Sometimes I think about writing back suggesting a redraft or something. The last one was just a couple of weeks ago,

We call upon Israeli leaders to end the siege of and war on Gaza. We call upon world leaders to end the political and economic sanctions of Palestine.

The siege and sanctions are sowing chaos and death in Gaza. They must come to an end.

As if ‘Israeli leaders’ and ‘world leaders’ had no idea about the chaos and death they were sowing in Gaza! It doesn’t appear to have penetrated as far as Oakland that Israeli leaders want to sow chaos and death and that world leaders are quite happy to do their bit.

But this time, it’s just insulting. Mitchell Plitnick asks if I can sign a petition that says,

The new Congress should heed President Jimmy Carter's leadership in crafting a Middle East policy leading toward a just peace.

But as I wrote in a recent blog, what Carter is advocating is nothing resembling a just peace. He has made it quite explicit that he does not want Palestinians to have democratic rights and that he insists on Israel remaining a sectarian apartheid state, although he does deny that it is one because the Israeli Arabs get to vote.

Carter is getting more and more support. And not just from the JVP wankers. From people who you’d expect to know better, like the usually antiZionist Jews sans Frontieres.

Meanwhile back on Telegraph Ave, JVP appear to have forgotten that the Democratic Party is just as committed to blinkered US imperialism and to the Zionist project as the Republicans.

Carter's book and the new Democratic majority represent an unusual opportunity for a change in U.S. policy in Israel-Palestine. Congress can pressure Israel to end the siege on civilians in Gaza, halt the construction of the separation wall inside the West Bank, and stop expanding the settlements. Congress can make military aid contingent on restarting peace negotiations in good faith.

Congress can certainly do that, but only if it wants to, as it never has before regardless of which party controlled it. Millions of Americans willing to strike or take action on the streets could force the issue, but not only are they not there, JVP isn’t even suggesting it.

Most Americans believe the U.S. must take an active and even-handed role in resolving this conflict. Yet while AIPAC and other groups lobby for support of the Israeli occupation, we in the silent majority have not mounted a successful challenge. Our voice is not reaching Congress. Unless we join together, Congress will keep ignoring the real obstacles to a just peace.

The US has taken sides in this conflict all along, but now, all of a sudden, it should turn around and be even handed. I assume by ‘even-handed role’ JVP don’t mean the pretense of acting as arbiter, as they did so successfully in Angola. Of course even genuine evenhandedness wouldn’t be good enough if we were interested in a just peace. A balanced approach to the oppressor and the oppressed never has and never can deliver fairness.

Anyway, the silent majority’s voice definitely reached congress on the question of bringing the troops home from Iraq, but it appears to have fallen on deaf ears. So why would anyone in their right mind expect those bastards to be more receptive to this appeal? In any case, I’m not expecting Congress to stop ‘ignoring the real obstacles to a just peace’ at least until JVP comes to the party and realizes that there’s no justice in a bunch of European colonists driving the Palestinians off their land to, in Herzl’s words, ‘form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.’

Jonathan Cook’s new article on Counterpunch explains why Hamas cannot in good conscience recognize ‘Israel’s right to exist’. I was delighted to find that I am no longer the only one rude enough to mention the security of the corridor between Gaza and the West Bank in public.

…Israel refuses to demarcate its own future borders, leaving it an open question what it considers to be the extent of "its existence" it is demanding Hamas recognise. We do know that no one in the Israeli leadership is talking about a return to Israel's borders that existed before the 1967 war, or probably anything close to it.

Without a return to those pre-1967 borders (plus a substantial injection of goodwill from Israel in ensuring unhindered passage between Gaza and the West Bank) no possibility exists of a viable Palestinian state ever emerging.

And no goodwill, of course, will be forthcoming.

I’m not actually sure what Jonathan’s position is on the desirability of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Where we differ is that I don’t think there was ever a realistic possibility of a viable Palestinian state confined to those enclaves. And one of the principal reasons for this was precisely the impossibility of securing passage between them.

In another departure from the standard discourse on Palestine, Jonathan makes some very sensible points about the impact of the right of return on Israel’s precious demography,

In demanding recognition of its right to exist, Israel is ensuring that the Palestinians agree to Israel's character being set in stone as an exclusivist Jewish state, one that privileges the rights of Jews over all other ethnic, religious and national groups inside the same territory. The question of what such a state entails is largely glossed over both by Israel and the West.

For most observers, it means simply that Israel must refuse to allow the return of the millions of Palestinians languishing in refugee camps throughout the region, whose former homes in Israel have now been appropriated for the benefit of Jews. Were they allowed to come back, Israel's Jewish majority would be eroded overnight and it could no longer claim to be a Jewish state, except in the same sense that apartheid South Africa was a white state.

I read a lot of stuff about Palestine and at this stage I reckon Jonathan is producing the most interesting analysis I see. Anyone who thinks its worth knowing about Palestine should make a point of reading his articles in full. I’d recommend his website, but he’s pretty slow about updating it. I usually find his stuff first on CounterPunch.

‘La sombra de Pinochet’

In today’s NY Times, Ariel Dorfman has quite a moving little op-ed.

In order to truly exorcise him from our existence it would have been necessary that he stand trial, that he defend himself from the accusations of murder and torture… In order to cleanse his image from our land, we would have had to witness him looking into the face of each and every one of his victims… Instead we must watch the sad spectacle of one-third of the country lamenting his departure, one-third of Chile still silent accomplices to his crimes… And yet…I feel that something has in fact changed quite categorically with his demise. What convinced me were the thousands upon thousands of Chileans who spontaneously poured into the streets here to celebrate the news of his extinction…we have come out from under the general’s shadow…

Anyhow, I’m delighted to see the bastard go and I’d have been happier if he’d done it sooner. As I wrote at the time, I was disappointed to see his mate Milton Friedman live so long and die so comfortably. Does evil promote longevity or something?

And speaking of Friedman, Greg Palast shows in today’s ICH that the Chilean economic miracle carried out by Friedman’s monetarist Chicago boys was in fact a fairy tale,

In 1973, the year General Pinochet brutally seized the government, Chile’s unemployment rate was 4.3%. In 1983, after ten years of free-market modernization, unemployment reached 22%. Real wages declined by 40% under military rule.

The WSWS reports an article I seem to have missed in the NY Times on the release of 2004 income statistics from the Internal Revenue Service (the US tax department). A few significant findings:

• In 2004, the richest 0.1%, the 130,500 households with average household incomes of US$4.9 million, saw their incomes rise by 27.5%.
• Those same 300,000 persons had reported earnings totaling US$639 billion ($679 billion according to the article, but that doesn’t compute), 9.5% of all pretax income, and twice as much as the poorest 120 million persons combined.
• In 2004, the three lowest quintiles (i.e. 60%, 180 million persons) earned less than 95 cents in real terms for every dollar they earned in 1979, when they started collecting these statistics.
• The top tenth of 1% of the population earned $3.48 in 2004 for every dollar they earned in 1979.
• The bottom quintile, or 60 million persons, have an average income of US$7 per day, just over a quarter of the official poverty line of $27 per day.
  

And that’s the kind of society everyone on the planet aspires to, or else.

Back in Palestine, JSF drew my attention to a concise article on al Jazeera about Israel’s refusal to grant a visa to Desmond Tutu and the rest of his delegation from the UN Human Rights Council for nearly a fortnight. But it transpires that Israel had good reason for this, according to Mark Regev, Israeli spokesperson and final arbiter on all human rights issues,

"We saw a situation whereby the human rights mechanism of the UN was being cynically exploited to advance an anti-Israel agenda. This would do the Israelis, the Palestinians and peace in the Middle East no good at all. This would also have done nothing to serve the interest of human rights."

A Pakhtun on Burnett's 'Shameless hellions'

The other day, I followed a link from Information Clearinghouse (ICH) to find an excerpt from Uncivilized Beasts and Shameless Hellions: Travels with an NPR Correspondent by award winning journalist, John F Burnett. He describes a very conservative society obsessed with ‘honour’, where any mother in her right mind wouldn’t hesitate to murder her own daughter if she had dishonoured the family.

My own experience relating to purda in the Pakhtun area was when I spent an Eid weekend in a village near Mardan, which Burnett describes as a ‘frontier town’, but is actually about 130km from the Afghan border, as the crow flies. In the poor households, women wore the same kind of loose scarves over their hair as you’d see peasant women wearing anywhere. They slipped partly or completely off as much as they stayed on and nobody seemed very fussed about it. Women and girls were a bit shy of the ‘sahib’, but had no problem looking at me, speaking to me, or shaking my hand. When they took me to visit the local godfather, Bader Khan, it was a completely different story. In several hours hanging around with Bader Khan and his relatives and retainers, I never saw so much as a cow or a bitch, much less a girl or a woman.

I sent the article around to a few people, including Khadim Hussein, a Pashtoon student I worked with a bit in Pakistan, who writes,

This is in fact a travelogue by an American who describes the Pushtoon way of life after staying in Peshawar for a couple of days (though he does not mention his duration of stay explicitly) and visited the tribal areas only once in passing. Mr. Burnett mentions only three people—Musarat Hilali (a lawyer by profession), Hasan Khan (who is now working for a private Pushto channel) and one Muhammad Akbar, an unknown Pushtoon tribal elder – as his informants. I would like to give my opinion about the following points of Mr. Brunett's captivating travelogue (which is closer in format to a short story):

Pushtoonwali

Talibanization of Pushtoon Society

Purda (veil) and Burqa

Honour and Revenge

Pushtoonwali, as I understand it as a Pushtoon and as a keen observer of Pushtoon society, revolves around the basic concept of collectivity and collective ownership of culture, customs and traditions. The core value of Pushtoonwali is a consistent consultative process which the Pushtoons call 'Jirga'. It is the Pushtoon Jirga that decides the meaning of every cultural symbol of their society, whether it is the concept of honour and revenge or the concept of their tribal and social rights. Because of their geographical location over a period of centuries, the Pushtoons have had to repel invaders from both east and west on a continuing basis. This has locked them in a state of insecurity and cultural isolation. The Pushtoon Jirga only once asserted itself to form a Pushtoon state when a number of factors conspired simultaneously to weaken the Safavi Empire in Persia and the Mughal Empire in India.

This Pushtoon state could have institutionalised their socio-cultural development, but it was curtailed by the 19th Century British imperialist invasion. The British divided the Pushtoons into several isolated enclaves — in the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP), Baluchistan, and Afghanistan. This colonization created a socio-cultural vacuum on the Pushtoon soil, intensified their insecurity and made them more conservative in their worldview.

In the early 20th Century, the Khudai Khidmatgar Movement (called the Red Shirts Movement by the British) led by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (alias Bacha Khan) and his friends, made a concerted effort to bring Pushtoon society into the mainstream. The movement was based on the concept of non-violence. Its daring leaders established free educational institutions, raised their voice against every kind of discrimination and worked for the socio-political empowerment of the Pushtoons.

The Khudai Khidmatgars 'Pushtoon' remained a harbinger of enlightenment, non-violence, democratic values, world peace and secularism for a long time. This movement could also have helped the Pushtoons emerge from their socio-cultural isolation and could have changed their worldview. But its leaders were persecuted and jailed, first by the British imperialists and later by the Pakistani establishment. This helped the conservative elements rule the roost on Pushtoon soil.

In the Seventies, the US and its allies against the Soviets manipulated the Pushtoons’ sense of cultural insecurity for their own ulterior motives and turned Pushtoon soil into a battleground. They were admired for their 'bravery' and 'honour' and were induced to take up arms again, and so they did. I don't remember that any scholar from the west indicated any conservativeness on the part of Pushtoons during all those decades of war against the Soviets. Religious extremism and Jihad were theoretically upheld by the think tanks across the globe under the US financial and intellectual umbrella.

The Zia ul-Haq regime of the Eighties fully supported this paradigm and did everything to turn Pushtoons into religious zealots. The enlightened, secular and non-violent elements of Pushtoon society were persecuted and jailed during this era. The process of Talibanizing the Pushtoons went on for decades until the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan and the warlords took control of Pushtoon soil.

Veiling women (purda), and especially the burqa, had never been strictly observed in Pushtoon areas. Mr. Burnett must have seen only the villages in the suburbs of Peshawar populated by Afghan refugees where the culture is more conservative and requires the burqa. I wish he could have also visited Charsadda, Swat, Malakand, Buner and Swabi, where he would have observed few veiled women. In most of the tribal areas, the women work on farms and never wear the veil.

It is sheer exaggeration to say that the burqa is ubiquitous, even in Peshawar city. Mr. Burnett was staying at the Pearl Continental Hotel, only 20-25 minutes from Peshawar University, where he could have met Pushtoon women from different areas study different courses. He could not only talk to them but also exchange views regarding purda and the burqa. Mr. Burnett has exaggerated the generality of this issue in his travelogue.

The concepts of honour and revenge in Pushtoon society arise from the Pushtoons' insecure feelings due to the political factors I’ve mentioned. But to say that honour and revenge is the core of Pushtoonwali displays sheer ignorance of the Pushtoon way of life.

The core of Pushtoonwali, in my view, is freedom and social cohesion on a consultative basis. Pushtoons never like to be dictated to and vigorously resist any attempt to tell them how to behave. This does not prove that they are Talibans. Moreover, despite conscious efforts by the American and Pakistani agencies to prove them extremely conservative for all these years, they have actually become significantly more flexible.

I myself have married a woman I loved and nobody has harmed me or my wife (who is now the mother my two kids) because of this. There are honour killings but they are not particular to Pushtoon society. Baluchis, Sindhis and even Punjabis are involved in honour killing, while most Pushtoon men and women have been struggling to end this phenomenon. There are a number of Pushtoon women, not in scores or hundreds but in thousands, who have been working for the socio-political and economic development of the Pushtoons for a long time. They are all secular, non-violent and enlightened. It is unfortunate that Mr.Burnett only managed to meet Musarat Hilali.

A small part of Pushtoon society might hold extremist views but this is so in every society. Mr Burnett generalizes from his limited experience out of sheer ignorance or as intentional distortion, in accordance with the policy of the Pakistani establishment for many years.