The Apartheid Paradigm in Palestine-Israel

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/27/1547221


NOAM CHOMSKY

Before saying a word, I’d like to express some severe personal discomfort, because anything I say will be abstract and dry and restrained. The crimes against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and elsewhere, particularly Lebanon, are so shocking that the only emotionally valid reaction is rage and a call for extreme actions. But that does not help the victims. And, in fact, it’s likely to harm them. We have to face the reality that our actions have consequences, and they have to be adapted to real-world circumstances, difficult as it may be to stay calm in the face of shameful crimes in which we are directly and crucially implicated.

Well, I’ve been asked to talk about the apartheid paradigm and the proper response here, so I’ll do that, though not without some additional reservations. We have to recognize that there will be no clear answer as to the question of whether the apartheid paradigm applies in Israel or in Boston, right here, or elsewhere. The genre has, after all, only one example: South Africa. And there are similarities elsewhere in many dimensions, and it’s fair enough to bring them up, but there's very little point debating whether they are close enough in one or another case to count as apartheid, because that will never be settled, we know that in advance.

I’ve brought up similarities in the past, when I thought that they were appropriate. Actually, the one time I recall clearly was exactly ten years ago. That was at a conference at Ben Gurion University in Be’er Sheva. It was on the anniversary of the thirtieth year of the military occupation. And in the talk there, I quoted from a standard history of South Africa on elections in the Bantustans, which I’ll read; and just change a few words, and you'll know what it’s about.

“South African retention of effective power, through its officials in the Bantustans, its overwhelming economic influence and security arrangements, gave to this initiative of elections elements of a farce. However, unlikely candidates as were the Bantustans for any meaningful independent existence, their expanding bureaucracies provided jobs for new strata of educated Africans tied to the system in a new way and a basis for accumulation for a small number of Africans with access to loans and political influence. Repression, too, could be indigenized through developing homeland policy and army personnel. On the fringe of the Bantustans, border industry growth centers were planned as a means of freeing capital from some of the restraints imposed on industrial expansion elsewhere and to take advantage of virtually captive and particularly cheap labor. Within the homelands, economic development was more a matter of advertising brochures than actual practical activity, though some officials in South Africa understood the needs from their own perspective for some kind of revitalization of the homelands to prevent their economies from collapsing even further.”

Well, I won’t waste time expressing the similarities to the Occupied Territories, but you can do that quite easily. Ten years ago, that was the optimistic prospect for the Occupied Territories. By now, even that’s remote, and reality is far more grim than it was then. There’s no time and, I presume, no need to review the harrowing details.

We’re now approaching George Bush's historic Annapolis conference, as it’s called, on Israel-Palestine, so we can anticipate a flood of deceit and distortions to set the proper framework. And we should be prepared to counter the propaganda assault, which has already begun. Just to pick a couple of examples, Bostonians could read in the Boston Globe a few days ago that at the Taba Conference in January 2001 -- now quoting -- “Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak accepted ideas floated by President Bill Clinton that would have produced a Palestinian state in 97 percent of the West Bank and 100 percent of Gaza,” but these forthcoming gestures failed. The evil Palestinians refused Israel's generous offers, keeping to their time-honored insistence on seizing defeat from the jaws of victory and proving they’re not partners for negotiation.

Well, there’s one fragment of truth in this conventional fabrication: there was a conference in Taba. And, in fact, it did come close to a possible settlement, but the rest is pure invention. In particular, the conference was terminated abruptly by Prime Minister Barak. The truth is completely unacceptable, so the facts are either suppressed, as they generally are, or, as in this case, just inverted. And we can expect a good deal more of that. Actually, the truth about the Taba Conference merits attention. That week, in one week in January 2001, that was the one moment in thirty years when the United States and Israel abandoned the rejectionist stance that they have maintained in virtual isolation until the present.

And that may suggest some thoughts about another familiar fairytale that you could read about a couple of days earlier in the New York Times, where the respected policy analyst and former high government official, Leslie Gelb, wrote that every US administration since 1967 has privately favored returning almost all of the territory to the Palestinians for the purposes of creating a separate Palestinian state. Note the word "privately." Crucial. We know what the administrations have said publicly. Publicly they have rejected adamantly anything remotely of the sort ever since 1967 -- ’76, when the United States vetoed a Security Council resolution calling for a two-state settlement on the international border, incorporating all the relevant wording of UN 242 -- it’s the basic diplomatic document to which Washington appeals when it’s convenient. The US veto -- it’s worth bearing in mind -- is a double veto. One part of the veto is that the actions are barred, of course. And it’s also vetoed from history, as in this case, so you’ll work really hard to find it, even in the scholarly literature.

Sometimes the public rejection of a separate Palestinian state is more articulate and considerably more extreme, so it takes a George Bush no. 1, who is reputed to be the most hostile to Israel of US presidents. In 1988, as you know, the Palestinian National Council formally accepted a two-state settlement, and the Israeli government responded. This was the coalition government of Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir. They responded by issuing a formal declaration that there can be no additional Palestinian state between Jordan and Palestine -- “additional” because for Shimon Peres and his Labor coalition, Jordan already was a Palestinian state. It’s a view that’s attributed to the right wing, but that’s mistaken. This is Shimon Peres. The United States reacted to that with what was called the Baker Plan -- James Baker, Secretary of State. The Bush Baker Plan endorsed Israel's position without qualification and went on to add that any Palestinian negotiators would have to accept that framework, namely no second Palestinian state in addition to Jordan. That’s Bush no. 1, the alleged critic of Israel, and the respected diplomat James Baker. Again, the truth is inconvenient, so virtually none of this was reported, and you’ll have to work -- search hard to extricate it from the web of self-serving propaganda that dominates commentary and reporting, of which Leslie Gelb's article in the New York Times is a typical, but not unusual, example.

Well, I’m not going to go on with that, but the diplomatic record is one of uniform rejectionism, apart from the week in Taba, and unilateral rejectionism, increasingly so. By now, virtually the entire world agrees on the two-state international consensus of the past thirty years, pretty much along the lines that were almost agreed upon at Taba. That includes all the Arab States, who actually go beyond to call for full normalization of relations with Israel. It includes Iran, although you won’t find that published here, which accepts the Arab League position. It includes Hamas; its leaders have repeatedly endorsed, called for a two-state settlement, even in articles in the US press. That also includes Hamas's most militant figure, Khaled Meshaal, who’s in exile in Syria. And it includes the rest of the world. Israel rejects it, and the United States backs that rejection fully, not in words just, but in actions.

Bush no. 2 has gone to new extremes in rejectionism. He’s declared the illegal West Bank settlements must remain part of Israel. That’s in accord with the Clinton position, expressed by his negotiator Dennis Ross, who explained that what he called “Israel's needs” take precedence over Palestinian wants. That’s Clinton. But the party line remains undisturbed. Facts don’t matter. Bush, Rice and the rest are yearning to realize Bush's vision of a Palestinian state -- somewhere, someplace -- persisting in the noble endeavor of the longtime honest broker.
Well, what’s happened in the past is -- of course, rejectionism goes far beyond words. It includes settlement programs, the annexation wall, closures, checkpoints, and so on. Settlements increased steadily right through the Oslo years, peaking actually in Clinton's last year, the year 2000, right before the Camp David Accords. And the story is now being repeated before our eyes -- shouldn’t surprise us.

So to take just one example, with the Annapolis conference approaching, Israel has just confiscated more Arab land to build a bypass road from Palestinians -- I’m quoting now -- “in order to push the Palestinian traffic between Bethlehem and Ramallah deep into the desert and effectively bar Palestinians from the central part of the West Bank." That’s part of the so-called E1 project, which is designed to incorporate the town of Ma’ale Adumim within Israel and effectively to bisect the West Bank. “With such policies” -- continuing to quote -- "With such policies enacted by the government, the famous Annapolis conference is emptied of all meaning long before it convenes." This is quotes from the Israeli peace organization Gush Shalom. All of this is backed by the honest brokers in Washington and paid for by US taxpayers, who, incidentally, overwhelmingly join the international consensus, in opposition to their own government. But that’s not what we’re going to hear.

Well, in fairness, it should be added that there is occasional public criticism of the settlement programs. So in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago, there was a favorable review of a very important study, which has just been translated into English, Lords of the Land by Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, which bitterly condemns the US-backed Israeli programs in the West Bank and the takeover of Israeli political life by their advocates. It’s a strong and important book.

The review, however, goes on with conventional fairytales. Among them, it tells us that within the Green Line in Israel itself, Israel is what it calls a “vibrant democracy” in which non-Jews have equal rights and, unlike the West Bank, there are no Arab villages made inaccessible, because their roads have been dug up by army bulldozers. Well, again, there’s a fragment of truth in the description. So take, for example, the village Dar al-Hanoun in the so-called Triangle, Wadi Ara, it’s older than the state of Israel, but it’s one of the innumerable unrecognized villages in Israel. So it’s true that there’s no road dug up by bulldozers, and the reason is that there’s no road. No road is permitted by the state authorities, and no construction is permitted. No services are provided. That’s not an unusual situation for Palestinian citizens, who are also effectively barred from over 90% of the land by a complex and intricate web of laws and administrative arrangements. Technically, that was overruled by the high court seven years ago, but, as far as I can determine, only technically. And we may recall that in the United States it took over a century for even formal implementation of the Fourteenth Amendment, guaranteeing equal rights to all persons, and actual implementation of it is still remote a century-and-a-half later.
Well, let’s turn briefly to the important question, the most important question: what can we do about it? Here, it’s useful to think about the apartheid analogy, and it’s useful to remember a little history.

In 1963, the UN Security Council declared a voluntary arms embargo on South Africa. That was extended to a mandatory embargo in 1977. And that was followed by economic sanctions and other measures -- sometimes officials, countries, cities, towns -- some organized by popular movements. Now, not all countries participated. In the United States, the US Congress did impose sanctions over Reagan's veto, but US trade with South Africa then increased by various evasions, along with concealed support for South African terrorist atrocities in Mozambique and Angola, which took a horrendous toll. It’s about 1.5 million killed and over $60 billion in damage during the Reagan years, the Reagan years of constructive engagement, according to UN analysis. In 1988, the Reagan administration declared Mandela's African National Congress to be one of the world's most notorious terrorist groups -- that’s 1988 -- while it described RENAMO in Mozambique merely as an indigenous insurgent group. That was after it had just killed about 100,000 people, according to the State Department, with, of course, US-backed African support. Thatcher's record was similar or maybe worse. But most of this was in secret. There was just too much popular opposition.

And the popular opposition made a difference. There was a very significant anti-apartheid movement decades after the global decision of the Security Council to bring apartheid to an end. In 1965, boycotts and other measures would not have been effective. Twenty years later, they were effective, but that was after the groundwork had been laid by activist, educational and organizing efforts, including within the powerful states, which is what matters in an ugly world.

Well, in the case of Israel-Palestine, the groundwork has not been laid. The quotes that I just gave are perfectly representative examples; you can fill them out in books, yeah. The kind of popular measures that were effective against apartheid by the late 1980s are not only ineffective in the case of Israel-Palestine today, but in fact sometimes backfire in harming the victims. We’ve seen that over and over. It’s going to continue until the organizing and educational efforts make real progress. It’s not just the United States; the European Union is hardly different. So, for example, the European Union does not bar arms deliveries to Israel. It joined the United States in vicious punishment of Palestinians, because they committed the grave crime of voting the wrong way in a free election. And there was very little internal protest in Europe. Populations support the international consensus, but they don’t react when their governments undermine any hope for its realization.

Well, in the coming weeks and the longer term, there's plenty of educational and organizational activity that will have to be carried out among an American population that happens to be largely receptive, though deluged with propaganda and deceit. And it’s not going to be easy. It’s never been easy. But much harder tasks have been accomplished with dedicated and persistent effort.

MIT Professor Noam Chomsky, speaking recently in Boston at a conference called “The Apartheid Paradigm in Palestine-Israel,” sponsored by the Palestinian Christian organization Sabeel.
To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire program, click here for our new online ordering or call 1 (888) 999-3877.

Open Season on America's Last Wild Bison

Montana's Buffalo Hunt Opens Without Any Buffalo in Montana
For Immediate Release, November 15, 2007
Contact: Buffalo Field Campaign, Stephany Seay 406-646-0070

WEST YELLOWSTONE & GARDINER, MONTANA - Today marks the opening day for Montana's bison hunt, authorized by the Montana Department of Livestock. Montana has issued 44 tags to kill members of America's last wild bison population that migrate out of Yellowstone National Park into Montana. It is expected that the Nez Perce as well as Confederated Salish-Kootenai Tribes will conduct separate buffalo hunts under treaty right. The state's hunt will continue through February 15, 2008.

There are currently no wild bison in Montana.

Glenn Hockett, President of the Gallatin Wildlife Association, a hunting organization that opposes the current bison hunt and is working to help restore wild bison in Montana had this to say, "Recent reports from Yellowstone National Park indicate there are no bison in the state of Montana for hunters to hunt. I think this points out the flawed nature of this shoot 'em at the border Department of Livestock led "hunt" with no year round habitat."

Wild American bison, while native to vast expanses of North America, are granted no year-round habitat in Montana. There is never a time that wild bison are allowed to be in the state without being subjected to harassment, capture, slaughter, quarantine, or shooting. Wild bison are ecologically extinct everywhere outside of Yellowstone National Park.

Montana's bison hunt is not authorized by the state's wildlife agency Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks, but by the Montana Department of Livestock, an agency that promotes cattle interests.

"I don't think most people understand that only the Department of Livestock can authorize the hunting of wild bison in Montana, and their goal is no bison left standing in Montana," said Glenn Hockett.

"Allowing the Department of Livestock to have authority over the management of wild bison or any wildlife species is a clear conflict of interest," said Buffalo Field Campaign spokeswoman Stephany Seay. "They have no interest whatsoever in wild bison or their habitat, and you may as well put the fox in charge of guarding the hen house."

Fewer than 4,700 continuously wild American bison exist in the United States; all reside in Yellowstone National Park. A joint state-federal agreement signed in 2000, the Interagency Bison Management Plan prohibits wild bison from migrating to lands outside of the Park and maintains a zero population of wild bison in Montana in an effort to benefit cattle interests who claim they fear the spread of the livestock disease brucellosis from wild bison to cattle. There has never been a documented case of wild bison transmitting brucellosis to cattle.

Buffalo Field Campaign strongly opposes Montana's bison hunt as well as the Interagency Bison Management Plan. BFC maintains that wild bison should be allowed to naturally and fully restore themselves throughout their native range, especially on public lands, and must be managed as a valued native wildlife species by wildlife professionals, not cattle interests.

"Our position on the hunt is clear," said Buffalo Field Campaign's cofounder and subsistence hunter Mike Mease, "No habitat, No hunt."

2,018 wild American bison have been killed or otherwise removed from the remaining wild population in Yellowstone since 2000 under actions carried out by the Interagency Bison Management Plan, as well as state and treaty right hunts.

Buffalo Field Campaign is the only group working in the field, every day, to stop the slaughter of the wild Yellowstone buffalo. Volunteers defend the buffalo and their native habitat and advocate for their lasting protection. Buffalo Field Campaign has proposed real alternatives to the current mismanagement of Yellowstone bison that can be viewed at
www.buffalofieldcampaign.org/actnow/solutions05.html

For more information, video clips and photos visit: http://www.buffalofieldcampaign.org/

Frank Zappa - censorship debate

glumbert - Hilarious debate with Frank Zappa about censorship

rules

ya know, we do actually have some rules in our house. Not exactly the same rules other people have in their homes, but rules nonetheless. One of these rules I been thinkin about lots lately. It's the one says that if you aren't having fun, find something else to do. We all agreed that was a pretty good rule to have. It works, too. Just sometimes we all need the reminder, probably me more than anyone else.

Flimix

Flimix, my children tell me, is a talking spider who lives in our trash can (much like Oscar the Grouch). He has a pet dung beetle that eats the stinky stuff. I decided to move Flimix and his dung beetle outside to the larger trash can. When we saw this spider web on the eave of our house, with rainbows in it (the photo really doesn't do it justice) the girls said that maybe Flimix was responsible..

on this date in history

November 12, 1969
Seymour Hersh, an independent investigative journalist, in a cable filed through Dispatch News Service and picked up by more than 30 newspapers, revealed the extent of the U.S. Army's charges against 1st Lt. William L. Calley at My Lai, a Vietnamese village.


http://www.berkeley.edu:80/news/media/releases/2004/10/11_hersh.shtml

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh spills the secrets of the Iraq quagmire and the war on terror
By Bonnie Azab Powell, NewsCenter

BERKELEY – The Iraq war is not winnable, a secret U.S. military unit has been "disappearing" people since December 2001, and America has no idea how irreparably its torture of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison has damaged its image in the Middle East. These were just a few of the grim pronouncements made by Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter Seymour "Sy" Hersh to KQED host Michael Krasny before a Berkeley audience on Friday night (Oct. 8).

The past two years will "go down as one of the classic sort of failures" in history, said the man who has been called the "greatest muckraker of all time" and (paradoxically) the "enfant terrible of journalism for more than 30 years." While Hersh blamed the White House and the Pentagon for the Iraq quagmire and America's besmirched world image, he was stymied by how it all happened. "How could eight or nine neoconservatives come and take charge of this government?" he asked. "They overran the bureaucracy, they overran the Congress, they overran the press, and they overran the military! So you say to yourself, How fragile is this democracy?"

From My Lai to Abu Ghraib

That fragility clearly unnerves him. Hersh summarizes his mission as "to hold the people in public office to the highest possible standard of decency and of honesty…to tolerate anything less, even in the name of national security, is wrong." He tries his best. More than any other U.S. journalist alive today, he embodies the statement that "a patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government," a belief defined by the conservationist Edward Abbey.

His country has not always thanked him for it — neocon Pentagon adviser Richard Perle has called Hersh "the closest thing we have to a terrorist," while his 1998 book on John F. Kennedy's administration, "The Dark Side of Camelot," cost him many friends on the left. But Hersh's reputation remains more bulletproof than most. The author of eight books, he first received worldwide recognition (and the Pulitzer) in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War. 1982's "The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House," painted Henry Kissinger as a war criminal and won Hersh the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times book prize in biography.

Most recently, as a staff writer for the New Yorker, Hersh has relentlessly ferreted out the behind-the-scenes deals, trickery, and blunders associated with the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Back in May 2003, he was the first American reporter to state unequivocally that we would not find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. (A mea culpa from a Slate journalist who doubted Hersh on WMDs also inadvertently confirms his prescient track record.) And in April of this year, he broke the story of how U.S. soldiers had digitally documented their torture and sexual humiliation of Iraqis at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The several articles he wrote for the New Yorker about Abu Ghraib have been updated and edited into his latest book, "Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib."

"Bush scares the hell out of me"

Hersh came to Berkeley at the invitation of UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism and the California First Amendment Coalition. His appearance in the packed ballroom of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Student Union was the fitting end to a week of high-profile events in honor of the 40th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement.

The Hersh event began only minutes after the second debate between President George W. Bush and John Kerry concluded. Krasny naturally asked Hersh — who had watched the debate at North Gate Hall stone-faced in the middle of a rowdy crowd — what he thought of the match.

"It doesn't matter that Bush scares the hell out of me," Hersh answered. "What matters is that he scares the hell out of a lot of very important people in Washington who can't speak out, in the military, in the intelligence community. They know in ways that none of us know, the incredible gap between what is and what [Bush] thinks."

With that, he was off and running. One could safely say that for the next hour, Hersh proceeded to scare the hell out of most of the audience by detailing the gaps between what they knew and what he hears is actually going on in Iraq.

While his writing is dense but digestible, in person Hersh speaks with the rambling urgency of a street-corner doomsayer, leaping from point to point and anecdote to anecdote and frequently failing to finish his clauses, let alone his sentences. His train of thought can be difficult to catch a ride on. This evening, it was a challenge for Krasny to slow him down long enough to get a word or question in edgewise. For example, here's a slice of raw Hersh on the current situation in Iraq:

I've been doing an alternate history of the war, from inside, because people, right after 9/11, because people inside — and there are a lot of good people inside — are scared, as scared as anybody watching this tonight I think should be, because [Bush], if he's re-elected, has only one thing to do, he's going to bomb the hell out of that place. He's been bombing the hell of that place — and here's what really irritates me again, about the press — since he set up this Potemkin Village government with Allawi on June 28 — the bombing, the daily bombing rates inside Iraq, have gone up exponentially. There's no public accounting of how many missions are flown, how much ordnance is dropped, we have no accounting and no demand to know. The only sense you get is we're basically in a full-scale air war against invisible people that we can't find, that we have no intelligence about, so we bomb what we can see.
And yet — despite the more than 1,000 deaths of U.S. soldiers and the horrific number of Iraqi casualties — Bush continues to believe we are doing the right thing, according to Hersh. "He thinks he's wearing the white hat," he said, adding that is what makes this administration different from previous ones whose hypocrisy Hersh has exposed. Bush and the neocons "are not hypocrites."

Enter the utopians

"I think it's real simple to say [Bush] is a liar. But that would also suggest there was a reality that he understood," explained Hersh. "I'm serious. It is funny in sort of a sick, black humor sort of way, but the real serious problem is, he believes what he's doing." In effect, Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and the other neocons are "idealists, you can call them utopians." As Hersh understands them, they really believe that the solution to global terrorism began with invading Baghdad and will end only with the transformation of the last unfriendly government in the Middle East into a democracy.

"No amount of body bags is going to dissuade [Bush]," said Hersh, despite the fact that Hersh's sources say the war in Iraq is "not winnable. It's over." As for Kerry's war plans, Hersh said he wished he could tell him to stop talking as if the senator's plan for Iraq could somehow still eke out a victory there. "This is a disaster that's been going on. It's a civil war, the insurgency. There is no 'win' anymore in this war," he argued. "As somebody said, 'We're playing chess, they're playing Go.'"

Later, Hersh shared something he had yet to write about. Sources were suggesting that the many acts of domestic terrorism in Iraq that U.S. officials have been attributing to suspected Al Qaeda operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi are in fact a smokescreen set up by the insurgents. "They decided to wage war against their own population," he said. "It's a huge step, with enormous consequences.…The insurgency has simply deflected what they're doing onto this man. And we fell for it."

What is worse, he said impatiently, was that because U.S. forces had "privatized" so many of Iraq's institutions, it had decimated the job market in the country."This is why Bush can talk about 100,000 people wanting to go work in the police or in the army. It's because there's nothing else for them to do. They're willing to stand in line to get bombed because they want to take care of their family," he said.

Hersh has been accused many times of sympathizing with "the enemy," and told that his publicizing of incidents like the My Lai massacre and the Abu Ghraib torture only fan the flames of anti-American sentiment around the world. He related that he's been asked if he feels guilty about the beheadings of two Americans who were wearing uniforms like those worn at Abu Ghraib. "As if the Iraqis needed me to tell them what's going on in that prison!" he responded. He also repeated a question often posed to him: "Was it immoral to go in … [T]he idea that Saddam was a torturer and a killer, doesn't that lend a patina of morality to going after him?" The answer to that one, he said unsmilingly, "is of course, Saddam tortured and killed his people. And now we're doing it."

In addition to adding more details to the woeful chronology of the Abu Ghraib scandal, in which the military stopped the abuse only after Hersh's story brought it crashing down onto front pages around the world — four months after it was first reported to the Department of Defense — Hersh speculated on why those dehumanizing techniques had been used. He was sure that they were not, as some have claimed, the "stress outlet" or other spontaneous recreational ideas of young soldiers from West Virginia. Instead, he said, they were the outgrowth of a massive manhunt for information, any information, about first Al Qaida, the Taliban, and then the Iraqi insurgency:

My government has a secret unit that since December of 2001 has been disappearing people just like the Brazilians and the Argentineans did. Rumsfeld decided after 9/11 that he could not wait. The president signed a secret document…There's a team of people, they fly in unmarked planes, they fly in Gulfstreams, they have their own choppers, they don't carry American passports, and they just grab people. And maybe in the beginning I can understand there was some rationale. Right after 9/11 we were frightened, we didn't know what to do …
The original idea behind the sexually humiliating photos taken at Abu Ghraib, Hersh said he had heard, was to use them as blackmail so that the newly released prisoners — many of whom were ordinary Iraqi thieves or even civilian bystanders rounded up in dragnets — would act as informants. "We operate on guilt, [Muslims] operate on shame," Hersh explained. "The idea of photographing an Arab man naked and having him simulate homosexual activity, and having an American GI woman in the photographs, is the end of society in their eyes."

And the fact that Americans had perpetrated such acts — and refused to take responsibility for it — ended America's role as any kind of moral leader in the eyes of not just the Middle East, but the world, Hersh railed. He talked about an Israeli, a longtime veteran of the troubles between his country and the Palestinians, who had emailed him to say, in essence, "We've been killing them for 40 or 50 years, and they've been killing us for 40 or 50 years, but we know that somewhere down the line we're going to have to live with those SOBs…If we had treated our Arabs the way you treated them in Abu Ghraib, the sexual stuff, the photographs, we couldn't live with them. You guys do not begin to understand what you've done, where you have put yourself in the Arab world."

"They just shot them one by one"

There was more — rumors of atrocities around Iraq that to Hersh brought back memories of My Lai. In the evening's most emotional moment, Hersh talked about a call he had gotten from a first lieutenant in charge of a unit stationed halfway between Baghdad and the Syrian border. His group was bivouacking outside of town in an agricultural area, and had hired 30 or so Iraqis to guard a local granary. A few weeks passed. They got to know the men they hired, and to like them. Then orders came down from Baghdad that the village would be "cleared." Another platoon from the soldier's company came and executed the Iraqi granary guards. All of them.

"He said they just shot them one by one. And his people, and he, and the villagers of course, went nuts," Hersh said quietly. "He was hysterical, totally hysterical. He went to the company captain, who said, 'No, you don't understand, that's a kill. We got 36 insurgents. Don't you read those stories when the Americans say we had a combat maneuver and 15 insurgents were killed?'

"It's shades of Vietnam again, folks: body counts," Hersh continued. "You know what I told him? I said, 'Fella, you blamed the captain, he knows that you think he committed murder, your troops know that their fellow soldiers committed murder. Shut up. Complete your tour. Just shut up! You're going to get a bullet in the back.' And that's where we are in this war."

The story seemed to leave Hersh sincerely, deeply saddened. While his critics may call him a "muckraker" and unpatriotic, on Friday night it was obvious that Hersh takes the crumbling of America's image, very, very personally.

"My parents were immigrants," Hersh said. "They came here because America meant something…the Statue of Liberty and all that stuff, because America always was this bastion of morality and integrity and a place for a fresh start. And it's right in front of us, not hidden, that they've taken this away from us."

Thunderbird

as told to me by my Mom, well, kinda. I'm not as good a storyteller as she. Any mistakes in telling this story are mine, not hers.

A long long time ago, three children, a girl and her two brothers, were sent over the mountain to bring their grandmother a gift from their mother. Grandmother was ill and mother knew the right plants to help her heal. So the children took the plants over the mountain to the other side where Grandmother lived. Grandmother got well, and the children undertook the journey back home.

When they returned to their home, they found their village burnt to the ground, and all the people and all the animals slaughtered. The oldest son, who by tradition was responsible for handling the death of his parents was very distraught. He was able to make arrangements for the funeral, this he did not neglect, but his little brother and sister thought he should do something about those responsible for what happened, revenge.

Older brother was lost in his grief and unable to function following the funeral, he would just sit and stare into the fire, rocking back and forth. So Little Brother decided to go back up the mountain and ask Thunderbird to help him enact revenge against the tribe who destroyed their village. When he told Little Sister of his plans, she got it in her head to go with him, and nothing he could say would discourage her. They had nobody left but each other.

So Little Brother and Little Sister fasted and sweated and went back up the mountain to ask Thunderbird for his help. Thunderbird heard their prayers. He came to them in a fog (humans are unable to gaze upon Thunderbird without damaging their mind) and he said to them, "I will grant you some of my thunder to do with as you wish. But with it comes a warning. You are to use your thunder to bring peace to this land, otherwise it will destroy everything you hold dear."

nine years ago today

Marriage Ceremony for Paul and Stacy

November 7, 1998


Opening Words:

We have come together to witness the union of Paul and Stacy. Marriage is an estate which embodies all the warm and precious values which grow from human companionship and love and should be entered into in all seriousness with the knowledge that love is both humanity's highest achievement and life's most precious gift.

Marriage symbolizes the intimacy between two people, yet this union should not diminish but strengthen the individuality of each partner.

In this spirit you can create a partnership which will strengthen both and give new hope and strength to all who love you.

Blessing:

Let me now ask all of you gathered here today:

Do you who know and care for Stacy and Paul, give them your blessings now as they enter into this new relationship, and do you aspire in the days and years ahead to give them your deppest love, understanding, and support during both good times and bad?

Response: We do.

Introduction to Vows:

Love is a living thing, waiting within each one of us for an awakening touch. In this ceremony, we will celebrate love come to life. May this love grow sure and straight and strong. We rejoice in its presence among us.

Let us all join hands. The hand offered by each of you is an extension of self, just as is your mutual love. Cherish the touch, for you touch not only your own, but another life. Be ever sensitive to its pulse. Seek always to understand and to respect its rhythm. Amen.

Vows:

Please repeat after me:

In reaffirming the relationship

we have been building together,

I Paul take you Stacy

to be no other than yourself.

Loving what I know of you,

trusting what I don't yet know,

with respect for your integrity

and faith in your abiding love for me,

through all our years,

and in all that life shall bring us,

I choose you as my wife.


In reaffirming the relationship

we have been building together,

I Stacy take you Paul

to be no other than yourself.

Loving what I know of you,

trusting what I don't yet know,

with respect for your integrity

and faith in your abiding love for me,

through all our years,

and in all that life shall bring us,

I choose you as my husband.


Ring Ceremony:

(Caitlin and Webb have the rings)

The circle is the symbol of the sun and the moon and the universe. It is a symbol of holiness and of perfection and of peace. In these rings is the symbol of unity, in which your two lives are now joined in one unbroken circle, in which, wherever you go, you will always return unto one another.

Take this ring, Stacy, and place it on the third finger of Paul's left hand, saying these words: With this ring, I thee wed.

Take this ring, Paul, and place it on the third finger of Stacy's left hand, saying these words: With this ring, I thee wed.

Pronouncement:

We acknowledge that Paul and Stacy are now joined; we affirm their choice to be together as partners in life.

Let us pray:
Eternal Spirit, in thy name we are met together,
to witness and to bless the union of these two lives.
May they be a blessing and a comfort, each to the other,
sharers of each others sorrows, helpers of each other
in all the chances and changes of the world.
May they grow in understanding and love,
and may faithfulness to the good of each
become the unfailing virtue of both.

Amen.


Presentation of the Couple:

You may now embrace and kiss.

It gives me great pleasure to present to you who are gathered here today Paul and Stacy as partners in life.

Go in peace. Our ceremony is ended, but their shared life together has just begun.

Biscuits!!

so, too lazy to go to the grocery after some eggs, I decided to give xanthan gum one last try. I found this recipe online: http://www.bobsredmill.com/recipe/detail.php?rid=112 and actually followed the instructions (except substituting the same volume of different flours, well, and without buttermilk, okay, I didn't really follow the recipe all that much after all, but much more closely than I normally would). They turned out pretty good, though barely enough for this family of four. I'll double the recipe next time, and bake at just a tad lower temp.


Ingredients:
1/2 cup Gluten Free Sweet White Sorghum Flour
1/4 cup Potato Starch
1/4 cup Tapioca Flour
1 tsp Sugar
1 Tb Baking Powder
1/2 tsp Xanthan Gum
1/4 tsp Sea Salt
1/4 cup Butter
1/2 cup Buttermilk

Preheat oven to 450°F. Spray baking sheet with cooking spray, set aside.

Sift dry ingredients together in medium bowl. Cut butter into flour mixture until it resembles small peas. Stir in enough buttermilk to form soft dough that holds its shape when pressed together. (You may not need all the buttermilk).

Place the mixture on prepared baking sheet. Lay sheet of waxed paper over biscuit mixture and press to 1” thickness and about 6” x 6” square or circle. Remove sheet of waxed paper and cut into 8 or 9 round biscuit shapes using a 2” biscuit cutter or open end of glass. Remove uncut portions of biscuit dough and gently shape into 2” circles, or simply cut dough into 9 square pieces and spread pieces across baking sheet.

Bake for 10-12 minutes or until lightly browned.

Makes 9 biscuits.

Tear Dress

So I was interested in perhaps making a tear dress, or something similar, anyway...

Found lots of neat information online. Doesn't seem so difficult, it fits with the way I sew already. But here's my problem. It's with this: "The Official Women’s Dress Of The Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma" link There's a long list of rules!

Hope I don't upset too many people if I make my own version of these tear dresses, but don't follow all the rules. I mean, it never was authentic to begin with, fashions change, tastes change, and NOBODY tells me how to dress. I really love the style, it certainly looks easy enough, and most definitely comfortable! Plus, it would go nicely with my aprons.