Clueless on Gaza

            Six weeks after 9/11, I thought I perceived a “new American thoughtfulness” in response to the attacks against New York and Washington.

            “For the first time in memory, Americans are reconsidering the wisdom of supporting an Israel whose reactions to Palestinian terrorism is itself increasingly indistinguishable from terrorism,” my syndicated column for October 23, 2001 reads.

“No one wants to cave in to those who massacred thousands of our fellow citizens. But the alternative is even less attractive,” I wrote. “If we refuse to even consider the possibility that our actions abroad are sometimes less than decent and honorable, we can look forward to more such attacks in the future.”

What a fool I was! Poor hapless thoughtfulness never stood a chance against the bloodthirsty and jingoistic neoconservative foreign policy that has since held sway.

Now it’s Israel’s turn to confront the blowback from years of suppression and repression of a population of Muslims who predictably determined that “enough is enough,” consequences be damned. Israelis are already describing last weekend’s incursion and rocket attacks from Hamas-governed Gaza Strip as their version of 9/11.

Expect Israelis, as Americans did 22 years ago, to wallow in denial. Why do they hate little old us so much? Then comes more military barbarism, Bibi Netanyahu promises. The bombings will resume until morale improves.

That approach worked so well for us in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Two million stateless people live in the hot, overcrowded, impoverished Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip, subject to an Israeli blockade since 2007. Egypt, in partnership with Israel, prevents people and goods from crossing Gaza’s southern border. 70% of Gazans are refugees expelled from their homes by Jewish invaders in 1948.

The blockade has caused unbearable suffering. Gaza’s 50% unemployment rate is the highest in the world, worse than Afghanistan. Four out of five residents live under the poverty line. The water is filthy, in large part because Israel has destroyed hundreds of wells. Port closures, road blocks and Israeli bombing campaigns have sucked tens of billions of dollars out of the economy.

“The blockade restricts the import of goods, including electronic and computer equipment, that could be used to make weapons and prevents most people from leaving the territory,” reports The New York Times. Because hospitals are short of X-ray machines and other medical equipment and travel via Israel to better-equipped facilities in the Fatah-administered, Israeli-occupied West Bank is severely restricted by “a lengthy, bureaucratic regime of permits,” patients die needlessly, according to the World Bank.

Thanks to Israel, Gaza, surrounded by 40 miles of a 20-feet-high, sensor-equipped underground wall topped with razor wire and hundreds of cameras, radar and sensors, and sea wall that features sonar and remote-controlled aquatic weapons to intercept boats and submarines, has become the world’s biggest concentration camp.

Insanely, the U.S. and its Western allies think that what Israel is doing is normal. “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades,” Biden Administration national security adviser Jake Sullivan said last week. Even though Israel has the farthest-right-wing government in its history Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest exporter of Wahhabi jihadism, was moving closer to normalizing relations. The war is crazy. But not as crazy as the “peace.”

None of this is to endorse Hamas’ obscene actions on Saturday, which include shooting civilians, taking some hostage and parading and abusing the semi-nude body of a woman killed by Hamas fighters while attending a concert. Although it’s also obscene to hold a rave three miles from the perimeter of a concentration camp.

Nor must one support all of Hamas’ stated impetuses for Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, like the alleged “desecration” by Jewish visitors of Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque. You don’t kill hundreds of people over access to a building because a religion—which, by definition, is a fiction—claims it’s “holy.”

Following 16 years of vicious oppression, the only shocking aspects of this war are timing and scale. What took Hamas so long? Why wasn’t the assault bigger?

When assessing whether an act is ethically or morally justified, the first question to ask yourself is: would I do the same thing if I were in the position of the person or persons carrying it out? Stealing is a crime. We nevertheless identify with Victor Hugo’s protagonist Jean Valjean when he heists a loaf of bread to feed his sister’s starving child. You’d make the same decision.

Bank robbery is a crime. Most people, me included and I assume you as well, would never choose to commit that act. So we judge adults who hold up banks harshly.

Gazans faced a choice.

They could obey Israel and its supporters. They could suffer, chafe under occupation, dodge bombs and bullets, starve, watch their friends and neighbors die, with no end in sight as the world keeps ignoring them.

They could stage protest marches that no important media outlet would cover, write firm-but-polite letters to the editor no one would publish and post to social media accounts no one would read. As they engaged in peaceful protest, they would keep starving and dying.

Or they could confront the Israelis with violence.

You can argue that violence is never the answer. You can claim that you’d be docile,  that you’d live under blockade and occupation, never taking up arms or cheering those who do.

Go on, judge the Gazans. We both know you’d do the same exact thing if you were them.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Every Policeman Is A Licensed Rapist

This week, you can read my column, or watch it!

Strip-Searching is Legal and Democracy is Dead

The text of Justice Kennedy’s majority is cold and bureaucratic. “Every detainee who will be admitted to the general population may be required to undergo a close visual inspection while undressed,” he writes for the five right-wingers in the majority of the Supreme Court.

There’s no looking back now. The United States is officially a police state.

Here are the basics, as reported by The New York Times: “The case decided Monday, Florence v. County of Burlington, No. 10-945, arose from the arrest of Albert W. Florence in New Jersey in 2005. Mr. Florence was in the passenger seat of his BMW when a state trooper pulled his wife, April, over for speeding. A records search revealed an outstanding warrant for Mr. Florence’s arrest based on an unpaid fine. (The information was wrong; the fine had been paid.) Mr. Florence was held for a week in jails in Burlington and Essex Counties, and he was strip-searched in each. There is some dispute about the details, but general agreement that he was made to stand naked in front of a guard who required him to move intimate parts of his body. The guards did not touch him.”

“Turn around,” Florence later recalled his jailers ordering him. “Squat and cough. Spread your cheeks.”

A court motivated by fairness would have declared this conduct unconstitutional. Fair-minded people would have ordered the New Jersey municipality to empty its bank accounts and turn them over to the man it humiliated. Everyone involved—the police, county officials—ought to have been fired and charged with torture.

Not this court, the U.S. Supreme Court led by John Roberts. Besotted by the sick logic of paranoia and preemption that has poisoned us since 9/11, it ruled that what happened to Albert Florence was perfectly OK. The cops’ conduct was legal.

Now “officials may strip-search people arrested for any offense, however minor.”

If you get arrested at an antiwar protest, the police can strip-search you. If you’re pulled over for a minor traffic infraction, as was the plaintiff in this case. For setting off fireworks on the Fourth of July.

Humiliation is the law of the land.

The Court heard examples of people who were strip-searched “after being arrested for driving with a noisy muffler, failing to use a turn signal and riding a bicycle without an audible bell.” They considered amicus briefs by nuns and other “women who were strip-searched during periods of lactation or menstruation.”

Body-cavity searches are now legal for anyone arrested for any crime, no matter how minor. As of April 2, 2012, finger-rape is the law of the land.

Think it won’t happen to you? 14 million Americans are arrested annually. One in three Americans under age 23 has been arrested. It happened to me a couple of years ago, for a suspended drivers license. Except that it wasn’t really suspended. I was lucky. My cops weren’t perverts. They didn’t want a lookie-loo at my private parts.

How did we get here? Preemptive logic.

Saddam Hussein is a bad man. He hates the United States. What if he has weapons of mass destruction? What if he used them against us, or gave them to terrorists who would? Can’t take that chance.

We don’t need evidence in order to justify bombing and invading Iraq. We have fear and the logic of preemption.

The logic of preemption flails, targeting anyone and everyone. A single plane passenger sets his shoes on fire. He never came close to causing real damage, but now everyone has to take off their shoes before boarding a plane. Infants. Old people. Veterans whose limbs got blown off in Iraq. Everyone.

Can’t take chances. What if your toddler is a member of Al Kidda?

The logic of preemption is indiscriminate. What if terrorists are stupid enough to use phones and emails to plot their dastardly schemes? We’d want to know, right? In the old days before 9/11, officials who suspected a person of criminal conduct went to a judge to obtain a wiretapping warrant.

Now we’re paranoid. And the government is power-hungry. So government officials and their media lapdogs are exploiting our fear and paranoia, openly admitting that they listen to everyone‘s phone calls and read everyone‘s emails. Can’t take chances. Gotta cover all the bases.

What about the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures? Quaint relics of a time before the police state. Like the Geneva Conventions.

Here comes Justice Kennedy, amping up the perverse logic of preemption. Responding to the nasty cases of the finger-raped nun and the humiliated women on their period, Kennedy pointed out that “people detained for minor offenses can turn out to be the most devious and dangerous criminals.” Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, was pulled over for driving without a license plate. “One of the terrorists involved in the Sept. 11 attacks was stopped and ticketed for speeding just two days before hijacking Flight 93,” he wrote, continuing with the observation that San Francisco cops “have discovered contraband hidden in body cavities of people arrested for trespassing, public nuisance and shoplifting.”

No doubt about it: If you search every car and frisk every pedestrian and break down the door of every house and apartment in America, you will find lots of people up to no good. You will discover meth labs and bombs and maybe even terrorists plotting to blow up things. But who is the bigger danger: a drug dealer, a terrorist, or a terrorist government?

This summer will be ugly. Cops will arrest thousands of protesters who belong to the Occupy Wall Street movement, which is fighting corruption and greed and trying to improve our lives. Now that police have the right to strip and molest demonstrators, you can count on horrible abuses. Cops always go too far.

Note to people about to be arrested: pop a laxative before they slip on the flexicuffs.

I don’t know about you, but I would rather live in a country that respects rights and freedoms more than the paranoid madness of preemption. In the old America where I grew up, we lived with the possibility that some individuals were evil. Now we face the absolute certainty that every policeman is a fully licensed finger-rapist.

(Ted Rall’s next book is “The Book of Obama: How We Went From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt,” out May 22. His website is tedrall.com.)

SYNDICATED COLUMN: America Against the People

Why Is Obama Coddling Egyptian Dictator?

Here is Egypt, America’s neo-con dream come true. Democracy! In the Middle East! And it isn’t costing us a single soldier. You’d think American policy makers would be pleased as punch. So why are they messing it up?

At first glance the uprising in Cairo and other Egyptian cities puts the United States in an awkward spot. We’ve propped up Hosni Mubarak for three decades. If we cut him loose, our other pet dictators will stop trusting us. If we don’t, all that yapping about democracy and freedom rings hollow. Which do we choose, our purported principles or our actual allies?

Actually, it’s not that hard. We lost the trust of our puppet tyrants when Saddam dropped through the trap door. We lost the people with a zillion CIA-backed coups, not to mention the $37 billion we’ve paid to Mubarak. The dictator’s wealth is estimated at $40 billion. That’s right: no one dime of U.S. foreign aid made it to the Egyptian people.

The Obama Administration has an easy way out. They can disavow the policies of the past 30 years, policies they merely inherited. The president can make a clean break, announcing that he is cutting off U.S. funding to the Mubarak regime until things settle down. Then shut up.

Simple. Yet the president is handling this Middle Eastern crisis with all the class and diplomacy of a George W. Bush.

There’s the arrogance. On Fox News he agreed with Bill O’Reilly that he doesn’t want the Muslim Brotherhood to take over. “I want a representative government in Egypt,” Obama said. Dude, it doesn’t matter what you want or what we want. What matters is what the Egyptians want.

There’s the shortsightedness. Like previous presidents, Obama doesn’t understand that repression isn’t a synonym for stability.

There’s the failure to recognize the broader implications. Hated for Egypt’s joint blockade with Israel of the Gaza strip, Mubarak is viewed throughout the Muslim world as the embodiment of American-funded corruption. Obama’s refusal to cut him loose fuels radical Islamists’ argument that the U.S. will never allow the Palestinians to live with dignity.

Last but not least, there’s that classic Cold War-era mistake: backing the wrong side. In this case, Mubarak’s new vice president Omar Suleiman. Since 1993 Suleiman has run Egypt’s feared Mukhabarat intelligence agency. He is Egypt’s chief torturer.

As head of the General Intelligence Directorate Suleiman was the Bush Administration’s main liaison and coordinator for its “extraordinary rendition” program. Victims of extraordinary rendition are kidnapped by CIA agents and illegally transferred to other countries for the purpose of being tortured.

According to experts on the war on terror, Suleiman is a torturer’s torturer, a hard man who sets a high bar—from which he hangs his bleeding victims. Personally.

One of the CIA’s victims was Mamdouh Habib, an Egyptian-born Australian citizen. U.S. agents bought him from Pakistani intelligence and shipped him to Egypt. “In Egypt,” reports Lisa Hajjar for Al Jazeera, “he was repeatedly subjected to electric shocks, immersed in water up to his nostrils and beaten. His fingers were broken and he was hung from metal hooks. At one point, his interrogator slapped him so hard that his blindfold was dislodged, revealing the identity of his tormentor: Suleiman. Frustrated that Habib was not providing useful information or confessing to involvement in terrorism, Suleiman ordered a guard to murder a shackled prisoner in front of Habib, which he did with a vicious karate kick.”

Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi was a former trainer in the Afghan jihadi camps who famously “confessed” a connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda while under torture in one of Suleiman’s dungeons. Colin Powell cited al-Libi’s “information” in his 2003 speech of lies to the U.N. arguing for war against Iraq.

Note the word “was.” Al-Libi died in a Libyan prison in 2009.

Evan Kohlmann, a terrorism analyst for NBC News, cites a classified source: “Al-Libi’s death coincided with the first visit by Egypt’s spymaster Omar Suleiman to Tripoli. “The Egyptians were embarrassed by this admission [that he had lied under torture…Omar Suleiman saw an opportunity to get even with al-Libi and traveled to Tripoli. By the time Omar Suleiman’s plane left Tripoli, Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi had committed ‘suicide’.”

Suleiman’s fearsome resume may come as a surprise to you. But Egyptians know all about him. Headlines like ” Obama Backs Suleiman – Led Transition ” (from the New York Times) aren’t making us more popular.

(Ted Rall is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto.” His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2011 TED RALL

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