One of my partners in Gaza was a young American activist who told us newcomers one day,

“There are no women anywhere in the world stronger than the women of Rafah.”

Really?

What about all those Vietnamese women in their fifties, sixties, and seventies?

What about the Tibetan women living as exiles in India?

What about all those unsung elderly African American women in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi?

Over time, I came to this possible translation of my friend’s unverifiable assertion:

In her nine months of living in this city,

A frequent target of Israel’s U.S.-made bulldozers and F-16s,

She had come to love the women of Rafah

For all they had given her

A stranger to their community

But a stranger who earnestly sought to learn their language

And walk their streets

And savor their food

And weep amid the rubble

And undertake their fast

And duck the shrapnel

And mourn their dead

Those women of Rafah–

The late teen-aged girls

The grandmothers

The wives and mothers–

Were strong enough

Even to shower their love

On an American.

1.

The work of this emotion requires people who throw themselves actively into what is becoming, to which they themselves belong. To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable.

–Ernst Bloch, Marxist philosopher

2.

[People] also ask frequently: “Where does your hope come from, how do you keep going?” Which seems to me a serious question, but composed out of insufficient evidence, a question having about it a certain immodest aura, which I’m being invited to stand under. (Should one stand under a light he did not kindle?) I like Phillip’s typically laconic answer: “Your hope is where your ass is.”

As in the case, I judge, of those who sit in. Or in another version: “Your hope is where your feet are” (as in the case of those who march). But hardly ever, in my experience, is one’s hope where his head is. Passing strange, to think of it, that those whose heads are presumably screwed on straight, should ask me, “Where is your hope today?”

Passing strange, and strangely true. Hope dwells in the posterior, or in the hands and feet. But hardly ever in that noblest of human members, whose functions, we are told, are to speculate and ponder and envision and calculate and predict and so all those things named by us, properly human. But in fact, so tragically and often: improperly inhuman.

–Daniel Berrigan, Jesuit priest

3.

Causes and effects assume history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes one person inspires a movement, or her words do decades later; sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they start a mass movement and millions do; sometimes those millions are stirred by the same outrage or the same ideal and change comes upon us like a change in the weather. All that these transformations have in common is that they begin in the imagination, in hope. To hope is to gamble. It’s to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.

–Rebecca Solnit, U.S. writer

What do we know about what’s going to happen?
You wake up one morning
Your life is so-so
You find yourself at a nearby café at 2 p.m.
You feel someone’s eyes on your left cheek
And you turn
And are greeted with a smile
Three years pass
You two are married with the first child expected any day

What do we know about what’s going to happen?
On your wedding day you imagine
What she’ll look like at 75—
The most beautiful French-braid of gray hair
The still dazzling green eyes–
But then you are at her burial
Two years later

What do we know about what’s going to happen?
At the late December 2009 gathering in Cairo of the Gaza Freedom March
A South African trade unionist admitted:
We were working hard against apartheid
But in 1989 we didn’t think it was going to end anytime soon
Then, a year later, it was on its way out
We just didn’t see it coming

For Lo
Ten times a day something happens to me like this-some strengthening throb of amazement-some good sweet empathic ping and swell. This is the first, the wildest, and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.
–Mary Oliver

So there’s that last chapter
In part two of The Book of Mev:
Deathbed scene.
The beloved one is slowing losing her life force
And, as the Easterners say, she was getting ready to shed her body.
She had no words, just an extension of head from neck to pucker and kiss.

So long ago.

Mary Oliver reminds me
I’s so simple:
We are to be light.

We are to be sri,
Inner beauty radiating out
Spitting forth light shafts
Every degree which way.

“Make of yourself a light.”

That Friday night at Ratterman’s Funeral Home
You did just this-
Another death scene-
My father encasketed.
Such flickering light there the last years
All that was said or barked,
Wasn’t said, wasn’t whispered,
At least by me, or not nearly enough.

I was slashed,
I knew I would go on,
I’ve done this before,
But it’s always different, isn’t it?
And then you walked in,
Light.

I’ve said this to you several times before
But then didn’t the disciples on the way to Emmaus
Tell that story over and over:
I was startled about how warm I felt
From being/basking in your presence.
You had few words.
And rightly so.
It was the Buddha within you,
That Buddha you’ve become-
Yes, you are, don’t deny it, maybe not 24/7
But long stretches of minutes you are,
Just sitting or standing there,
Eyes wide open,
Eyes like Mary Oliver’s,
No wonder you sent me her book,
You two both have eyes that are in good working order,
Eyes that are enablers of appreciation,
Especially the most ordinary savoring.

So, Guruji, you taught me light:
Light the opposite of growling
The opposite of judging meanly
The opposite of doing it once and wondering why nothing changes
The opposite of 7% there, moving in and out of orbit

The Gita says: “Like a million suns”
Oliver writes: “Like a million flowers on fire”

What else, dear Lo,
Is there to do
But to throw off these self-manufactured
Socially approved encrustations
That block and dim and drain our light?

“Look within, Shimmelstoy, how many times
Do I have to kick you in the mud:
You are Light already.
People have told you this,
A student every five years or so,
They are not used to someone paying them such close attention.
But you fade out, from fear, and shine and polish your armor.
Send that armor to the junkyard,
And be free.”

Anne Waldman, Buddha student,
American poet, trainee in disaster, says:
“May all beings enjoy profound, brilliant glory.”

Thanks to you,
Thanks to Mary Oliver,
Thanks to Buddha,
I revise:
“May all beings be profound, brilliant glory.”

Years ago my teacher Marc Ellis came to Saint Louis
Another university, another talk on Palestine and Israel
The news is always changing
The oppression remains the same
No, worse
The politicos and their pundits cry, “peace process, peace process”
But there is no peace process,
Only a conquest process or, if you prefer,
A ghettoization process.
At Maryknoll School of Theology where I studied with Ellis, he said
“We Jews have a lot to answer for, given Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians,
But you Western Christians, the burdens you have would break anyone’s back”—
Colonialism, Hiroshima, Holocaust, Indochina incinerated.
Speaking at Webster University that night at the Winifred Moore Auditorium,
Not a full house, but he was the Jewish Muhammad Ali
He was not there to mess around:
“There is no moral future for the Jewish people outside of our solidarity with the Palestinian people.”
Naturally, there were dissenters to this dissenter:
You could hear the low grumbling,
The shocked ejaculations,
The moans of incredulity.
But then somebody broke:
A middle-aged man in the back of the auditorium left his seat
Bounded down the main aisle,
Stopped mid-way, pointed his finger at Ellis,
And screamed in a thick accent
YOU
SHOULD
BE
TAKEN
OUT
AND
SHOT!!!
The man then spun around, and fled the evidently unclean environs
Of the Jewish professor who taught Catholics and Baptists
About what their elders had never told them,
Who was trying to remind Jews of their patrimony.
You can always be assured
When someone starts to name idolatry
Blood begins to boil in the heart.

Please remember Victor Jara,
In the Santiago Stadium,
Es verdad - those Washington Bullets again

—The Clash

Washington Bullets

(We’re making the world safe for democracy)

Washington Little Boy and Fat Man

(We stand for what is right … and God blesses us, too)

Washington Napalm

(Aren’t we’re the most generous nation on earth)

Washington CBUs

(Who can compare with us)

Washington Smart Missiles

(Consider the awesome nobility of our intentions)

Washington Depleted Uranium

(See how much we love freedom)

Washington Daisy Cutter

(Remember all the places we’ve touched)

Washington White Phosphorous

(Count all the beneficial changes we’ve initiated)

Washington Drones

(Imagine all the people affected by what we’ve done)

Washington M-16s

(When you stop and think about it…)

Washington Apache helicopter gunships

(…We’re pretty amazing)

Washington Tiger Cages

(Aren’t we)

1.

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

–Milan Kundera, Czech/French novelist

2.

The Jews of my city are now forgotten, erased from its memory. Before, there were some thirty synagogues in Sighet; today, only one survives. The Jewish tailors, the Jewish cobblers, the Jewish watchmakers have vanished without a trace, and strangers have taken their place.

–Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor, advocate of remembrance

3.

Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You don’t even know the names of these Arab villages, and I don’t blame you, because these geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahalal arose in the place of Mahlu, Gvat in the place of Jibta, Saird in the place of Haneifa, and Kfar-Yehoshua in the place of Tel-Shaman. There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.

–Moshe Dayan, Israeli military leader, politician

4.

The dispossession of Palestinian lands did not only entail the expulsion of their legal owners and the prevention of their repatriation and regaining ownership. It was compounded by the reinvention of Palestinian villages as purely Jewish or ‘Ancient’ Hebrew places.

–Ilan Pappe, Israeli historian, advocate of remembrance

1.

Even before Hamas won in the January 2006 general elections, Israel had been further tightening the screws to the Palestinians in Gaza. The summer 2005 Israeli settler pullout was a relief: Gaza had been a costly albatross around Israel’s neck, but no longer. Some people erroneously believed that the “occupation of Gaza was over,” but Israel’s domination and control continued-by land, air, and sea. Ariel Sharon’s government was intent on increasing the pressure by limiting what could come in and go out from the territory. A grave humanitarian crisis was building.

Though the Israeli leadership proceeded with their typical seriousness to force the Palestinians to face reality, the leaders of the Jewish state were not without a sense of humor. Dov Weisglass brought laughter from Sharon and the cabinet ministers when he said in the fall 2005, “We won’t starve the Palestinians; we’ll just put them on a little diet.”

2.

Some results of the diet are becoming clearer. In early 2009, the prestigious British journal The Lancet issued a report on the health condition of people in the Palestinian territories. The authors of the report noted that “stunting during childhood is an indicator of chronic malnutrition and is associated with increased disease burden and death.” In 1996, stunted growth was found in 7.2 percent of the children in Gaza, whereas by 2006 the percent had grown to 10.2 percent.

One psychiatrist noted, “We see children who are 12 years old yet have the bodies of 8 year olds.” Beyond the obvious physical impairments, the children are harmed cognitively as well.

Sources

Eric Hazan, Notes on the Occupation: Palestinian Lives (2007)

Sarah Boseley, “Gaza conflicts stunt children’s growth,” The Age, March 6, 2009

CTSA Fall Course

Mark Chmiel

Brief Course Description

In this course, writing is introduced as a practice to help us “wake up” to the wonders, suffering, and joys of everyday life. Accordingly, we will use various exercises to get in touch with our own powers of creativity, clarity, and compassion. We will learn how to write without stopping and without judgment, our basic method being the timed writing practice in notebooks as taught by Natalie Goldberg. Once we get experience with this method, we can use writing practice to generate material for any writing we want or need to do, from old-fashioned letters to short stories to populist poems to academic papers to Twitter posts. Throughout the ten weeks, we will learn to trust our own voice and to be receptive to the voices of each other.

Here’s a way of looking at writing practice from Natalie Goldberg:

Recording the details of our lives is a stance against bombs with their mass ability to kill, against too much speed and efficiency. A writer must say yes to life, to all of life: the water glasses, the Kemp’s half-and-half, the ketchup on the counter. It’s not a writer’s task to say, “It is dumb to live in a small town or to eat in a café when you can eat macrobiotic at home.” Our task is to say a holy yes to the real things of our life as they exist—the real truth of who we are: several pounds overweight, the gray, cold street outside, the Christmas tinsel in the showcase, the Jewish writer in the orange booth across from her blond friend who has black children. We must become writers who accept things as they are, come to love to details, and step forward with a yes on our lips so there can be no more noes in the world, noes that invalidate life and stop these details from continuing.

Method

At each session we will do variously timed writing practices, share in pairs or trios, listen attentively to each other, share reflections on the book we’ve chosen to read, and (re)learning the discipline to trust our own minds.

Essentials

1 200-page wide-ruled composition notebook

1 or 2 pens

1 copy of Natalie Goldberg, Writing down the Bones, 2005 edition

1 book of your own choosing, one you are eager to read and share the fruits of your reading with the class

Tuition

$100.00

Time and Place

Wednesdays, 7:30-9:00 p.m.

September 23, 30

October 7, 14, 21, 28

November 4, 11,18

December 2

Center for Theology and Social Analysis

1077 South Newstead

Forest Park Southeast

(Also, perhaps, various local cafes)

Instructor/Animator

I have taught at Webster University and Saint Louis University, using the methods of Natalie Goldberg in classes since 2001. I used some of Goldberg’s techniques in composing The Book of Mev (2005). I can be contacted at MarkJChmiel@gmail.com

Follow-Up

I’ll be offering a ten-week spring course, based on Mary Pipher’s book, Writing to Change the World. Now skilled in writing practice, we can go on to send specific works out into the world—to agitate, wake up, to connect the dots, to empower, and to share visions of a more just and harmonious world.

Final Advice (from Jack Keroauc)

Submissive to everything, open, listening

Be in love with yr life

Write in recollection and amazement for yourself

Believe in the holy contour of life

A Reflection on Peretz Kidron, Refusenik! Israel’s Soldiers of Conscience (London and New York: Zed Books, 2004)

1.

General, your tank is a powerful vehicle

It tramples the forest, it crushes a hundred men.

But it has one flaw:

It requires a driver.

General, your bomber is strong.

It flies faster than the storm, it loads more than an elephant.

But it has one flaw:

It requires a mechanic.

General, man is very useful.

He knows how to fly, he knows how to murder.

But he has one flaw:

He knows how to think.

–Bertolt Brecht, German poet and playwright who left Germany after Hitler came to power

2.

Refusenik = Israeli Army reservists who report for duty when summoned but refuse morally objectionable assignments (notably serving in the West Bank and Gaza)

In Refusenik!, Peretz Kidron has done a great service in collecting the testimonies of and giving the historical background for the Israeli refusenik movement. It is a slim volume, less than120 pages but it shines a powerful light on the Jewish humanism at work in Israeli society.

Born in Vienna in 1933, living in England during the Third Reich, and moving to Israel in the early 1950s, Kidron has been a refusenik himself. Although there were some instances of Israelis refusing military service in the 1970s, it was with the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon that galvanized Israelis to protest and say, Enough. In fact, these soldiers of conscience called their organization, Yesh Gvul, Hebrew which means “There is a limit.”

The refuseniks, it is important to know, are not pacifists. However, they would seem to agree in principle with a formulation of the twentieth-century’s best known pacifist, Mohandas Gandhi, who said, “Non-cooperation with evil is a sacred duty.” Theirs is a selective conscientious objection, that is, they are committed to the defense of Israel but not to Israel’s occupation and domination of the Palestinians.

Not surprisingly, many Israelis would see such questioners of authority as traitorous. Likewise, in recent years, even though more Americans have indicated that they want the U.S. troops brought back from Iraq, I suspect those soldiers who refuse to go to Iraq and Afghanistan would be seen in comparably critical terms by their fellow American citizens.

Consider the view of Mike Levine, who was jailed for his refusing to serve in Israel’s Lebanon campaign in the early 1980s: “First time I was called up, I reported for duty. The second time I refused and joined Yesh Gvul. I should stress that my activity in the movement is in no way directed against the state of Israel, I do it out of concern and dread over what is happening here. I believe my refusal is an act of personal protest stemming from unwillingness to take part in the brutal acts committed by the Israeli army. Furthermore, I consider my refusal to be a patriotic act.” [p. 17]

Stephen Langfur was born in the U.S. and was a Conscientious Objector during the American war of destruction in Vietnam. When he moved to Israel, he began to serve in the Israel Defense Force but later refused to serve in the West Bank during the first Palestinian intifada. He faced three weeks of detention for his objection. The following is part of his reckoning for why he did what he did: “The basic moral law here is the Torah, as stated by the Jewish sage of antiquity, Hillel: ‘What is hateful to you, do not do unto others.’ Its principle: another person’s life is as important to him as mine is to me. Insofar as I owe my own being to other persons, that law is basic to being human. We are stuck with it. When we violate it, we feel guilt. There is, however, a way to oppress others and not feel guilt. The moral law applies to persons, so one can avoid feeling guilt by persuading oneself that the oppressed are subhuman. The doctrine of the sub-humanity of the Arabs is in full swing among us (‘grasshoppers’, ‘cockroaches’, ‘one thousandth of a Jew’, ‘animals’, ‘the dirtiest people on earth’). But then, instead of guilt, one feels dread of their ultimate revenge. And because one has pushed their humanity into the unconscious, the oppressed seem not only like animals, but like animals with demoniacal properties. So one feels threatened and beats them harder, and then there is more guilt to avoid, so one de-humanises them more, and on and on: it is the spiral of evil. One cannot sit upon another people without de-humanising them. This is my green line. I refuse to de-humanise the Arabs.” [p. 32]

There have been controversial reports circulating in Israel from soldiers speaking frankly about what they did in the recent Operation Molten Lead in late 2008 and early 2009 in Gaza. Supporters of Israeli policy attribute the problem to individual soldiers. This reaction is reminiscent of the reaction to U.S. soldiers involved in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal in the early years of the U.S. occupation in Iraq. A few of those soldiers, like Lynddie England, became scapegoats to obscure the chain of command ultimately responsible for the nefarious treatment of Iraqis.

Doron Vilner is a social worker and a co-founder of Yesh Gvul. While imprisoned for his resistance, he had some contact with fellow soldiers who were the cogs in the machine of the Israeli occupation that is authorized by the Israeli power elite. He writes, “The surprise is the discovery of what it is the occupation does to those who enforce it on the ground. Ostensibly, they’re ordinary youngsters like you’d meet anywhere in the world, who talk about the girl-friend they have or haven’t got, or how many days they have left to serve in prison. But over and again, conversations in the tents revert to experiences they’ve had in fighting the intifada. They talk about the Palestinian they beat to a pulp; about the child they caught after a chase, and how his mother came along and made such a fuss trying to get him released; about the Ratz (Liberal) party member who handed over the Arab he’d caught to the Border Guards, begging them not to beat ‘his’ Arab, and how they just waited for him to clear off before giving the prisoner a thrashing. Whenever I enter the tent, the talk ceases or they change the subject to more general matters. Those silences cry out. I have often heard stories of such silences. I heard about them in another land [German] when an entire generation kept silent, never telling their children about an entire period of their lives. And here in prison, detached from my usual circles of acquaintances, I meet those who do the daily work of the occupation. An entire generation for whom authorized establishment violence is part of their daily round. In corners, when there aren’t many listeners around and you can talk discreetly, someone finds a moment to slip up to me and say he didn’t behave that way, that he was different. And anyway, they too, the Arabs, are human beings.” [p. 40]

There are many other such compelling voices in this collection.

3.

Yigal Bronner is a professor of literature at Tel Aviv University and has worked with Ta’ayush, an Arab-Jewish solidarity group. In his letter of refusal to a general, he stated, “I have to turn down your summons to duty. I won’t come along to squeeze the trigger on your behalf. Of course, I have no illusions. To you I am a buzzing gnat that you will swat and try to crush before striding on. You’ll find yourself another gunner, more obedient and gifted than me. There’s no shortage. Your tank will rumble on. One single gnat can’t halt a tank, certainly not a column of tanks, certainly not the entire march of folly. But the gnat can buzz, irritate, infuriate, occasionally even sting. Ultimately, more and more gunners, drivers and commanders, who will see more and more aimless killing, will also start thinking and buzzing. There are already many hundreds of us. Ultimately our buzzing will ascend into a deafening outcry that will echo in your years and the ears of your children, and on the pages of history for many generations.” [p. 117]

For more information, see

Yesh Gvul: http://www.yeshgvul.org/index_e.asp

The Shministim are Israeli high school students who have been imprisoned for refusing to serve in an army that occupies the Palestinian Territories: http://december18th.org/

Courage to Refuse: http://www.seruv.org.il/english/combatants_letter.asp

Breaking the Silence: http://www.shovrimshtika.org/index_e.asp

for Megan Heeney

I was dreaming about your future:
Later twenties, Manhattan, Union Theological Seminary,
“What’s a nice Catholic senorita like you doing in a place like this?”
It’s back to the books,
But with an occasional downtown jaunt to the Catholic Worker,
You cultivate an affinity group with your cheerful animation,
Speaking Spanish to the chicas on the subways,
Standing on Malcolm X Boulevard and 110th Street and listening to Dylan’s koan-like wind,
Picking up trash on the sidewalks as a spiritual exercise,
Watering geraniums at your studio apartment,
Teaching your teachers about the limits of language,
A NYU undergrad wants to come uptown and make a two-minute “movie” about you
And you say with a giggle to Katie, “I don’t want to be dismissed so cinematically!”

So far from the Midwest
With our cornfields and stolidness and segregations,
You feel liberated, like you could leap over the Empire State Building
Some days,
Other days, lost in the carrels,
Like Dorothy at the end of her life
(even though you’re still so young—une jeune femme en fleur)
You have elbows on the table, hands holding head of Botticelli Venus hair,
Weeping, sobbing, gasping for air
Half hour
Two hours
No studying today, simply
Soaked, spent, screwed

But then
(It’s a dream after all)
Like a bullet
You’re straight out of the frenzied focus of the library
Into the magnificent polluted spring air
Your eyes radiant, resurrected because
It came to you
It landed on you
It burrowed inside you
That precious, precarious image
That needs your noon-time and nocturnal nurturing
The image that suggests

How
To
End
The
War.

1.

I have noticed that some Missourians are converging on Columbia on Saturday 21 March “to mark the 6th Anniversary of the Iraq War.” The slogans for this gathering include the following: “Yes We Can! Begin the Peace Economy. End the Wars!” In the words of the flyer now circulating, the day will be a time for “Speakers! Music! Marching!” In remembering such a dread event as the U.S. invasion, I’m unsure how to interpret the exclamation points.

I make the following surmise: The invocation of “Yes we can!” is a direct reference, not to Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, but to the new American president, whose campaign adopted this self-empowering mantra.

Further, I admit to the following nagging curiosity: How can we end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, especially given President Obama’s undeniable commitment to the well-being of the military-industrial complex? Why would the Missouri peace movement adopt Obama’s own borrowed phraseology when he is escalating the U.S. commitment to “win,” whatever that means, in Afghanistan?

Last, I ask the following question: Why say “begin the peace economy” now? Haven’t people been addressing this issue since the end of the Cold War? Is now a particularly auspicious time to do so? What evidence is there to suppose so?

2.

“I don’t really see that we’re the bad boy.”

“Why should I feel responsible?”

“But the thing which I think I will remember about Vietnam when I am a hundred years old and will talk about it with my grandchildren is the countryside, how beautiful the women looked, and the food.”[1]

3.

A few elementary truths…

The United States has no right to be in Iraq.

The United States has committed war crimes, crimes against peace, and crimes against humanity in Iraq.

No American officials are above the law, while they are in office or after leaving office.

American citizens have a responsibility for the crimes committed in their names by their government officials.

4.

“I don’t hate Americans. I hate the policy of invading other countries. And the debt, the distribution from the Paris Agreements, why haven’t they given us anything? We are very poor because of the war. The Americans don’t see how they destroyed everything, and they won’t pay their debt. I listen to the radio and hear how the Americans still have an embargo on our economy, and have no diplomatic relations with us. That’s not right.

This is the Vietnamese people’s land. Why did the Americans come to destroy us and make war, and why don’t they help now to rebuild our country? I am a farmer, I stay here. And I ask a simple question. Why did the Americans come here to destroy homes and kill people? And I ask you, who invaded who? If Vietnam decided to invade America they would have to send troops—the distance is far, thousands of kilometers. I ask you, if I came to your land to destroy and burn your houses, how would you feel? So I say, when the Americans came here to fight and destroy the Vietnamese people, they were wrong. The Vietnamese were not wrong to defend their land. And when the Americans lost the war, why didn’t they want to have relations with us?”[2]

5.

Since Israel’s assault on Gaza in late December and January, there has been increasing discussion about the need for supporting the Palestinian call to a boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign (BDS) against Israel.[3] Embraced by numerous organizations in Palestinian civil society, the BDS movement seeks to put the kind of pressure on Israel as was placed on apartheid South Africa by international civil society in the days when Nelson Mandela was still in prison.

U.S. citizens ought to consider whether BDS is an appropriate strategy here to force changes in Israeli policy, given that U.S. government has long been an enthusiastic accomplice with Israel in its torment of the Palestinians. But at this late date, six years into the American aggression against the Iraqi people, I wonder: Has anyone from within the U.S. or beyond called for a BDS movement against the United States, for example, by tactics such boycotting our artists and universities, and divesting from American companies? After all, the Bush administration was the singular instigator and relentless perpetrator of the war, occupation, mass death, torture, extraordinary rendition, destruction of Fallujah, devastation of culture, and unimaginably much more in Iraq.

6.

“I don’t think we ever lost hope or determination. But because the war was around for so many years the frustration was high and we ran out of what to do next. I mean first you have a picnic type of peace demonstration in the park, then you take it to Washington, or you have five demonstrations in five key cities. But that’s not working. They’re not paying attention. They don’t care if you have one peaceful demonstration. It doesn’t take any toll on the establishment. They can still pursue the war. There’s no price they have to pay. They don’t care if we don’t go to school. They don’t care if we’re out of our jobs and running around Washington or staying up all night. They don’t care.”[4]

7.

In a stirring conclusion to his brilliant examination of Gandhi’s relevance to resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict, Norman Finkelstein said,

Gandhi translated satyagraha as “hold on to the truth.” Herewith is our challenge: to hold on to the truth that what Israel has done to the Palestinians is wrong; to hold on to the truth that Israel’s refusal, backed by the U.S., to respect international law and the considered opinion of humankind is the sole obstacle to putting an end, finally, to their suffering. We can win if we hold on to the truth, and if, as the Negro spiritual put it with cognate wisdom, we “keep our eyes on the prize, and hold on.” That is, if we keep remembering what the struggle—the prize—is all about: not theoretical fad or intellectual provocation, not holier-than-thou radical posturing, but—however humdrum, however prosaic, by comparison—freeing the Palestinian people from their bondage….

Where was the world during the Nazi holocaust?, we still ask. Where is the world now? Has the Palestinian struggle gone on too long? Has it become boring and passé? Has the time come to move on? But the Palestinian people continue to be ground under, the merciless Israeli juggernaut keeps pressing on, confiscating yet more land, demolishing yet more homes, destroying yet more lives. The time now is not to move on—but to hold on![5]

This month, as people remember the U.S. invasion of Iraq, to which truths will we hold on? To whom will we communicate such truths? Will we blunt the edge of those truths so we can be more “effective” to get the ears of people in power? Will we challenge those who admit that, yes, some mistakes were made in Iraq during the Bush years, but things are different now? Will we remember our crimes with shame or will some of us say with a shrug that Iraq is now passé?

Do we have any idea how to free the Iraqi people from their bondage by us? Do we have any strategy for dealing with the permanent U.S. military bases and the business-as-usual profiteering of U.S. corporations in Iraq? In this period of daily talk of hundreds of billions of dollars for the economy, have we given thought to the case for reparations we owe the people of Iraq?

Will we interfere with the merciless American juggernaut as politicos and intellectuals soberly debate whether or not to add Iran to the other two Muslim nations we are currently dominating?

When we were reading Chan Khong’s book, Learning True Love, I compiled the following for my young students who do not know much about the American War in Vietnam.

American Heritage Dictionary

Napalm, incendiary material used in bombs and flame throwers. Developed during World War II, napalm is a mixture of gasoline (sometimes mixed with other petroleum fuels) and a thickening agent. The thickener turns the mixture into a dense jelly that flows under pressure, as when shot from a flame thrower, and sticks to a target as it burns. Earlier Soap thickeners were replaced by polystyrene and similar polymers.

Philip Jones Griffiths, Vietnam, Inc.

NAPALM. The most effective “anti-personnel” weapon, it is euphemistically described as “unfamiliar cooking fluid” by those apologists for American military methods. They automatically attribute all napalm cases to domestic accidents caused by the people using gasoline instead of kerosene in their cooking stoves. Kerosene is far too expensive for the peasants, who normally use charcoal for cooking. The only “cooking fluid” they know is very “unfamiliar” – it is delivered through their roofs by U.S. planes.

Some of its finer selling points were explained to me by a pilot in 1966: “We sure are pleased with those backroom boys at Dow [Chemical Company]. The original product wasn’t so hot – if the gooks were quick they could scrape it off. So the boys started adding polystyrene – now it sticks like shit to a blanket. But then if the gooks jumped under water it stopped burning, so they started adding Willie Peter (WP – white phosphorous) so’s to make it burn better. It’ll even burn under water now. And just one drop is enough, it’ll keep on burning right down to the bone so they die anyway from phosphorous poisoning.”

Philip Jones Griffiths, in the book Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides by Christian Appy

There was a napalm ward in the provincial hospital of Quang Ngai where the people were so badly disfigured they could probably never go back into society. Many had been put in there to die. I was there once and saw this kid. He had his eyelids burned off, his nose burned off, and his lips burned off. He was halfway to becoming a skull, but he was still alive. I could hardly look at him—he was so ugly, so frightening, really, really frightening.

So I just glanced at him and turned around. I was photographing someone else and I felt somebody pulling at the back of my shirt. I turned around and it was the boy. He indicated with sign language that he wanted me to take his picture. As I took his picture, I remember thinking that it will never get published but it’s something we should have for the war crimes trial. Of course that never happened.

When I came out of that ward there was an American journalist. She said, “I can’t go in there, it’s too horrible. Can you take my camera and take some pictures for me?” I said, “No, you go in there. Those people were burned with your taxpayer’s money. Go and see what they did to those people with your money.”

Teachings from the Buddhist Order of Interbeing

Do not avoid contact with suffering or close your eyes before suffering. Do not lose awareness of the existence of suffering in the life of the world. Find ways to be with those who are suffering by all means, including personal contact and visits, images, sound. By such means, awaken yourself and others to the reality of suffering in the world.

Do not live with a vocation that is harmful to humans and nature. Do not invest in companies that deprive others of their chance to life. Select a vocation which helps realize your ideal compassion.

Do not kill. Do not let others kill. Find whatever means possible to protect life and to prevent war.

Respect the property of others but prevent others from enriching themselves from human suffering or the suffering of other beings.

Dear Shannon,

I enjoyed our long conversation on Saturday afternoon at 6 North Coffee. I appreciate you taking the time to visit on such a busy weekend. After our chats, the strong impression I am left with is of a person of great integrity and commitment to justice. You want to “walk the walk.” In the idiom of your semester in San Salvador, you want your “praxis” to be real, substantial, and serious.

You were curious about Ralph Nader, whom I mentioned I had been reading recently. My friend Andrew Wimmer and current Social Justice student Dan McGinnis have stimulated me in this deeper consideration of Nader. As I look back on it, I knew his name in my early teens, but I didn’t know who Dorothy Day was until I read her autobiography at 21. Nader was a household name in the Seventies because he was the foremost consumer advocate in the United States.

I assume in your studies in El Salvador you learned about people who made “the preferential option for the poor.” The option wasn’t made only by relatively famous people like Archbishop Romero and Ignacio Ellacuría; it was made by countless poor people in Salvador but also throughout Latin America. I’d like to borrow that expression to describe Nader as having made a preferential option for the American consumer. From his first confrontation with General Motors in the mid-1960s, Nader expressed great suspicion of corporate America’s willingness to seek profits at the expense of individual safety. Through painstaking investigations, he exposed GM’s lethal lack of consideration for auto-drivers.

You surely have come across that conviction of Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” Nader seemed to notice problems about which no one else seemed to care. An early example in his life: When he was an undergraduate at Princeton in the 1950s, he wondered if there was any connection between the dead birds appearing on campus and the fact that Princeton’s beautiful trees were sprayed with DDT.

Attracting young people to the nascent consumer movement, Nader and his associates researched corporations and the government itself, seeking to root out injustices and make reforms that were of benefit to large numbers of Americans. Nader’s biographer, Justin Martin, summarized, “Through his efforts, dozens of safety laws have passed, and at times he has shown himself to be as skilled a legislator as any duly elected U.S. senator.” The following are some of the areas in which Nader has made an impact: air bags in cars, seat belts, remuneration when being bumped from a plane, clean air, food safety, lead protections from x-rays in during visits to the dentist, warnings on drug labels, nutritional labeling for foods, automobile crash-testing, cigarette labeling for tar and nicotine, the right to know in your workplace when being exposed to chemicals, among others.

For well over forty years, Nader has played this role of activist, gadfly, and relentless skeptic of corporate power. But he also ran as a presidential candidate in recent years, which has tarnished his reputation among some, but brought his name and mission to younger generations of Americans. His strongest critique is that the two parties, Democratic and Republican, are ensconced with corporate power. In effect, both parties make their own “preferential option for the rich.” Crucial issues are ignored by the entrenched elites of both parties, to the detriment of the U.S. citizenry. Nader believes, “We can have democracy or we can have the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few. We cannot have both.”

To better understand the arena in which Nader has operated since the 1960s, I’d recommend reading Joel Bakan’s book, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power. The heart of the book argues that the corporation’s fundamental nature is psychopathic, at least as based on the Personality Diagnostic Checklist from World Health Organization (ICD-10/Manual of Mental Health Disorders, DSM-IV”). The following characteristics match the intrinsic nature of corporations:

1. Callous unconcern for the feelings of others

2. Incapacity to maintain enduring relationships

3. Reckless disregard for the safety of others

4. Deceitfulness: repeated lying and conning others for profit

5. Incapacity to experience guilt

6. Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors

Nader has energetically addressed these characteristics in his battles on behalf of the American population. You can imagine it has earned some vociferous enemies. His critics call attention to his self-righteousness, vindictiveness, and caustic tone. One associate, though, Alan Morrison speaks about Nader with great respect: “I have never known anybody who has more ideas about more things than Ralph. He’s not interested in two or three or five or ten things. He’s interested in a million. He sees things differently from everybody else. He just sees injustices, unfairnesses, and improper ways of handling situations that everyone else just accepts. He has a cosmic view of these things, very broad, but at the same time, he is a person who pays enormous attention to details. I never met anybody who can think so big and think so small at the same time.” Nader acknowledged that his work is like “playing fifty chess games simultaneously.”

You can read Nader’s views on many current issues, including his critique of corporate-based globalization, in The Good Fight: Declare Your Independence and Close the Democracy Gap. Apropos of what Morrison said about Nader’s curiosity and hunger for justice, among the issues he treats in The Good Fight are: corporate takeovers, unraveling neighborhoods, cultural decay, political parties dominated by corporations, horrible prisons, the use of the death penalty, the disproportionate percentage of young black males in jail, the war on drugs, the glass ceiling for women, attacks on civil liberties, lack of proper investment in fraud control, deregulation, tax havens and tax avoidance schemes for the rich, the decreasing amount of taxes paid by corporations, mountain top removal coal-mining, dirty air, toxic water, erasing habitats and the killing off of species, the ruthless class war waged by the rich, union busting, pathetic enforcement of weak labor laws, precarious pensions and dwindling heath care, unsafe workplaces, corporate crime, corporate fraud, savings and loan fraud, corporate homicide, the WTO displacing national sovereignty and human rights, declining schools, inadequate transit systems, lack of nuclear disarmament, lack of low cost of drugs for HIV/AIDS, lethal arms trafficking, hunger, and the smoking industry.

Sounds overwhelming, doesn’t it? But as Nader is fond of saying, “Nothing is possible without an individual. Nothing is perpetual without an institution.”

I also strongly recommend his short book, The Seventeen Traditions, in which he pays homage to his upbringing in the Thirties and Forties in a Lebanese immigrant family in a small town in Connecticut. You know the expression, “Mother, home, and apple pie”? I’d add Ralph Nader to that as a fourth item on that list of what is quintessentially American. As you read his warm and loving accounts of the lessons taught to him by his family and community, you will be reminded of how civic life was once nurtured and might be again.

In addressing his readers, Nader wrote this book to provide “stimuli for your own thoughts and recollections—as an occasion to revisit lessons passed on within your family. Such family traditions challenge the notion that fads, technologies, how-to-manuals, and addictions of modern life have somehow taken the place of the time-tested wisdom fashioned in the crucibles of earlier generations.” Among the traditions he highlights are those of listening, health, history, the kitchen table, independent thinking, and patriotism. At the book’s close, he writes, “I feel sure that raising civically responsible children is most likely to happen in the kind of atmosphere my parents created: one of indirection and delights, strong examples and certain boundaries, solitude and conversation, witness and respect, and, above all, the strength of parental love and sacrifice. All of this cannot help but nourish a sense of dedication to help one’s fellow human beings achieve a better life.” I trust that some of these traditions will be quite familiar to you because of how your parents raised you and your siblings.

There may come a time when you are feeling down, pessimistic and despairing that Americans will throw off our ignorance, ethnocentrism, and laziness to address the problems that face us. At such times, it’s good to remember the people who have gone before us marked by a passion for justice, people who stood up and stood out and paid a price. For me, I would want to remember Ralph Nader in those dark times, for he shows that injustices can be fought. Like the saying attributed to Mohandas Gandhi, Nader’s life is his message. He reminds me of a sentence from George Eliot’s Middlemarch: “The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character.”

Last thing I’ll say is a quotation from Nader: “All things start with a sign-up sheet.”

I’ll put in the mail to you Nader’s pamphlet, Civic Arousal, and you can tell me what you think.

Hope to see you again this spring and good luck in the Boston Marathon!

Dr C

P.S. In addition to The Good Fight and The Seventeen Traditions, Justin Martin’s biography, Nader: Crusader, Spoiler, Icon, is worth exploring, as is the 2006 documentary film, An Unreasonable Man, on Nader’s life and career. It’s available now on DVD, and you can check out a Youtube clip at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BS1c5Ei0eIg.

Last, check out http://nader.org/.

The following is a short reflection, which grew out of a talk on Friday 30 January at Karen House, the Catholic Worker House of Hospitality in Saint Louis.

Four decades ago the courageous Brazilian archbishop Helder Camara wrote The Spiral of Violence in an attempt to better understand the social dynamics of his own — and many other – impoverished Third World countries. Written shortly after the pivotal Latin American Bishops Conference at Medellín in 1968, Camara sketched a typology of societal violence in three escalating stages. First is the stage of institutionalized injustice, exemplified by poverty, high infant mortality, unemployment, exploited workers and farmers, and inadequate health care; in other words, a social situation breeding misery. The second stage is that of revolt against the first stage, as more and more people find the status quo intolerable. Repression is the third stage of violence and is a response to quell the revolt and preserve the status quo deemed all too tolerable by its architects and beneficiaries. Camara’s straight-forward analysis calls to mind John F. Kennedy’s view, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

A now familiar case in point of Camara’s analysis is El Salvador. Long dominated by an economic oligarchy of “fourteen families” who were backed by the military, many Salvadorans – of the Catholic Church and the Marxist left – revolted, in different ways, against the pervasive denials of human dignity throughout Salvadoran society. Accordingly, the “preferential option of the poor” – embraced by Father Rutilio Grande, the Jesuit intellectuals at the University of Central America, and Archbishop Oscar Romero – was seen as “subversive” by the Salvadoran elite and the full fury of state terror was inflicted upon them as well as their numerous, less famous companions.

In his book, Beyond Chutzpah, Norman Finkelstein states, “Looking back after two decades of study and reflection, I am struck most by how uncomplicated the Israel-Palestine conflict is.” Looking at this conflict in the terms of Camara’s analysis confirms Finkelstein’s observation. If people want to reduce the violence in the region, they must first see that the 41-year-old Israeli occupation is at the root of the spiral of violence. What would we think if our land was appropriated by a foreign military power and the citizens of that nation took over our land? What would we think of that military force monitoring and controlling our movements, interfering with our ability to get to at work, visit a doctor, or even visit our extended family? What would we think of power being exercised over our lives without us having any input or representation? What would we think of the humiliation and intimidation with which the military troops treat our friends and family?

Given the Israeli occupation and domination of the Palestinians and their land, Palestinians have resisted, revolted, and attempted to “shake off” (intifada) the Israeli occupation. Some revolt with arms, others with nonviolent methods. The use of rifles, Qassam rockets, suicide bombing, stone throwing, tax resistance, and peaceful demonstrations are among the ways Palestinians express their resistance to being occupied.

Having shown no indication that it wants to end its control of Palestinian territory, Israel must regularly resort to force to repress the insubordinate and insurgent Palestinians. Among the methods it has historically and recently employed for repressing them: imposing curfews for days or weeks at a time; constructing roadblocks and checkpoints; practicing administrative detention, which means one can be arrested without charge and held for months or years; engaging in torture; building a separation Wall; firing sound bombs; shutting down universities and schools; shooting tear gas; assassinating terrorist suspects with predictable “collateral damage”; deporting “trouble-makers,” both Palestinians and international activists; demolishing homes; using white phosphorus in heavily populated civilian areas; bombing “terrorist” infrastructures; imposing an economic blockade. All of these methods only increase the immiseraiton, marginalization, and powerlessness of the Palestinian people, which drive more to despair and compel others to new levels of fury.

What was the dominant theme of discussion in mainstream circles in December and January regarding Gaza? It was the firing of the rockets and Israel’s unquestioned right to defend itself. Notice, though, that the Hamas rockets represent the second stage of violence, that of revolt. Scant attention was paid the harsh humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and the continued expansion of settlements in the West Bank, both of which are the first, primary stage of violence. This systematic, on-going, and generative violence of the Israeli occupation and control is overlooked or downplayed. Notice, too, that Israel’s “response” to the rockets was an especially vicious and devastating three-week campaign of repression and state terrorism, resulting in over 1,300 deaths, including hundreds of children, as well as thousands of wounded. Mosques, schools, homes, buildings, and neighborhoods were bombed and destroyed.

Among U.S. commentators and politicians, ensuring Israel’s security is touted as a major pillar of U.S. Middle East policy. It’s worth remembering that, armed with nuclear weapons and backed by the world’s only superpower, Israel has one of the most powerful military forces in the world.

Among U.S. political leaders and media pundits, there is no evidence of a comparable concern for Palestinian security, because U.S. policy is fixated on the second stage of violence, Palestinians violently resisting Israel’s illegal occupation.

Activist A. J. Muste once advised fellow pacifists that their agenda should be “to denounce the violence on which the present system is based, and all the material and spiritual evil it entails for the masses of [men and women] throughout the world. So long as we are not dealing honestly and adequately with this ninety percent of our problem, there is something ludicrous and perhaps hypocritical about our concern over the ten percent of violence employed by the rebels against oppression.”

For citizens in the United States, then, an important ethical imperative is that if we are disturbed by the violence of Hamas rockets and suicide bombers (and are even occasionally taken aback by the or “disproportionate” reaction of the Israeli authorities), we ought to direct ourselves to addressing the complex of social injustices that constitute Camara’s first stage of violence, namely, the Israeli occupation. The reason is simple: That endemic injustice of one nation dominating and oppressing another people is the root of the unsurprising revolt and the guaranteed, consequent repression. Unless the unjust status quo is significantly transformed in the West Bank and Gaza, violence will continue to escalate, including greater numbers of people in its deadly spiral.

The simple words of Pope Paul VI retain their relevance to the current situation, “If you want peace, work for justice.” If we want justice, end the occupation. If we want to end the occupation, we have to transform the U.S. diplomatic, military, financial, media, and congressional support away from Israel’s occupation and toward freedom and some semblance of justice for the Palestinians.

There are many vital actions people are taking to respond to the intensifying crisis in Gaza. Inspired by the work and teachings of the Vietnamese Buddhists Thich Nhat Hanh and Chân Không, we offer the following simple practice for your consideration.

Pick a particular day (of the week or month) and decide to fast from breakfast to dinner.

By skipping lunch, one may feel some mild discomfort toward the later afternoon. Use that discomfort (1) to remember the people in Gaza who are struggling for life and (2) to resolve to find ways of responding to their suffering with efficacy.

The money one would have spent on lunch, say, $5.00, send to a project or an organization in or for Gaza that is trying to alleviate the suffering caused by the blockade since 2005 and Israel’s bombing and invasion since late December 2008.

Possibilities include: Red Crescent, UNRWA, and the Ahli Arab Hospital. People can post worthwhile projects and organizations on this Wall.

If this makes sense to you, please join us. If not, good luck in your own efforts.

Nima Sheth, Saint Louis University Medical School

Matt Miller, Washington University in Saint Louis

Mark Chmiel, Center for Theology and Social Analysis

Double standard, noun. Any code or set of principles containing different provisions for one group of people than for another.

Hopes are being raised for President Obama’s approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict. To many, the appointing of George Mitchell as the Special Middle East Envoy seems to augur well, given Mr. Mitchell’s previous negotiations in the Northern Ireland conflict. President Obama acknowledged the difficulties of reaching an agreement between Israelis and Palestinians, but said, “That’s why we’ve got George Mitchell going there. This is somebody with extraordinary patience as well as extraordinary skill, and that’s what’s going to be necessary.”

Undoubtedly, these traits and skills are necessary, but certainly not sufficient. For there to be a breakthrough, Mr. Mitchell is going to have to terminate a long-standing practice of U.S policy in the Middle East, which is the adherence to a strict double-standard.

For example, prepare yourself to hear for the thousandth time how it is absolutely central for Hamas to make good on three issues: recognize Israel, renounce all violence, and adhere to previous agreements.

Who could disagree with these wonderful goals?

Yet, will Mr. Mitchell insist (not merely ask) that Israel also renounce violence? If so, will that renunciation include the fundamental violence of the Israel occupation of the West Bank and the violence of the embargo and the creation of Gaza as an open-air prison (and, now, morgue)? Will the U.S. envoy call for others in the international community to work to prevent Israel from securing more weapons, which aren’t smuggled in through tunnels, but arrive in broad daylight at Israeli ports?

Will Mr. Mitchell’s research assistants provide him with a single instance of any Israeli Prime Minister who has recognized any Palestinian right to exist on the land they have cultivated for centuries?

Will the Special Envoy demand that Israel, like Hamas, abide by previous agreements or, more broadly, international law? Like the Geneva Conventions which prohibit an occupying power from moving its population into occupied territory?

These questions cut to the heart of the matter: How can one reasonably expect our government to “broker” a peace settlement, when the United States has such a lopsided relationship to one of the antagonists? Consider the arms deals, the diplomatic support in the U.N., and the year-after-year munificence lavished on the Jewish state.

Here’s a thought experiment: Given the Israeli onslaught in Gaza, how many U.S. Senators do you think would issue a public statement (however belated) supporting the Palestinians’ right to self-defense?

As La Rochefoucauld remarked, “Hypocrisy is a tribute vice pays to virtue.” In U.S. policy in the Middle East (a region so indispensable because of the oil resources), double standards are standard operating procedure. The U.S. cloaks its actions and policies in the most noble and moralistic rhetoric, yet realpolitik is the way, the truth, and the life.

Remember: Saddam Hussein’s gassing of the Kurds did not arouse the Reagan Administration’s indignation; that indignation was only expressible years later when, in his rhetorical build-up to invasion, George W. Bush repeated ad nauseum, “He gassed his own people!”

Remember: The U.S. is dead set against Iran having a nuclear weapons program. Indeed, the thought of Iran having nuclear bombs is nerve-wracking, but the thought of anyone having nuclear weapons ought to be similarly nerve-wracking. When have you heard a single comment from a U.S. politician critical of Israel’s existing nuclear weapons arsenal? It’s regularly asserted that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East; it’s also the only nuclear power. The U.S. isn’t concerned about that some nation has nuclear weapons per se; it’s which nation has them.

Remember: The U.S. justified its invasion of Iraq because the Iraqi people deserved freedom and democracy, which we, as U.S. citizens, are to understand as worthwhile objectives. Notice, though: There has been no invasion of Saudi Arabia to liberate those people under the thumb of a brutal Islamic fundamentalist regime.

Remember: In recent years, U.S. military officials and politicians have expressed outrage that a foreign political power—Iran—dares to interfere with Iraq’s progress to stability and democracy. Of course, the foreign power that is the U.S. isn’t meddling—it’s helping.

Many people outside U.S. borders understand quite clearly that the U.S. government and corporations have long played a crucial role in assisting Israel in its dispossession and torment of the Palestinian people. They can also see the pertinence to the U.S. of Orwell’s observation, “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.”

The horrors in Gaza are indefensible. We have to undermine the righteous defense of these horrors and increase the number of people in our own society who can see the true workings of the United States in the Middle East. We can start by asking our friends, relatives, co-workers, neighbors, clergy, teachers, and media workers: Should we conduct our public affairs by a single standard based on human rights and international law? Or is the United States entitled to a double standard? Does might make right? Are we above the law?

How the Bush Administration answered these questions is painfully clear. Mr. Mitchell, President Obama, and Secretary of State Hilary Clinton are soon to reveal their answer.

Cowardice asks the question - is it safe? Expediency asks the question - is it politic? Vanity asks the question - is it popular? But conscience asks the question - is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular; but one must take it because it is right. — Martin Luther King, Jr.

Sociologists have identified two traditions in what they call the American civil religion: The Priestly emphasizes superior morality and singular calling of American power, while the Prophetic does not hesitate to criticize power for violating its ideals. One example of the Priestly tradition in U.S. history is the theory and practice of Manifest Destiny in the 19th century, while an example of the Prophetic tradition is the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.

The national calendar provides an unusual juxtaposition for a consideration of these two traditions, amounting to two distinct options for the American future. Monday Americans remember and celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King and on Tuesday witness the inauguration of Barack Obama.

What’s striking is that Dr. King, who once referred to his own United States as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” has been appropriated into the national pantheon. King has been honored with this holiday on the third Monday of January, while plans move forward for establishing a Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation, Inc., to be located on the National Mall.

Such a foundation needs generous donors and they have been responding to the call. For example, in summer 2008, the Boeing Company gave a million dollars to this project to further the memory of Dr. King’s work. Boeing president James Bell said, “on behalf of Boeing and its employees, I am proud to announce this gift with the sincere hope that, through this Memorial, the power of Dr. King’s example will endure and become a reality in our lifetime. Striving to create a better future by bringing people together, enabling communication and protecting peace is what inspires our 160,000 employees every day. We are tremendously honored to support the Memorial as an enduring reminder of Dr. King’s legacy of inclusion, hope and freedom.”

It may be that Mr. Bell has not yet studied Dr. King’s speech “Beyond Vietnam” from 1967. A stirring indictment of U.S. policy, King states therein, “A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, ‘This way of settling differences is not just.’ This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Or, possibly, Mr. Bell has read the speech but no matter. Even Boeing can cite Dr. King for its purpose.

In her study, America, Amerikkka, U.S. theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether comments, “[American leaders] both pursue murderous policies motivated by that they see as American self-interest and also manage to sincerely believe that they are serving the best interests of these colonized and exploited people as well. Few American politicians are pure hypocrites who know that what they say to justify their policies has little to do with what they are doing. Most politicians are deeply self-deluded by their own rhetoric. Indeed, to combine being both practitioners of realpolitik and also self-deluded believers in the rhetoric of America’s messianic role is the basic requirement of an effective American politician.

On Tuesday Mr. Obama officially begins his presidential work of offering stirring rhetoric and pursuing American self-interest. During the campaign, Mr. Obama’s mantra-like oratory on change and hope supposedly indicated his distance from the horrors of these last eight years of Republican rule. Yet, it may be useful to keep in mind what a character said in Lampedusa’s The Leopard: “Change everything just a little so as to keep everything exactly the same.” Quote Dr. King and support Israel. Call for more diplomacy and say no option is off the table. Pull back from Iraq and go full-throttle in Afghanistan. Acknowledge the mistakes (not crimes) of your predecessors and be relentless in pursuing victory in the Global War on Terror. Call for citizen sacrifice but don’t ask too much of the corporations.

The King Holiday and the Obama inauguration can lead us to consider: With whom and what do we Americans identify, past and present: the priestly or the prophetic lineage of our history?

The abolitionists or the defenders of the slavery status quo?

The Robber Barons or Nader’s Raiders?

Boeing’s sale of weapons to Israel for its Gaza bombing or Hedy Epstein, Paul Larudee and the Free Gaza Movement?

The neoconservatives who planned and plotted the invasion of Iraq for reasons of WMD, democracy, and liberation (and oil and hegemony) or the veterans who return from Iraq to speak the truth of the brutal killing of civilians?

Journalist Ida B. Wells or the respectable city fathers and citizens who applauded lynching?

Cardinal Spellman who blessed the U.S. invaders of Vietnam or Daniel Berrigan who burned draft files?

The nationally approved iconic King on the National Mall or the King who in his last days stood with the Memphis sanitation workers?

An accommodation to Obama’s new and improved American Exceptionalism or a commitment to a growing, permanent opposition of conscience?

Because of the extensive, though sanitized, U.S. news coverage of Israel’s bombing and invasion of Gaza, many Americans are paying closer attention to the Israel-Palestine conflict (those with access to Arabic news programming and Youtube clips are not spared the gruesomeness and enormous destruction of Israel’s effort to deal Hamas a death-blow.)

Many people are shocked, if not disgusted, by the mounting death and injury tolls, the David and Goliath asymmetry, and the “collateral damage” and war crimes inflicted on the Palestinian people.

Given this latest escalating round of brutality, and events in recent years such as the publications of Jimmy Carter’s controversial book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid and Walt and Mearsheimer’s The Israel Lobby, more people may be ready to critically question the U.S.-Israel relationship. Further, those horrified by the mass death in what has been called the world’s largest prison may ask, “What can be done to stop this?”

Americans may pride ourselves on being problem-solvers and pragmatists. Yet, these dispositions can sometimes lead to knee-jerk quests for quick-fixes.

Over twenty years ago, MIT professor Noam Chomsky concluded his grim study of the U.S. support for bloodbaths in Central America with these sobering words: “There are no magic answers, no miraculous methods to overcome the problems we face, just the familiar ones: honest search for understanding, education, organization, action that raises the cost of state violence for its perpetrators or that lays the basis for institutional change — and the kind of commitment that will persist despite the temptations of disillusionment, despite many failures and only limited successes, inspired by the hope of a brighter future.”

As far as the search for understanding and education, allow me to mention a few resources that provide alternatives perspectives to those often found in the mainstream media or voiced by the U.S. Congress. That search for understanding and education requires a willingness to question all kinds of authority, exposure to various viewpoints, thoughtful consideration of evidence, and on-going dialogue. I offer the following not as “the last word,” but for those wanting to begin to invest more attention to this part of the world.

One website: www.electronicintifada.net offers a stimulating range of news, analysis, and commentary, including diary entries from internationals working in the Palestinian territories.

One book: The Question of Palestine, by the late Edward Said, the foremost Palestinian voice in the U.S. for decades. Part of his work is to show what Zionism has looked like, not from the standpoint of Jews fleeing anti-Semitic Europe, but from the standpoint of Zionism’s victims, the Palestinians.

One documentary: Occupation 101: The Voices of the Silenced Majority deals the current and historical root causes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The group If Americans Knew is distributing this documentary for free; contact them at http://www.ifamericansknew.org/about_us/freeocc101.html. The group’s hope is that people will take the initiative to screen the film in homes and gathering places for friends, family, neighbors, and community members.

For those who want to deepen their understanding by acting in concert with others, whether that means material aid, lobbying Congress, political protest, boycott campaigns, and/or travel to Palestine, one can begin by investigating the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation: http://endtheoccupation.org/index.php.

Chomsky’s “hope of a brighter future” is undoubtedly tested by the accumulated misery of the Gazans in the last few years up to this very hour. More of us need to reach out to others who have begun to question the predictable pieties of American political discourse. Further, as activist Kathy Kelly has said, we need to “catch courage from one another” as we seek ways to encourage moves toward justice and peace. Last, we ought to ponder these famous words of Dr. Martin Luther King: “Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly….”

Under review

Deborah Nelson, The War Behind Me: Vietnam Veterans Confront the Truth about U.S. War Crimes—Inside the Army’s Secret Archive of Investigations (New York: Basic Books, 2008) and Chris Hedges and Laila al-Arian, Collateral Damage: America’s War against Iraqi Civilians (New York: Nation Books, 2008).

“[U.S. military forces] raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war….” – Vietnam Veteran John Kerry

“I remember my unit was coming along this elevated overpass. And this kid is in the trash pile below, pulls out an AK-47 and just decides he’s going to start shooting. And you gotta understand… when you have spent nine months in a war zone, where no one—every time you’ve been shot at, you’ve never seen the person shooting at you, and you could never shoot back. He’s some guy, some fourteen-year-old kid with an AK-47, decides he’s going to start shooting at this convoy. It was the most obscene thing you’ve ever seen. Every person got out and opened fire on this kid. Using the biggest weapons we could find, we ripped him to shreds…. Everyone was so happy, like this released that they finally killed an insurgent. Then when we got there, they realized it was just a little kid. And I know that really fucked up a lot of people in the head….They’d show all the pictures and some people were really happy, like, “Oh, look what we did.’ And other people were like, ‘I don’t want to see that ever again.’” – Iraq Veteran. Patrick Campbell

“Support the troops.” How many times in the last seven years have you heard or seen this imperative? Its frequency may be due to its mindless lack of specificity. With the dominance of the Bush Administration’s viewpoint in the media during this “global war on terror,” “support the troops” easily functioned as “support the Bush Administration.” Don’t question authority.

One Iraq war veteran, Aidan Delgado offered a more specific challenge to those fond of repeating, mantra-like, support the troops: “Honor the veterans by listening to what they really have to say.” Of course, veterans have all kinds of things to say as well as all kinds of things they are unable and unwilling to say. Several of my students over the years have spoken about a relative who was in the Vietnam War, and the young people have never heard a word from their uncle or father about their war-time experiences. It’s obvious, too, that they know not even to ask a question of their elders.

Two recent books provide an opportunity for us to consider veterans who want to communicate to us about the crimes of war that are barely acknowledged in the mainstream press. Deborah Nelson’s The War Behind Me and Laila al-Arian and Chris Hedges’s Collateral Damage examine U.S. soldiers who’ve been willing to confront the U.S. military’s contempt for civilian life in Vietnam and Iraq. A few hours with these two succinct and revelatory volumes may better enable us to understand what has happened in both Vietnam and Iraq and so stimulate our critical thinking and responsible action.

Deborah Nelson conducted interviews with a number of Vietnam veterans whose stories she initially found in a recently declassified Army archive of war crimes investigations about U.S. troops in Vietnam. Composed of letters from soldiers, official investigations, and statistical reports, the archive provided ample, official confirmation of what soldiers had long been desperate to reveal to those high in the chain of command. Nelson excerpts amply from these documents as well as from recent interviews with the soldiers, and some of the higher-ups responsible for the policies that horrified these soldiers.

Nelson offers the following pointed rationale for her book: “It’s a place for [veterans] to tell their stories again, now with the full force of the army’s own investigation findings behind them. Years ago, many of them hoped their accounts would pressure the Pentagon to stop ‘all the wrong killing,’ as a soldier wrote in a private letter to then army chief of staff William C. Westmoreland in 1970. The war ended without an accounting or acknowledgement of the war crimes they witnessed. Their retelling comes at an equally important time when, having failed to address the past, we’re destined to repeat it.” [4-5]

The very nature of U.S. strategy in South Vietnam was to increase the “body count” of the enemy, the “Viet Cong” (National Liberation Front). This necessitated neutralizing the value of the civilian population to the guerilla fighters, which required uprooting villagers and moving them to “strategic hamlets” behind barbed wire. Once removed, the areas around their villages became “free-fire zones,” which allowed the U.S. to bomb or shoot anything that moved, including civilians who went back seeking food or to be near where their ancestors were buried. Vietnam veteran Myron Ambeau observed, “The firefighting you could handle. It’s all that other stuff that plays on your mind. We just basically search and destroy with no rhyme or reason….How in the hell do you go in there, completely destroy everything they have, beat up their family members, rape their wives, and burn down their houses?” [37]

Some older Americans will be able to link the name My Lai with U.S. atrocity in Vietnam. One “Anonymous Soldier” had written persistently to U.S. commanders, asserting that the My Lai massacre of March 1968 wasn’t unique: “In case you don’t think I mean lots of Vietnamese got killed this way, I can give you some idea how many. A batalion would kill maybe 15 to 20 a day. With 4 batalions in the Brigade that would be maybe 40 to 50 a day or 1200 to 1500 a month, easy. (One batalion claimed almost 1000 body counts one month!) If I am only 10% right, and believe me its lots more, then I am trying to tell you about 120-150 murders, or a My Lay each month for over a year.” [78]

Dead civilians were counted as “V.C.” and so increased the body count, said quantification facilitating officer advancement and perks for the enthusiastic soldiers. In one case, a U.S. soldier eager to win a competition of the most kills was convicted on unpremeditated murder, but only received less pay and demotion in rank. He was soon able to get another tour in Vietnam. One of Nelson’s interviewees, Robert Stemme, Jr., told her, “I just couldn’t believe that went away after what happened to those people. I was really kind of shocked.” Nelson goes on to write, “The wrist slap reflected the ‘mere gook rule,’ [Stemme] says. U.S. soldiers learned in basic training to dehumanize the enemy and carried the lesson to its logical conclusion in the field. So when Army leaders pressured the men at LZ English [a support area and camp] to produce more bodies and intelligence, the ‘mere gook’ rule provided an easy solution.” [59]

Some defenses of the Vietnam War view claim that the war was lost because of a cantankerous, anti-military media, or the half-hearted timidity of the politicians, who did not allow the military to use all the power at its disposal. Yet, Vietnamese themselves used words like “extermination” for what the U.S. military was doing in the 1960s. Consider two perspectives contrary to the view that the U.S. might have won if allowed to use its full might. The first is James Henry, one of the whistle blowers interviewed by Nelson: “All we wanted to do is survive this and get out. Nobody wanted to quit. Everybody wanted to do their job. When we were told to attack, we did. It was a fight. But it was pretty obvious that we weren’t going to accomplish what the government wanted us to accomplish, especially the way we were going about it. I mean, going around killing all the people that we’re supposed to be saving isn’t going to work. If they weren’t enemies before we got there, they were enemies after we got there.” A second view is that of Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh: “The more American troops sent to Vietnam, the more the anti-American campaign led by the NLF becomes successful. Anger and hatred rise in the hearts of the peasants as they see their villages burned, their compatriots killed, their houses destroyed. Pictures showing NLF soldiers with arms tied, followed by American soldiers holding guns with bayonets, make people think of the Indochina war between the French and the Viet Minh and cause pain even to the anti-Communist Vietnamese.” [from Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire, 63-64]

As more and more soldiers began to complain of systematic disregard for Vietnamese civilian life, the Army grew concerned. It was obligated to investigate each claim of a war crime, but, like President Richard Nixon, military officials weren’t interested in seeing these crimes make the front page of the nation’s newspapers. Damage control mode kicked into high gear, which tried to minimize what happened, or to discredit the soldiers who became increasingly outspoken.

There has yet to be an honest national reckoning with the crimes the United States committed in Indochina. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission needs to take place here. If such were to happen, the testimony revealed in Nelson’s book would surely be crucial evidence in the process of facing the gruesome truth of what really happened and who was ultimately responsible. Let James Henry have the last word: “I would guess that there hundreds if not thousands of allegations of various abuses. Not stealing bananas, but serious abuses. The army could not possibly bring all of these problems out into the open, (which court martial trials would do) without admitting that they had failed in every aspect of training, tactics, and command of the troops in Viet Nam and the ultimate responsibility and the corruption went from the rice paddies, all the way to the Pentagon.” [185-186]

&&&

One striking difference between the U.S occupation of Iraq and the U.S. occupation of South Vietnam is that in the latter case, U.S. commanders were obsessed with body counts—the greater the number of “Viet Cong” killed, the closer we were to “victory.” Yet, General Tommy Franks said after the invasion of Iraq, “We don’t do body counts.” When he declared “mission accomplished” in May 2003, President Bush also said, “With new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians. No device of man can remove the tragedy from war, yet it is a great advance when the guilty have far more to fear from war than the innocent…” In Collateral Damage Hedges and al-Arian focus principally on those modes of a military occupation that cause harm and death to innocent civilians: convoys, checkpoints, raids, and detentions. By understanding the dynamics of these phenomena, we can detect an operative “mere haji rule” in Iraq. The authors state, “The word ‘haji’ in the Muslim world is a term of respect and denotes someone who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca. But it is used by American troops as a slur, taking the place of ‘gook’ in Vietnam or ‘raghead’ in Afghanistan. The dehumanization of the Iraqis, the implicit assumption that they were less than human, made it easier to cope with abuse and killing, to deny the humanity of those standing on the wrong end of the conflict.” [94]

According to the authors, “conveys are the arteries that sustain the occupation. They ferry water, mail, maintenance parts, sewage, food, and fuel to bases across Iraq.” [9] But to the Iraqis, they are seen as “freight trains of death.” To supply the troops, convoys have to travel great distances and need protection. Drivers are therefore instructed by commanders never to stop because that puts the convoy and its protectors at risk of insurgent attack. The human consequences: if Iraqis of whatever age, including children, are seen as an impediment to the plan to go smoothly from point A to point B, then the Iraqis will be run over, or shot, no matter what. Sergeant Geoffrey Millard said, “No one ever questioned if someone skipped the step [of firing a warning shot] and just fired directly into the vehicle, because it’s a split-second decision. And you err on the side of life, meaning your life and not the life of the person in the vehicle.” [16] Sergeant Kelly Dougherty commented, “It was just like, the mentality of my squad leader was like, Oh, we have to kill them over here so I don’t have to kill them back in Colorado. He just seemed to view every Iraqi as a potential terrorist.” [26] National Guardsman Fernando Braga reported: “[The lieutenant] said the reason was that we shouldn’t hesitate [to run over children] because of the way they would treat their children. They don’t value human life like we do and they don’t share our same Western values.” [13]

The authors describe the checkpoint system as follows: “The U.S. military has checkpoints dotted across Iraq. They are designed to restrict the flow of traffic, make travel by insurgents difficult on roads, and prevent the shipment of weapons and explosives. These checkpoints serve as safety valves, used by the occupation troops to protect neighborhoods, fortified compounds, and city streets from attack. But the checkpoints are deadly for civilians.” [30] Due to the ignorance of the Iraqi civilian drivers, or to the short temper of the U.S soldiers, a checkpoint is a calamity waiting to happen. A family in a car approaches and the driver is neither able to read the minds of the soldiers positioned many meters away nor understand their language, the U.S. modus operandi is predictable: Shoot first, ask questions later. Sergeant Dougherty admitted, “You start looking at everyone as a criminal…. Is this the car that’s going to try to run into me? Is this the car that has explosives in it? Or is this just someone who’s confused?” [36] Sergeant Ben Flanders recollected, “The enemy can come from any direction. They can come in any form, whether it’s a pregnant woman who blows herself up on soldiers or it’s this car just sitting idly on the side of the road.” [37] Spc. Patrick Resta stated, “I even specifically remember being told that it was better to kill them than to have somebody be wounded and still alive.” [41] The U.S. military does not keep statistics of civilians killed at checkpoints.

Raids are frequently undertaken to identify and arrest the insurgents. The raids typically take place from midnight to 4 or 5 a.m. These are incursions into domestic Iraqi lives, disruptive, destructive, and tending to the dehumanizing. Sergeant John Bruhns pointed out, “And if you find something, then you’ll detain him. If not, you’ll say, ‘Sorry to disturb you. Have a nice evening.’ So you’ve just humiliated this man in front of his entire family and terrorized his entire family and you’ve destroyed his home. And then you go right next door and you do the same thing in a hundred homes. [53-54] Staff Sergeant T.J. Westphal contended: “Most of the people were terrified. You could see it in their eyes. We knew that this was not the way to win the hearts and minds. You don’t come in the middle of the night and harass people and then expect them to give you flowers the next day.” [70] As with U.S. “pacification” efforts that uprooted Vietnamese civilians, the raids, according to some of the interviewees, were seen as counterproductive, as they led outraged Iraqis to become opposed to the U.S. occupation.

Detentions have achieved certain notoriety in the U.S. as increasing attention has been paid to the practice of torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo. Hedges and al-Arian state the gravity of the problem: “Tens of thousands of Iraqis have been incarcerated in prisons and detention facilities in Iraq. The numbers range from 60,000 to 120,000, according to military officials. Some prisoners have languished for months, even years, in Iraqi prisons. Families are forced to navigate a dysfunctional bureaucracy to find and plead for the release of their relatives.” [72] Spc. Resta’s supervisor claimed, “The Geneva Conventions don’t exist at all in Iraq, and that’s in writing if you want to see it.” Resta had the gumption to ask to see it in writing, but the commander refused. Resta realized that he could be obedient and relent or risk a court-martial. Power trips by the soldiers and dehumanization of the Iraqis went hand in hand.

The last chapter, “Hearts and Minds,” alludes to President Lyndon Johnson’s “Hearts and Minds” speech. To win in Vietnam required military success and political success, the latter involving “winning over the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people.” Yet the U.S. was doomed in Vietnam, because napalm, Agent Orange, search and destroy, torture, mass murder, and strategic hamlets/concentration camps were guaranteed to be great recruiting for the resistance, as Thich Nhat Hanh observed in 1967. The continued U.S. domination of Iraq is guaranteed to generate outrage, bitterness, leading some to take up arms (or to throw shoes at Bush), leading others to recall, in a hard to fathom nostalgia, the good old days under Saddam Hussein.

Many have felt a sense of relief at Barak Obama’s 2008 election victory, as well as the impending supposed handing over of power from the U.S. to Iraqis. Yet, these two books ought to give pause. 30,000 more troops going to Afghanistan? Won’t they have to institute more checkpoints there? Won’t these troops undertake hundreds of nocturnal raids, seeking Taliban terrorists? Won’t there be a proliferation of convoys, leading to further “collateral damage” of Afghan civilians, added to those already killed while celebrating at their weddings by U.S. aerial bombings? Won’t more Afghanis and other nationals be swept up in raids and pressured to confess via means Americans have found abhorrent?

In Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, the United States created an incalculable disaster for the people of these countries. The damage and destruction of human life and society has continued in Iraq and is soon to accelerate in Afghanistan. But veterans ranging in age from their mid-20s to their mid-60s, continue to speak out about the human costs of U.S. arrogance and belligerence past and present. In his communication to superiors when the Vietnam war was a daily topic of conversation in the United States, James Henry said, “My motivation can be stated quite briefly: I want the murder of Vietnamese stopped and I want the military to stop putting Americans in the position of becoming murderers.” [16]