NOVANEWS

Dear Friends,

Tonight’s 6 items are more talk than reports about what is happening daily here, but are worth your time.

Item 1 is actually a video about militarism in Israeli society—‘Selling Israeli Militarism like Toothpaste’ interviews both our own Rela Mazali, one of the founders of New Profile and Alex Cohn, a conscientious objector, and also shows how militarism is sold to kids from an actual TV propaganda program aimed at youngsters. Well worth 10 minutes of your time.

In item 2 the PCHR reports that the Israeli High Court has cancelled a previous judgment regarding Cast Lead and will now hear a case that it had originally dismissed.

Item 3 reports that 300 academics support women who not only practice civil disobedience but also report their doings publicly.

In item 4 Alice Walker explains why she is participating in the flotilla to Gaza.

Items 5 and particularly 6 are long, but both, I believe, are worth reading.

In item 5 Mark LeVine reports on ‘Palestinian Youth and the Healing Arts,’ that is to say, ways that the youth have found to express their emotions and to protest without violence.

Item 6 is Jerry Levin’s review of ‘Strong Horse Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilization’ by Lee Smith.  Levin’s review is particularly useful because he points out the fallacies of much right-wing thinking about Muslims and other subjects.  You may very well find Levin’s counter arguments useful in your own experiences with people who believe every bit of propaganda that they hear.

All the best,

Dorothy

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1. Selling Israeli Militarism like Toothpaste

From children’s shows to national war drills, a discussion on militarism in Israeli society and gender equality in the army To watch a multi-part interview, click the link,

10 minute video

Lia Tarachansky interviewed Rela Mazali, the founder of New Profile, an organization working to demilitarize Israeli society, and Alex Cohn, a war resister who served five months for objecting to serve in the army. Cohn analyses a children’s show that portrays a typical interaction between soldiers and Israeli children as part of a discussion on the insidious prevalence of militarism in Israeli society.

Bio

Rela Mazali is one of the founders of the New Profile movement to de-militarize Israeli civil society. She has also co-founded Gun-Free Kitchen Tables, a new project aiming to drastically reduce the number of small arms in homes and families in Israel. She is also the author of Maps of Women’s Goings & Stayings (2001), and the upcoming book, Home Archaeology.

Alex Cohn is an Israeli activist and conscientious objector who served five months in jail for his refusal to serve in the army in 2005.

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=33&Itemid=74&jumival=705

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2,Forwarded by the JPLO List

Ref: 58/2011

23 June 2011

Israel High Court of Justice vacates verdict in Cast Lead Case: Appoints New Panel of Judges and Orders Case on behalf of 1,046 victims be Re-heard

On Wednesday, 15 June 2011, the Israeli High Court of Justice vacated (cancelled) a previous judgment dismissing a case brought by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, and litigated by Advocates Michael Sfard and Carmel Pomerantz, on behalf of 1,046 victims of Operation ‘Cast Lead’. The case had been illegitimately dismissed in April 2011 when the Court issued its decision solely on the basis of the State’s submission, effectively denying PCHR’s ‘right of reply’. This procedural irregularity was challenged, resulting in the successful decision of 15 June 2011. A new panel of judges will now be appointed, and the case can proceed.

This successful decision constitutes an important step towards ensuring victims’ legitimate right to access a court, and obtain an effective judicial remedy. The policies and practices challenged in this petition serve to comprehensively deny victims’ right to access justice. They perpetuate a climate of pervasive impunity, and effectively contribute to the establishment of an accountability free zone in the Gaza Strip.

Background to the Case

The initial petition was filed before the Israeli High Court of Justice on 21 December 2010 against Israel’s State Attorney on behalf of 1,046 victims of Operation Cast Lead. The petition requests that the High Court of Justice (HCJ) order the State Attorney to refrain from raising a claim under the statute of limitations in future civil suits brought before Israeli courts. According to PCHR, the right of access to the courts demands that the statute of limitations on bringing such civil cases, begin to accrue only once Israel’s illegal closure of the Gaza Strip has ceased.

The Knesset (Israeli parliament) amended the Israeli Civil Torts Act in 2002, reducing the statue of limitations in these types of civil suits to two years, instead of the previous seven-year limitation.The closure policy on the Gaza Strip prevents these victims from meeting with their Israeli lawyers and from entering Israel in order to testify before Israeli courts.

As a result of the physical, financial, and legal obstacles imposed by Israel, Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip – including the thousands of victims of Operation Cast Lead – are effectively prevented from seeking redress before Israeli courts. This situation results in the systematic denial of fundamental human rights.

The issue addressed in this petition relates to the right to reparation and the filing of civil tort compensation cases before Israeli courts on behalf of victims of Operation Cast Lead.

Background Information

Customary international law recognises all victims’ right to reparation (including compensation) in the event of a violation of international law. However, Palestinian victims from the Gaza Strip are currently faced with a number of significant hurdles which effectively prevent them from accessing justice, in violation of their fundamental rights. Claimants face three principal obstacles:

1. Statute of Limitations. Under Israeli law, a complaint for civil damages must be brought within two years of the date of the incident, or the right to compensation is irrevocably lost. As a result of the illegal closure of the Gaza Strip, and the significant number of victims of Operation Cast Lead, this two-year limit means that the victims are often unable to submit their cases within the required time-frame. Prior to 1 August 2002, the statute of limitations was seven years.

2. Monetary Barrier. Israeli courts often require claimants to pay a court insurance fee before the case can begin. While this is a discretionary fee applied by the court, in practice, this fee is always applied to Palestinian claimants. The exact value of the fee is not fixed, and it is determined on a case-by-case basis by the court. With respect to claims for damage to property, the fee usually constitutes a percentage of the value of the property being claimed, however, for death or injury there is no informal guideline. In PCHR’s experience this amount is typically set at a minimum of NIS 10,000 (about US $2800); however, it can reach significantly higher amounts. In a recent case brought by PCHR, the claimants were required to pay an insurance fee of NIS 20,000 (US $5,600) for each of the five wrongful deaths claimed. Thus, grave violations equal extremely high monetary barriers to justice. This insurance fee constitutes an insurmountable obstacle to justice. Simply put, claimants from Gaza – crippled by the economic devastation wrought by the occupation and the illegal closure – cannot afford this fee and their cases are being dismissed and closed.

3. Physical Barriers. Under Israeli law, in order testimony to be valid, the victim or witness must be present in court to undergo cross-examination. However, since June 2007, despite a letter from the court requesting their presence, the Israeli military authorities have not allowed a single individual to leave Gaza to appear in court. As a result, their cases are dismissed and closed. Further, PCHR’s lawyers – although qualified – cannot enter Israel to represent their clients before the courts. As a result, PCHR is forced to work with and hire lawyers in Israel (at extra cost). However, clients are not allowed to enter Israel to meet with their lawyer, and all requests made by lawyers to enter Gaza – to meet with clients, visit the crime scene, and so on – have been denied. Necessarily, this affects the lawyers’ ability to represent their clients, thereby undermining victims’ right to an effective remedy.

The Petition

The petition, brought by PCHR and litigated by Attorneys Michael Sfard and Carmel Pomerantz, challenges the two-year statute of limitations. An injunction is sought from the court suspending the two-year statute of limitations period. The petition highlights a number of barriers to justice created as a result of Israeli policy, including the illegal closure of the Gaza Strip; the petition develops a letter previously submitted by Adalah to the Israeli Attorney General. This petition is brought on behalf of 1,046 victims of Operation Cast Lead, representing the overwhelming majority of cases prepared in the aftermath of the offensive.

They cover virtually the entire spectrum of international humanitarian law violations, and among them are the most infamous cases of the offensive, including those of the Samouni, Abu Halima, and Al-Dia families.

Public Document

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For more information please call PCHR office in Gaza, Gaza Strip, on +972 8 2824776 – 2825893

PCHR, 29 Omer El Mukhtar St., El Remal, PO Box 1328 Gaza, Gaza Strip. E-mail: pchr@pchrgaza.org, Webpage http://www.pchrgaza.org

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If you got this forwarded and you want to subscribe, send mail to request@pchrgaza.org

and write “subscribe” in the subject line.
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3. Forwarded by the JPLO List

From: Ruth Hiller [mailto:hillerruth@gmail.com]

Press Release (Please distribute widely)

19 June 2011

300 Academics Join 40 “Civil Disobedience” Women

Willing to Break Israel’s Entry Laws

About 300 lecturers and teachers from institutes of higher education throughout Israel have signed a public advertisement in support of civil disobedience actions of a group of women who openly infringe the law of entry to Israel. The academics put their full names in an advertisement which was published in Ha’aretz newspaper last Friday, 17 June 2011, next to an advertisement – the third in recent months – published by the women’s group called “Civil Disobedience”. (For the advertisement itself, see attachment.)

The women, who have all been investigated by Jerusalem police and who now have official criminal records, called for the Israeli public to join them in their protest activity which consists of driving Palestinian women and children for a day at Israeli recreational sites and the beach.  These actions come in the wake of writer and translator Ilana Hammerman’s initiative, who started publicizing such activities last year.

“We recognize neither the legality, nor the morality, nor the wisdom of the walls between us and our neighbors which have been erected with brute force,” stated the group in its advertisement.

Alongside the women’s statement, a support letter from the academics appeared, including the following words: We, the undersigned women and men, state that we are willing to collaborate with the actions of the “Civil Disobedience” women. In these dark hours, we are willing to drive their guests, Palestinian women and children, to hide them and to support their challenge in any other way, whether in deeds or in words.  The action of these women shows the right way for any Israeli citizen who truly supports a democracy respectful of human rights. Should Israel’s legal system find it appropriate to prosecute and penalize these women we shall be willing to support them, to join them and to be tried alongside them.

For further information and for interviews:

On behalf of the academics: Prof. Yishay Rosen-Zvi: 050-9670033

And for “Civil Disobedience” – Alma Ganihar: 052-6787353; Annelien Kisch: 052-5236132; Irit Gal: 054-5335573

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4.  Article of interest. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker will join an international flotilla of boats sailing to Gaza to challenge Israel’s blockade of the territory. Here, Walker, best known for her 1983 novel “The Color Purple,” explains why she will be taking part.

Ed Corrigan
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/06/21/alice.walker.gaza/

Alice Walker: Why I’m sailing to Gaza

By Alice Walker, Special to CNN

June 21, 2011 — Updated 1324 GMT (2124 HKT)

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Our boat will be carrying letters of solidarity to the people of Gaza

• I am indebted to Jewish civil rights activists who came to the side of black people in the South in our time of need

• I see children, all children, as humanity’s most precious resource

• If Israel attacks us, what is to be done?

Editor’s note: Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker will join an international flotilla of boats sailing to Gaza to challenge Israel’s blockade of the territory. Here, Walker, best known for her 1983 novel “The Color Purple,” explains why she will be taking part.

Why am I going on the Freedom Flotilla II to Gaza? I ask myself this, even though the answer is: What else would I do? I am in my sixty-seventh year, having lived already a long and fruitful life, one with which I am content.

It seems to me that during this period of eldering it is good to reap the harvest of one’s understanding of what is important, and to share this, especially with the young. How are they to learn, otherwise?

Our boat, The Audacity of Hope, will be carrying letters to the people of Gaza. Letters expressing solidarity and love. That is all its cargo will consist of. If the Israeli military attacks us, it will be as if they attacked the mailman. This should go down hilariously in the annals of history. But if they insist on attacking us, wounding us, even murdering us, as they did some of the activists in the last flotilla, Freedom Flotilla I, what is to be done?

There is a scene in the movie “Gandhi” that is very moving to me: it is when the unarmed Indian protesters line up to confront the armed forces of the British Empire. The soldiers beat them unmercifully, but the Indians, their broken and dead lifted tenderly out of the fray, keep coming.

Our boat will be carrying letters to the people of Gaza.
–Alice Walker

Alongside this image of brave followers of Gandhi there is for me an awareness of paying off a debt to the Jewish civil rights activists who faced death to come to the side of black people in the South in our time of need. I am especially indebted to Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman who heard our calls for help – our government then as now glacially slow in providing protection to non-violent protestors-and came to stand with us.

They got as far as the truncheons and bullets of a few “good ol’ boys'” of Neshoba County, Mississippi and were beaten and shot to death along with James Cheney, a young black man of formidable courage who died with them. So, even though our boat will be called The Audacity of Hope, it will fly the Goodman, Cheney, Schwerner flag in my own heart.

And what of the children of Palestine, who were ignored in our President’s latest speech on Israel and Palestine, and whose impoverished, terrorized, segregated existence was mocked by the standing ovations recently given in the U.S. Congress to the prime minister of Israel?

I see children, all children, as humanity’s most precious resource, because it will be to them that the care of the planet will always be left. One child must never be set above another, even in casual conversation, not to mention in speeches that circle the globe.

One child must never be set above another, even in casual conversation, not to mention in speeches that circle the globe.
–Alice Walker

As adults, we must affirm, constantly, that the Arab child, the Muslim child, the Palestinian child, the African child, the Jewish child, the Christian child, the American child, the Chinese child, the Israeli child, the Native American child, etc., is equal to all others on the planet. We must do everything in our power to cease the behavior that makes children everywhere feel afraid.

I once asked my best friend and husband during the era of segregation, who was as staunch a defender of black people’s human rights as anyone I’d ever met: how did you find your way to us, to black people, who so needed you? What force shaped your response to the great injustice facing people of color of that time?

I thought he might say the speeches, the marches, the example of Martin Luther King, Jr. or of others in the Movement who exhibited impactful courage and grace. But no. Thinking back, he recounted an episode from his childhood that had led him, inevitably, to our struggle.

He was a little boy on his way home from Yeshiva, the Jewish school he attended after regular school let out. His mother, a bookkeeper, was still at work; he was alone. He was frequently harassed by older boys from regular school, and one day two of these boys snatched his yarmulke (skull cap), and, taunting him, ran off with it, eventually throwing it over a fence.

Two black boys appeared, saw his tears, assessed the situation, and took off after the boys who had taken his yarmulke. Chasing the boys down and catching them, they made them climb the fence, retrieve and dust off the yarmulke, and place it respectfully back on his head.

It is justice and respect that I want the world to dust off and put – without delay, and with tenderness – back on the head of the Palestinian child. It will be imperfect justice and respect because the injustice and disrespect have been so severe. But I believe we are right to try.

That is why I sail.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Alice Walker. A longer version of this article will appear on Alice Walker’s blog.

5.  Al Jazeera

June 23.11

Palestinian Youth and the Healing Arts

Mark LeVine

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/06/201162110840143444.html

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6.Friends:

I was asked to prepare a review of a recently published book that essentially absolves the U.S. of culpability with respect to the violence that is afflicting the Middle East and killing young Americans in their prime. The main fault, according to the so-called journalist author lies with misplaced anti-Anti Americanism and a penchant for violence that is uniquely Muslim.

As some of you know, for a variety of reasons my writing and activities in connection with them have slowed down considerably. Nevertheless, the more I read the book, the more disgusted I got, so the short 1000 word piece I started write took on a life of its own and grew like Topsy. It is much longer than that. But friends who looked it over for me suggested I send it on.  So for what it may or maynot  be worth, it follows.

(Also, now that my energy is improving, I have been thinking about organzing another transcontinental speaking tour as I used to do early in the last decades ofthe old century and the first of this one. It would deal with matters such as you find below. If that interests you in terms of arrainging a venue in your area, I can be reached via Facebook, of course, and as per the heading below.)

Jerry Levin

2455-E Arlington Crescent

Birmingham, AL 35205

Phone: Fax 205 264 1244

E-mail: jlevin0320@yahoo.com

Reviewing: The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilization by Lee Smith; Doubleday

When reading any analyses or commentary on Middle East politics, society, and culture written by – let us narrow the field here – a journalist, it is important, I think, to consider for whom he is writing: not his audience but his employer. In the case of Lee Smith, a senior editor at the politically and culturally right of center inside-the-Beltway polemical enterprise, The Weekly Standard, one may safely presume that The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilization is not going to be a disingenuous exposition of the subject. One could also presume that the thesis and its conclusions are also going to be, if not suspect, at least significantly arguable. And one would be right.

As expected, there are glowing uncritical promotional blurbs that appear on and inside the book. Extracted from such neo-conservative sources as Commentary Magazine, The Weekly Standard naturally, and Daniel Pipes’ in the National Review, the hosannas make my point. So if those names resonate positively with readers, then this book report or – better said – this book complaint is not for them.

Not to dismiss Smith’s work out of hand, because a reporter even worth a quarter of his salt is bound to get some of the facts right; but the conceptual uses to which he puts both his correct and incorrect facts, ah, there’s the rub. They indicate that his slipups may be wittingly self-serving. The factual and the not factual constitute a worrying apologetic that pervasively perpetuates domestic politically correct stereotypes about the politics and culture of Arab, Iranian, and other Islamic people. The aim is clearly to justify and absolve chauvinist my country right or wrong interventionist U. S. foreign diplomatic, military, and economic Middle East policies that have been blowing up in the national face with increasing frequency since the 1980s.

They are views that are held not just as articles of faith by tens of millions of people across the entire spectrum of political and cultural thought in the West, especially the United States, but also as unassailable truths. These are the shibboleths professed at times by those inhabiting our domestic left, middle and right that have been providing a conceptual undergirding for the rise of repeated retail militant inciteful U.S. involvement in the Middle East that has been growing in intensity in recent years.

Regrettably too often it has been questioned and challenged most vigorously as to its credibility or necessity only after the fact and only after body bags with no discernible affirmative result have begun to pile up. So the situation there for both our troops and the helpless indigenous civilians living within range of our bullets and bombs has in every case perceptibly worsened. Indeed, one could assert, and I do, that the U.S.’ perilous and increasingly weakened power to influence or outright control events in the Middle East can be traced to when we crossed a policy Rubicon in Lebanon in 1982 and started attempting to affect political events with military force.

One of Smith’s key stereotypes supports a long running assertion that Middle Eastern (read this sotto voce as Muslim) nature and culture is incorrigibly violent, especially when compared to the West, which has been and is genteel by comparison. This judgment is exemplified by a typical every day observation that has taken on aphoristic significance. It goes something like this, “What do you expect? Those people over there have been fighting each other for centuries.” Or as Smith smugly avers, “The cycle of violence; in the Middle East [which is] thousands of years old, is the defining characteristic of [its] political order.” Therefore, current regional instability, according to Smith, is the result of this uniquely inbred indigenous penchant for eternal violent regional internal mayhem. To condense this condition he has coined the phrase, “clash of Arab civilizations.”

The internal Arab clash, Smith asserts, is the cause of instability in the region to an infinitely greater degree and consequence than the so-called East West Civilization clash favored by a plethora of politically correct history specialists. That clash, however, is best exemplified these days by a series of U. S. led or inspired interventionist “the best defense is an offense” style invasions, aka as preemptive attacks. As difficult as it may be for American uber patriots to acknowledge, the reality about violence cycles is this: the main difference between the Middle East’s and our own throughout history is simply quantity. As a perpetrator, ours amount to far less, only because we have not been around as long. To hold that violence is a defining characteristic of the Middle East and not the United States is an exercise in hazardous gratuitousness.

Furthermore, those who subscribe to such generalizations tend to ignore the historical fact that Arabs were held under strict Ottoman rule for hundreds of years, which precluded the kind of violence Smith has posited for the region. The notion also ignores the fact that the Dark Ages apply to Europe not the Middle East, or that Avicenna almost single handedly translated the West out of its centuries of self-inflicted brutish lethal ignorance. Also for that to be true, where violent internecine strife is concerned, somehow World Wars I and II pale in comparison as defining characteristics with the Six Day War in 1967, the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the first and second Intifadas and the attack on the World Trade Center, which was not Arab against Arab but Arabs against alien forces.

Nevertheless, the author reports with a straight face, the instability that is a result of the so-called internal clash of Arab civilizations, was best described by – are you ready for this? – the late Osama Bin Laden! “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.” The operative words in the Bin Laden/Smith thesis are by nature, they and like. It is in the Arab and Iranian man and woman in the souk’s DNA, .i.e., it is in their biological nature to like Strong Horse leaders who plunge them into potentially lethal factional violence. In other words the preference has nothing to do with choices favoring violence imposed on a collective they by their authoritarian leaders but everything to do only with their genes.

Bin Laden, the would-be murderous autocrat, was no more chosen by the people in aggregate of the region than the many autocrats and despots he wanted to see replaced. He was no truth to power democracy advocate; but a power coveting violence rationalizing outsider who used every violent means available to get on the inside in order to run things ruthlessly himself. With respect to governance, however, this is what Bin Laden/Smith insists that they, i.e. a cumulative people, who never have had any political voice and whom he wished to dominate, said they like.

Smith’s view of the Arab character is that of the typical contemporary Orientalist as fleshed out by the late Edward Said in Orientalism, his study of demeaning Western narcissistic conceits about Middle Eastern culture. In it Said catalogued 19th century Western main stream stereotypical patronizing assumptions that were constantly employed to motivate and rationalize its various colonial conquests in the region. Those conclusions are still powerfully in vogue today as they continue to be applied to outside attempts to affect events there in this post-colonial age.

Powerful Western sovereignties, mainly the United States, backing equally powerful national and extra national enterprises are continuing to exploit the region economically with respect to its resources, commercially with respect, for example, to arms sales, and politically with respect to its subsidizing as many regional despots who can be bought. But that is not a collective they; that is a Middle East leadership they. That is who Osama Bin Laden was actually describing and whom David Brooks accurately describe recently in the New York Times as “fundamentally self-dealing.” However, and on behalf of truth in writing, Brooks was actually pinpointing U.S. leadership. Whatever! The shoe fits perfectly over there too.

Smith devotes five pages to refuting Said’s claims. That leads to the suspicion that he doth protest too much, especially his astonishing claim that Orientalism “was not a book about the contemporary Middle East.” That is akin to saying that scripture has no ethical or moral relevance to the current age. Said’s ancestral home in Jerusalem was confiscated by the Israelis after the war for independence in 1948. Today it is occupied by the International Christian Embassy, an unofficial evangelical organization formed to support the perpetuation of the Jewish State of Israel as opposed to a truly democratic pluralist state.

So certainly Said had an ax to grind with respect to what he perceived as the paralyzing effect of Western imperialism on individual rights, liberties, and the development of democratic institutions in the region. But his research and witness, which was first hand and long running, was never published or broadcast on behalf of either personal or collective retribution or restitution but in the hopes that it might inspire pervasive comprehension and justice. It took courage for him to say on National Public Radio in 1988, “I identify with the Canaanites.”

Dr. Said, an Episcopalian Palestinian Arab-American academic, far from being an ivory tower observer was also an outspoken member of the Palestinian National Congress, the official deliberative wing of the diaspora Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). But he was far from being a rigid Palestinian ideologue. He quit loudly in disgust when the PLO would not come to grips with the rampant corruption and cronyism of the Israeli and American enabled post Oslo Accords Palestinian Authority led by Yasser Arafat. Said’s plague-on-all-your undemocratic houses should be an indication of his exquisite independence of mind and action.

Smith spent so much time beating up on Edward Said in order to lay the groundwork for a next assertion that the West, in particular the United States, are libeled whipping boys with respect to being a significant cause of Middle East unrest. He asserts that Western “actions and policies have been less important than we imagine.We all took 9/11 too personally.” In other words, why do they hate us? was an irrelevant question, because the attack was “not really about us” but by extension all about they.

Far from taking 9/11 too personally, the problem has been, as subsequent history has proved, that we did not take it personally enough. We are in denial as to the underlying provocations. Officially we remain attached to the Smith thesis that 9/11 was an expression of unprovoked rage committed by a monolithic Middle Eastern they for theological, cultural, and political reasons. While admitting that “Arab rulers played a role in fostering it [anti-Americanism],” Smith insists that “its existence doesn’t depend on them.Anti-Americanism is not the effect of American politics, but is organic to the region.” Let’s see: if all Arabs are not terrorists, then at least according to Smith they are all anti-American in general and anti-Semitic specifically, because hatred is a motivating component of Muslim character.

That logic, could lead one to say that all Jews are Zionist with all that implies about the Jewish State’s violent repression, suppression and oppression of Palestinians both inside Israel and in the occupied territories. But, despite what AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) and its adherents would like non-Jews to think, this is far from the truth, especially in Israel. In fact until World War II and the Nazi genocide with which the Muslim world had nothing to do, Jewish anti-Zionism was a powerful political force in the United States, and is still a force large enough to cause Zionist Jews to – feeling threatened – label those Jews self-hating. Trying to shame them by accusing them of anti-Semitism would be oxymoronic.

To support his logic with respect to his pervasive Islamic anti-Americanism theme, Smith rejects out of hand what Americans in the thousands learn when traveling in the region from the they who talk to them one-on-one out of earshot of the Strong Horses’ secret police. “We don’t hate Americans,” they say. “We hate what your government is doing to us.” Smith’s explanation for the furtive distinction is that they don’t really mean it. If all Arabs aren’t terrorists, then at least, he implies, they are liars.

If that out of hand rejection doesn’t work, Smith also scornfully attacks the Muslim and Christian Arab perception that there is a “wide gap between Americans and their leaders,” calling that view an “Arab conceit.” He uses the reelection of George Bush in 2004 to refute it. But this is another attempt at demeaning sophistry that just won’t fly. American unity is only true if one considers majority rule as evidence that no gap exists between Americans and their leaders. The reality, of course, is that tens of millions of Americans constitute an angry gap that voted against the President specifically because of his policy of military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan. The difference is that majority rule here can lead us in to inimical foreign policy initiatives in the same way that despotic minority rule does over there.

What Smith denies, along with such doctrinaire neoconservative writers and editors as Charles Krauthammer, Cal Thomas, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Martin Peretz, Alan Dershowitz, and even George Will, as well as a large number of American theo/political commentators like Pat Robertson, is that 9/11 had nothing at all to do with an organic (Smith’s word) anti-American hatred of a generic Middle Eastern they. It did have everything to do with a strategy crafted by a very specific they, a band of domestic outsiders trying to replace despotic insider regimes with equally if not more despotic regimes of their own. They foolishly thought they could mobilize mass Muslim sentiment by whipping up an angry anti-American sentiment that both they and Smith thought was pervasive but is not.

Instead what is truly amazing is how indulgent countless Muslims are about Americans, given our undeniable history of officially supporting and often undergirding most Middle Eastern dictators, autocrats, and monarchial aristocracies. What is even more amazing is their affection for Americans despite our government’s indulgence of the oppressive Israeli police state policies which non-Jews who are mostly Muslim are obliged to endure.

In recent months, we have gained a better understanding as to why the indulgence. All along there has been an underestimated – if estimated at all – simmering Arab radicalism that is vastly different from the only kind of radicalism that Smith insists exists. This is a kind of democracy favoring radicalism that is neither automatically anti-American nor reflexively violent. It was suddenly exemplified by the unfolding events of the so-called Arab Spring that have quickly served to discredit much of Smith’s book, which appeared in bookstores late in 2010 a scant few weeks before the revolts that proved to be monumental exceptions to his just published rule were launched.

We in the West were more surprised than we ought to have been by the massive out pouring of democratic or at least republican radical sentiment and resolve. This is due to the fact, of course, that our domestic organs of mass public information and opinion have played a significan role in perpetuating the incorrigible violently undemocratic Middle Eastern stereotype, while ignoring, obscuring or minimizing the intentions of huddled masses there yearning to be free, masses stretching from the Maghreb through Iran and on into Pakistan, masses who if at all possible hope to achieve meaningful political reform nonviolently.

For instance, it was hardly noted or even commented on that it was nonviolent protests organized by Muslim lawyers that led to the toppling of the Musharraf military regime in Pakistan. This was a harbinger for restless Muslims elsewhere that democratic reform might be achieved without violence on the part of would be reformers. Furthermore their subsequent revolts were inspired and informed by the writings of generations of Islamic liberal nonviolence theoreticians and activists who also gleaned practical advice from such American nonviolence strategists as Gene Sharp, who categorized 198 distinct kinds of nonviolent protest and resistance to oppression.

Whether they succeed in the long run or not is another matter. Nevertheless the current political unrest in the Islamic sphere has been initiated almost entirely by Muslims and, especially in Egypt, by Christian Arabs aching for truly representative governments. A Gallup organization poll released earlier this month (June 2011) reports that support among the masses is huge. 83% of Egyptians in the sampling “sympathized with [the] protesters.” In addition when Egyptians were asked the following question, “Some people think that for an individual person or a small group of persons to target and kill civilians is sometimes justified, while others think that kind of violence is never justified. Which is your opinion?” 97% said, “never justified.” People in fourteen other nations were asked the same question. Egypt led the “never justified” list. Palestine was fourth at 79%, the United States was sixth at 76%, Iran tenth at 70% and Israel eleventh at 69%.

It is not clear whether the revolts currently underway will succeed or will be coopted, as they were in Europe in 1848. Back then entrenched autocracies or power hungry cabals of aristocrats and militaristic plutocrats, who having no interest in liberty, equality and fraternity, were lying in wait for the opportune moment to hi-jack the revolutions for their own selfish uses. There is no reason to think that this could not happen this time. It is also not unreasonable to think that the West and in particular the United States will not revert to historic type and only offer tepid encouragement to liberal reformers while continuing to do business with less than democratic replacement regimes who may yet emerge once our government is sure which way the wind is blowing. This is not based on conjecture. This is based on history.

Another assertion is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is only a tangential issue in the Middle East. Smith contends that the central issue is the struggles between Muslim political and geographic entities due to that inbred, inborn predilection for internecine violent Islamic factionalism. However, the fact is that most of the major modern violence in the region has been in response to or because of a single unsettling political event that originated outside its borders – the birth of colonoial Zionism at the end of the 19th Century.

Lest all Jews be tarred with the Zionist brush, it is important to differentiate Zionists from a sizeable number of Jews both inside and outside Israel who oppose Zionism. They oppose it, because its aim from the beginning was the establishment of an elitist Jewish State in which Muslim and Christian Arabs already living there would be turned into second class citizens obliged to accept and endure social and political apartheid. In time the West not only approved of the concept but enabled it in the mid-1940s.

Despite what Smith and others insistently proclaim, one has to be in complete denial of the facts about Israeli social and political policies to be able to persist in describing it as either a democracy in general and/or the “only democracy in the Middle East” in particular. The Israeli government is as heavy handed with its non-Jewish subjects as its Islamic counterparts are with their non-Muslim minorities not to mention their Muslim majorities. At best Israel is a limited democracy-wolf in sheep’s clothing.

At best it is an example of representative governance gone wrong, where a Jewish majority has been able to create an exclusivist state in which Jewish nationality provides supremacist rights and privileges not available to Israel’s non Jewish population. At best Israel is an example of representative governance gone wrong (or actually never went right), just as the United States was in the pre-Martin Luther King, Jr. era, or South Africa was in the pre-Nelson Mandela era in South Africa, or Czechoslovakia and Poland were in the pre-Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa eras.

Besides the myth of Israeli democracy, Smith resorts to other distortions to support the contention that there is nothing credible about the Palestinian movement in the West Bank and Gaza to be free of Israeli military rule and stranglehold on the Palestinian economy. He also ignores the Arab Muslim and Christian Arab struggle for equal social, civil, and human rights inside the Jewish State.

Finally and frequently he characterizes the PLO’s late leader, Yasser Arafat of waging “from 1960 to the time of his death. a campaign of terror targeting European as well as Israelis and other Arabs.” Arafat’s revolutionary lifetime arc actually progressed from terrorism to armed guerilla type struggle to mainly abandoning any kind of militant force. It very nearly paralleled that of his Zionist counterparts, many of whom such as Manchem Begin, Ytzak Shamir and Ariel Sharon became Prime Minister. Very nearly but not quite. It is irrefutable history that each of those Israeli “patriots” during their early careers as leaders of the violent opposition to the British Mandate not only engaged in indiscriminate retail terror against Arabs and the British but also inflicted it on non-Zionist Jews.

But unlike Arafat, those Israeli leaders never gave up terrorism. As leading government figures, each in his time personally green lighted the Israeli army’s retail reign of organized state approved terror against civilians that continues to this day. The Israeli military establishment tries to obscure this inescapable fact by officially terming the slaughter of civilians as comprehensible and therefore acceptable “standard deviations” from acceptable (!) norms. “Standard deviation” is the Israeli way of saying “collateral damage.”

Despite the incessant provocations, for about twenty years Arafat, in order to give negotiation a chance, was able to keep the lid on armed struggle despite the continuing expansion of settlements in the West Bank and Gaza and the murder of Palestinian civilians by Israeli soldiers and settlers. But in 2000 he was skillfully provoked by his old adversary, Sharon, into resuming guerilla warfare. Once begun, however, he could no longer keep the lid on the terror violence on his side, which is quite different from saying that he approved and controlled it. This is the historic reality of the inevitable factionalism within revolutionary struggles.

Smith’s so-called Islamic predilection for violence is the proof that the Palestinians’ principal political pursuit as exemplified by Arafat has been and is mindless groundless terrorism. Their desire for and their legitimate efforts on behalf of ending the occupation and establishing a viable state of their own doesn’t exist in his book. The only acceptable reality is the free-lance terror attacks that jeopardize Israeli security. To hold that deceptive thought, however, one must ignore the existence of the word “Liberation” as in Palestine Liberation Organization and deny freedom and justice as being the Palestinian goal and the PLO’s raison d’etre. Which brings up the existential question, When is a thug not a thug? Answer: When he is our thug.

So the brutality of the occupation, which was already the longest of the twentieth century, far from being tangential in the region remains a central cause of its fragile often shattered stability. Its political dimensions are enormous. As Jeff Halper, the Jewish-American Israeli Anti-Zionist anthropologist founder Coordinator of the Jerusalem based Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions (ICAHD) wrote earlier this month (June 2011), “Even though there are larger and bloodier conflicts in the Middle East, until the Palestinians signal the rest of the Muslim world that they have arrived at a political settlement with Israel and the time has come to normalize relations, the conflict is not over.Nothing can happen without them.”

The biggest Middle Eastern clash, Smith notwithstanding, remains as it has been for decades not the intermural political squabbles between Arab states. The on again off again occupation of Lebanon by Syria, Iraq’s short occupation of Kuwait, or the costly theocratic/geopolitical/economic struggle between Iraq and Iran are side shows to the main event that lies west of the Jordan River. That struggle has little to do with Smith’s so-called violent Islamic nature. It has everything to do with the reality of the comprehensible alarm and anger over the ulcerous would be exclusivist debilitating occupation of the western half of the old British Mandate by a Zionist crusade that was mainly Western in origin and has been Western enabled from the time it began.

A last stereotype that serves, in Smith’s opinion, to excuse the United States from provocative culpability in Middle East violence is Arab unity or pan Arabism. It “continues to be a resilient cultural force that Arab leaders use to manage their domestic affairs, legitimize their regional ambitions and create consensus out of dissonance and catastrophe.” Cultural force is one thing. Political force is another. There is, of course, Arab culture, which tends to homogenize social, tribal and family practices, of which both Muslim and Christian Arabs are proud; but except for a comprehensible political hostility to the exclusivist Jewish State, Arabs are far from politically or economically unified.

For just one example, oil production levels are a hot button issue. OPEC decision making conclaves are frequently immediately dishonored openly. Production levels were the underlying cause of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. It wanted to raise levels dramatically in order to sell enough oil to pay for its long war to contain Iranian expansion in the Persian Gulf region, a war that Arab oil producers, in particular Saudi Arabia, were eager to help finance through loans. But when the bills came due after the war ended and Iraq wanted to increase oil production in order to produce more oil with which to pay back the loans, the Saudis and others said “no.” The closest additional oil to Iraq was in Kuwait, hence the invasion. It is quite probable that, despite the need, Sadaam Hussein might never have launched it except for a kind of official ambiguous response to the notion of an attack when he put it to the U. S. ambassador. Sadaan interpreted it in a way that our government, perhaps to save face for its oracular blunder, insists never was intended.

Smith did get it right, when he described violent repressive authoritarian sectarianism as a force unique to the region for which there is no Western counterpart today. But even that has little to do with Islam’s bedrock Quranic tenets but much to do with the way the various regional leaders and both their dogmatic domestic undemocratic doctrinaire supporters and equally undemocratic opposition – sectarian or otherwise – manipulate them. The Quran, like Scripture, because of its literal ambiguities means what those in power want and say those ambiguities mean.

But even the spector of expanding constrictive authoritarian sectarian rule is not the sole reason for the regional unrest in which, according to Smith, Americans have played no consequential role. “This is an enticing exoneration,”The New York Times’ book reviewer concluded “but the United States is undeniably a player, and a certain amount of responsibility must surely go along with military hardware, troop deployments and subsidies to various regimes.”

Henry Higgins, of My Fair Lady fame complained, “Why can’t women be like men.” Similarly with Orientalists (among whom Christian fundamentalists and Zionists both secular and religious are numerous and prominent) the insistence seems to be that the Islamic Middle East ought to be more like us. Maybe that really is the problem. But I am reminded that Jesus told his followers, not their enemies, “First remove the beam in your eye.”

So I am afraid that as long as notions like Smith’s have traction in the home of manifest destiny, significant enemies to stability in the Middle East and security here at home will continue to infect U. S. policy makers on the left, middle and right. Driven by myopic jingoism and condescending Orientalism, they will create inimical policies that will cause us to perhaps lose what until now truly have been the long suffering yet forgiving liberal Islamic friends we do have in the Middle East. Instead by perpetuating our perilous course there, we will be enabling new tyrannical regimes. As a result, the collective we here at home and the collective they over there will continue to be big losers.