Boston has been overcome by hysteria surrounding the Aqua Teen Hunger Force marketing campaign. The swift reaction of the authorities has been to criminalize speech. Screaming fire in a theater has morphed into the mutterings of any counter cultural innuendo. The forces of repression have figured out how to succeed where there counterparts of the sixties failed. At the same time, we find the rebirth of the Dada spirit, so sorely lacking until Aqua Teen has come to save the day. When I first started wheat pasting Meatwads around Boston with his pronouncements on world affairs, I knew there was something deep in the concept of marrying empty pop culture images with that of social commentary. After conversations with friends I was turned on to the Situationalist movement, specifically to the books Lipstick Traces, The Most Radical Gesture, and Beneath the Paving Stones. I had no idea how old of a concept I was dealing with, or that my particular choice of couplings would be prove so prescient. I’m encouraged by the reactions on the two NYTimes blog entries covering the story [1, 2]. More importantly though, I’m encouraged by the reaction of the two arrested for the “hoax” to the media after posting bail (see the video in the second NYTimes link). Finally someone responds with the absurdity for which the situation demands. We need more of this.
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The “Anybody but Rumsfeld” philosophy is just as dispicable as the ABB one. Consider what could have been asked of Rumsfeld’s replacement:
November 13, 2006
The Revolving Gates at the Pentagon
By Col. DAN SMITH
http://www.counterpunch.org/smith11132006.html
Excerpt:
They may well resurrect the charges lodged against Gates in 1987 and in 1991. They may ask him again whether he lied to Congress about the extent of his involvement in or knowledge of Iran-Contra. They may want to know whether the CIA, under his watch, altered national intelligence estimates on Soviet capabilities to make the threat seem worse than warranted. Their questioning might probe his involvement in providing military equipment and intelligence to Saddam Hussein during the 1980-1988 Iraq-Iran War, all of which helped Saddam in his battles against U.S. forces in 1991 in Operation Desert Storm. More broadly, Gates may be held to account once again for the CIA’s failure to predict the demise of the Soviet Union, the lack of monitoring of Saddam’s progress toward developing a nuclear weapon in the 1980s, and the “politicizing” of intelligence to support presidential biases.
Contrasted with:
December 5, 2006
Senators Praise Gates as a Welcome Change
By KATE ZERNIKE
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/05/washington/05cnd-scene.html
Excerpt:
Today, Mr. Gates arrived before the Senate as a savior, welcomed as “a refreshing breath of reality,” applauded from both sides of the aisle for his candor and forthrightness, pledges of bipartisanship and dialogue. And he was promised a speedy confirmation.
Great.
The following is a very short excerpt from an article called “Diversity at Brandeis: A real turkey” by Harry Mairson, which appeared in the Feb 2004 issue of The Watch, the Brandeis University magazine. It is a thorough dissection of the paradox of diversity at the university, and though it is concerned with the conflicting aims of a small school in a Boston suburb, it is representative of larger contexts and the reasoning presented here is no less devasting when scaled up.
The fall semester at Brandeis was marked by racial incidents which left students and faculty very upset. Were these actions of thoughtless individuals, or do they reflect deep-seated racism and intolerance in the Brandeis community? Those individually culpable must bear responsibility; the easiest, simplest, and maybe sufficient solution is to punish them as a warning and example to everyone, and move on. But the University administration has been additionally charged to address issues of diversity and tolerance, without merely casting bromides upon the troubled waters. What is the University supposed to do? What concrete actions should it take? Nobody really knows.
Fifteen years ago, someone had a concrete idea what to do. In the interest of—yes, encouraging diversity—Brandeis President Evelyn Handler oversaw removing the Hebrew letters from the University seal, putting “No classes” in the catalog instead of “Closed for Shmini Atzereth,” and introducing an “International Foods” line in one dining hall where you could get a plate of shrimp and black bean sauce. These moves were intended to address the need for a “character balance” on campus. Also created was a University Committee on Students of Color, formed to address the perceived difficulty of life at Brandeis for these students. At the same time, the University ran a “December Holiday Fair” which encountered various problems reported in the Justice, including considerable unease about a Christmas tree in the Usdan Student Center.
The consequent eruption of the greater Brandeis community was Krakatoan. The eminence grise of the Brandeis chaplains, Rabbi Albert Axelrad, publicly bemoaned the fate of Brandeis’ lost “Jewish soul”. For her ham-handed decisions, so laden with symbolism, President Handler got fired. She was run out like a Biblical scapegoat into the desert, cursed with the sins of her actions.
Then the pendulum reversed direction. In a significant symbolic gesture, Interim President Stuart Altman wore a kippah during the first commencement after Handleris’ departure, and in 1994, Jehuda Reinharz became President. At Brandeis’ fiftieth anniversary, Professor Jonathan Sarna, Braun Professor of American Jewish History, spoke approvingly of Reinharz returning Brandeis to matters Jewish, as quoted in the Jewish Advocate: “President Reinharz has been able to articulate a vision for the University that makes its ties to the Jewish community central to what the University is about. He glories in the University’s Jewishness.” Further quoted in a New York Times article, he said of the Handler era, “Brandeis was like a guy named Mendelssohn trying to pretend that he’s not Jewish. Once that came to an end, things improved quickly.” President Reinharz added in the Advocate article, “Brandeis is a microcosm of world Jewry, and this imposes special obligations upon us. We are seen today by the Jewish community as the think tank and action center of the Jewish community.”
The honest, straightforward words of Brandeis leaders are matched by commensurate actions—Brandeis puts its money where its mouth is. Banner investments of Brandeis, backed by millions of endowment dollars, include a large department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, a Hornstein Program in Jewish Communal Service (together having about 35 full time equivalent faculty, in a University that has about 200 tenured faculty), and an International Research Center on Jewish Women (now the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute). There are other similar programs and institutions I haven’t mentioned. A budding and inevitably pro-Israel Mideast Institute waits in the wings, with 20 million dollars already raised for it out of a 30 million dollar target. President Reinharz named Professor Sarna to head the search for an Institute director. I do not think Professor Sarna will have to look very far to find such a distinguished scholar and accomplished fundraiser.
You can characterize these commitments in various ways. You can call it the traditional focus of Brandeis. You can call it a well-run, consistent University with a carefully chosen set of priorities. You can call it building on our strengths. You can call it a good target for fund raising, on which the University crucially depends, especially during a capital campaign. You can call it tikkun olam. You can call it an academic extension of my Greater Boston Jewish family. They are all true. But you can’t call it a commitment to or an investment in diversity. Because it isn’t. It is the opposite of that. I’m not even sure that you can call it nonsectarian, one of the “four pillars” of the University’s mission statement.
See “Diversity at Brandeis: A real turkey” for the full article.
On Wednesday (6 Sept), I attended this year’s inagural event of the Brandeis University Crown Center for Middle East Studies, a panel discussion titled, “The Hezbollah-Israel War: What’s Next?” The panel consisted of Shai Feldman, director of the Crown Center, Dr. Abdel Monem Said Aly, a Senior Fellow of the Crown Center and director of the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo, and Charles Radin, the Boston Globe “Specialist on Religion and Society” and former Middle East correspondent to the Globe (a journalist who has been given the “thumbs up” by the Zionist media tormentor, CAMERA) . The speakers were introduced by Robert Art, Professor of International Relations in the Politics Department. The speakers were each given about a half hour to lecture, then the floor was opened to questions. In Art’s introduction, he tried to paint the discussion as a meeting of Israeli and Arab views, represented by Feldman and Aly, respectively, plus a journalist’s perspective for good measure.
“Shai” (everyone referred to him on a first name basis) scoffed in his seat at Art’s suggestion that he represented the “Israeli view.” He was the first to speak and took up this misrepresentation as the first item on his agenda. “You will find very quickly that my views do not express the Israeli perspective.” Appearances must be maintained, it seems. He first discussed how Hizbollah had effectively “won the battle of the narrative.” This, apparently, was Shai’s departure from the Israeli line and proved his objectivity and intellectual integrity. He then went on to enumerate the strategic victories that Israel enjoyed as a result of the conflict.
The conflict, in Shai’s view, was the result of Hizbollah’s violation of an unspoken agreement between it and Israel, which he coined as “the balance of terror.” According to the “balance of terror,” small border conflicts between Israel and Hizbollah were tolerated on the Eastern part of the border, near the Shebaa Farms and Golan Heights. Hizbollah violated this pact by kidnapping and killing soldiers on the Western part of the border. This taken together with the political climate in Israel, which was suffering from the fall-out of Sharon’s unilateral disengagement plan having resulted only in consistent violence from its places of “withdrawal,” namely Southern Lebanon and Gaza, had forced the government’s hand, according to Shai.
The strategic victories of Israel came in the form of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, the ensuing land and sea blockade, the war’s ability to effectively take the Golan Heights occupation out of the conversation, and exhausting a majority of Hizbollah’s long range rockets. The last point is an interesting one. Shai believes that diminishing Hizbollah’s long range capabilities, spending somewhere around 70% of their supplies, according to Shai (as compared to its Katyusha supplies, which are still plentiful), emboldens the US and Israel to engage Iran militarily. This was surprising to me. No doubt, the US looked eagerly upon as the events unfolded between Lebanon and Israel, hopeful that Hizbollah could be crippled and thus a major deterrent to a war on Iran would be eliminated (Hizbollah represented a deterrent to war on Iran in the sense that it is widely believed they would strike Israel in retaliation to a US attack on Iran). Just a few days before the panel discussion, I wrote in the introduction to the Ballistic Helmet zine that I hoped the disaster would prevent US violence against Iran based on the model of Israel and Hizbollah. At least according to Shai and other hawkish analysts and commentators, this is not the case—quite the opposite, in fact.
Shai’s view that Hizbollah had won the “battle of the narratives,” but lost strategically, has become the zeitgeist of his fellow commentators. Just a few days ago, I received clippings from my father that included Charles Krauthammer’s 2 September Houston Chronicle article “A promising moment not to be missed in the Mideast.” (My father’s clippings are a tried and true bellwether of the influential right’s opinion). Krauthammer quotes Nasrallah’s now famous “1 percent” statement saying essentially that, had he known the severity of Israel’s response, he never would’ve authorized the July 11 operation that captured the Israeli officers. Krauthammer wrote of the statement:
So much for the “strategic and historic victory” Hassan Nasrallah had claimed less than two weeks earlier. What real victor declares that, had he known, he would not have started the war that ended in triumph?
Nasrallah’s admission, vastly underplayed in the West, makes clear what the Lebanese already knew. Hezbollah may have won the propaganda war, but on the ground it lost. Badly.
Apparently, the propaganda war is far from over. Counter to his claim that Nasrallah’s statement has been underplayed in the West, a quick LexisNexis search for “Nasrallah” and “1 percent,” just within major US newspapers, reveals the statement was reported in the New York Times, the St. Petersburg Times, the Star Tribune, Newsday, the Washington Post (K’s own article), etc. What’s disturbing about this trend, although not at all surprising, is that these commentators are taking Nasrallah at face value (when convenient). Far more convincing than the rhetorical espousing of Nasrallah is what Robert Fisk wrote in his 16 July Independent article “Hizbollah’s response reveals months of planning“:
It now appears clear that the Hizbollah leadership [...] thought carefully through the effects of their border crossing, relying on the cruelty of Israel’s response to quell any criticism of their action within Lebanon. They were right in their planning. The Israeli retaliation was even crueler than some Hizbollah leaders imagined, and the Lebanese quickly silenced all criticism of the guerrilla movement.
Fisk, when later asked about the Nasrallah quote during an interview on DN!, said “Hizbollah, I think, is telling us a whopper.” He goes on:
They had clearly, with massive bunkers, underground storage depots, planned that war. They hit a warship. They hit an Israeli warship and almost sank it. They hit it on midships, killed four sailors and set it on fire for 15 hours. That wasn’t because some guy got up in the morning and ate his morning minutiae with cheese and said, “Oh, let’s hit a warship today.” No, that had been planned weeks, months before. You can’t just set that up, like that. And, of course, now, according to Seymour Hersh, we are led to believe and it’s possible that the Israelis planned their war for months before.
But to get back to the point—Shai’s analysis is totally devoid of considerations of what is right, just, or humane. Rather we are to consider only strategic victories and losses. It is our side versus their side (where our side surely means the state of Israel), and what passes for critical evaluation need only concern itself with the structures and operations of power.
In short, the Crown Center is engaged in realpolitik at its worst.
Taking this perspective, all sorts of abhorrent things become acceptable if the ends justify the means. With this in mind, its no surprise that Israel’s illegal use of cluster bombs—90 percent of which were dropped in the last days of the conflict leaving 100,000 unexploded bomblets—was mentioned during the talks. It’s no surprise that the continuing strangulation of Gaza was not mentioned. It’s no surprise that the refusal to grant a ceasefire while the Mediterranean was being poisoned by an oil leak caused by strikes against critical Lebanese infrastructure was mentioned. To the extent that these afford Israel strategic currency, they are perfectly acceptable to influential commentators such as Shai.
When asked about the unilateral disengagement plan for Gaza, Shai responded that it was motivated by the occupation causing an existential crisis for Israel—it challenged Israel’s self-identification of a democratic nation. Mind you it was not motivated by humanism or a respect for the dignity of the Palestinians living there—or a respect of Israeli dignity for that matter, either—after all, military occupation is dehumanizing to both the oppressor and oppressed. The democratic existential crisis is well-founded and much needed, however ethnic cleansing—be it under the name of a “peace process” or “unilateral disengagement”—is hardly the appropriate response.
