Dissident Veteran For Peace

David Atkins seems to be an honest Liberal, he unapologetically says Liberalism is "paternalistic" and an ideology that fully sanctions the use of violence in the name of the "weak and powerless". Of course, nearly everyone dresses up their use of violence in the garb of justice, freedom, or whatever.

Related to this is another contradiction peculiar to Liberal peace advocates—their unthinking embrace of tax-supported government progams in the name of equality, justice, etc. Liberals seldom seem to acknowledge that behind the tax collector is someone with a gun ready to put you behind bars if you don't pay up and to kill you if it comes to it. As Voltairine de Cleyre put it one hundred years ago: " ... even when the State does good things, it finally rests on a club, a gun, or a prison, for its power to carry them through."

Lost, too, is the lesson of Mohandas K. Gandhi: "The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence." And as Paulo Freire wrote more recently: "Welfare programs ... ultimately serve the end of conquest. They act as an anesthetic, distracting the oppressed from the true causes of their problems and from the concrete solutions of these problems. "

American Liberals ought to embrace the political approach of Conservatives who don't want tax funds used to support abortion and apply that to their opposition of US foreign wars but that's unlikely to happen. If Liberals embraced that principle they would have to reject their paternalism and embrace of force as a means to their ends.

Any way, I digress. What set me to thinking about all this was something I read today in Samuel Noah Kramer's History Begins at Sumer: Thirty-Nine Firsts in Recorded History (U Penn Pr, 1981). At least 3,762 years ago, some Sumerian scribe wrote down this bit of wisdom:

You can have a lord, you can have a king,
But the man to fear is the tax collector!

Labels: abortion, anarchism, freedom, Gandhi, history, politics, quotations

Do a Google search on the phrase "we love death" and you will get more than 37,000 hits, many of them describing a purportedly essential feature of Islam. But consider that it is primarily Christian nations that have the world's largest nuclear and conventional arsenals. Further, the predominantly Christian United States has likely been responsible for the violent and other premature deaths of more people than any other country in the last sixty years--including half-a-million children under the age of five in Iraq during the 1990s.

In the last seven years, the predominantly Christian US has invaded and occupied two predominantly Muslim countries: Afghanistan and Iraq at the cost of more than a million dead Afghanis and Iraqis. Over the last sixty years, the predominantly Christian US has been the most important backer of Israel which displaced the predominantly Muslim Palestinian people and continues to visit murder and mayhem upon them. The Christian President-elect Barack Obama has spoken openly about attacking another predominantly Muslim country, Pakistan.

In "The Spirit of Disobedience," Curtis White eloquently ties these threads together:

In the end, evangelical Christianity conspires with technical and economic rationalism. In the end, they both require a commitment to "duty" that masks unspeakable violence and injustice. In the end, the Muslim whose legs are being reduced to pulp by his American tormentor doesn't care if he's being murdered because he is despised by Christians or because he is an impediment to economic rationality. He understands far better than we do how the two become one at the end of the torturer's rod. The Predator missile, product of American scientific ingenuity, that homes in on his head is both self-righteously and arrogantly evangelical and meanly pragmatic. It is the empire that the rest of the world reads in George Bush's smirk. As John Ruskin understood 150 years ago, "The only question (determined mostly by fraud in peace, and force in war) is, Who is to die, and how?"

If we live in a "culture of death," as Pope John Paul II put it, it is a culture that is made possible by the advocates of both Reason and Revelation. In the opposition of Reason to Revelation, death cannot lose. Ours is a culture in which death has taken refuge in a legality that is supported by both reasonable liberals and Christian conservatives. Our exploitation of humans as "workers" is legal and somehow, weird and perverse though it may seem, generally acknowledged as part of our heritage of freedom, and virtually the entire political spectrum falls over itself to praise it. When Wal-Mart pays its employees impoverishing wages without adequate health or retirement benefits, we justify it out of respect for Wal-Mart's "freedom," its "reasonable" need to make itself "competitive," and because what it does is legal. As George Whalin, president of Retail Management Consultants, put it, "They don't have a responsibility to society to pay a higher wage than the law says you have to pay." Similarly, our use of the most fantastically destructive military power is also legal and also somehow a part of our heritage of "protecting freedom," no matter how obscene and destructive its excesses. The grotesque violence of video games and Hollywood movies, doing God knows what to the "individual morality" of teenagers, is legal and somehow now a protected part of our freedom of expression. Even, as the more thoughtful anti-abortionists complain with some justice, the legality of abortion at times covers over an attitude toward human life that subjects life to the low logic of efficiency and convenience. The idea of abortion as a minor "medical procedure" becomes Orwellian in its intense determination not to "know what we do." Or, perhaps most destructively, the legality of property rights condemns nature itself to annihilation even as we call it the freedom to pursue personal happiness and prosperity through the ownership of private property. This legality formalizes and empowers our famous "unalienable right" to property (especially that most peculiar form of private property known as the corporation), the exercise of which will profoundly alienate those on whom this right is inflicted: workers, children, foreign enemies, and animals. In its most extreme and universal form, our constitutional rights are reducible to the right not to have to love our neighbor. The irony is that the more energetically we pursue our individual, socially isolated right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," the deader the social and natural worlds become.

So, just who is it that demonstrably loves death, even if it is not articulated clearly? An American and/or Christian culture of death is abundantly evident. But what got me thinking about this subject was part of a post on the ZionistsOut blog about the head of the Jewish Federation of Greater Ann Arbor. It says:

The new JFGAA Executive Director is David Shtulman, a dual US-Israeli citizen, Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) veteran, and, in all likelihood, a current IOF reservist. ... in his weekly shabbat message--wittily entitled "The New Year Enters with a Bang!"--Herr Shtulman refers to the Israeli attacks as an "Israeli counter-attack on Hamas."

Shtulman next pulls a predictable role reversal of the Judaic culture of death with the unsourced claim: "Hamas has often responded with the mantra, 'We will win because we love death and Israel loves life.' " If Hamas uses this "mantra" frequently then it is pretty strange that it is not attributed to Hamas in the New York Times even once. In fact, in searches using two different databases, the phrase "we love death" turns up in the NYT archives only three times between 1851 and the present. The "mantra" never made it onto the news pages of the NYT.

In two instances, it appears in editorials by Jewish neoconservative pundit David Brooks. In March 2004, Brooks attributed it to Al Qaeda and by September of that year he had expanded it to the "fringes of the Muslim world." The third instance, was just five days before Brooks' second invocation of the "mantra." At the invitation of the NYT "Op-Ed page," in his proposed "conclusion to President Bush's [2004 RNC] address," former Bush I speech writer Daniel McGroarty attributed the phrase "to the statement the terrorists released to claim responsibility for the carnage ... in Madrid."

Terrorism: A Documentary and Reference Guide by Burns and Peterson (Greenwood, 2005), which includes Hamas, has only one documented reference to terrorists loving death and that is a statement attributed to "al-Qaeda in Europe" in connection with the Madrid bombings. It says: "You love life and we love death." There are two problems, though.

First, this is one of at least two statements claiming responsibility for the 2004 Madrid bombings. The apparently first alleged claim of responsibility by al-Qaeda does not say anything about loving death. It was discredited by the pro-Israel group, MEMRI. More importantly, a "two-year investigation into the attacks has found no evidence that al-Qa'ida helped plan, finance or carry out the bombings, or even knew about them in advance," which would indicate that both of the claims of responsibility are fabrications.

It is plausible that Shtulman's claim began as an Israeli false flag operation to smear Islam (see also the "Gil Affair" and "Israeli Psyops Against EU and US"). If that is the case, then it is awfully helpful to have someone to discredit the competing claim of responsibility. In this case the guy doing the discrediting, author of the MEMRI analysis, was Yigal Carmon, an IOF Colonel who served at least twenty years (1968-88) in the Israeli intelligence service. In sum, there is nothing credible linking Shtulman's "mantra" to Hamas. But since when have supporters of Israel ever cared about the truth?

One other example of a Muslim claiming a love of death is, perhaps, more credible than the claims attributed to al-Qaeda in 2004. A 2001 story by the Telegraph (UK) quotes a veteran Afghan fighter:

Maulana Inyadullah, who began fighting the Soviet invasion in 1982 at the age of 16, declared that his fellow Afghans relish the prospect of an American attack.

"War is our best hobby. The sound of guns firing is like music for us. We cannot live without war. We have no other way except jihad," he said. ...

Mr Inyadullah, 35, said: "The Americans would be easier to defeat than the Russians. The Americans lead lavish lives and they are afraid of death. We are not afraid of death. The Americans love Pepsi Cola, we love death."

But only an idiot or a liar would read this as a broad cultural embrace of death or a statement of theological principle. Rather, it is not a desire to die but an express willingness to do so, if need be, in the service of home and hearth with a good dose of braggadocio mixed in for good measure.

A willingness to die is similarly expected of American combat troops. And if Americans put greater stress on killing the enemy then, perhaps, it is simply because they ruthlessly put a premium on killing others and because the commanders know overcoming the normal human aversion to kill is the more difficult task unless, perhaps, you live in America where we are programmed to kill.

The willingness to sacrifice oneself, even in battle, is more humane and noble than the willingness to kill. As Jesus Christ said, "No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends." But this is an ethos that Christianity turned against centuries ago when it joined with the Roman Empire--the very empire that carried out the death sentence of Jesus. The "Constantinian moment" marks the key point in the transformation of the cross from a symbol of love, self-sacrifice, and hope into a symbol of death, empire, and greed. In the wake of this transformation came forced conversions, the Crusades, the Inquisition and the like. Whatever lip service they may pay to the older, nobler meanings, it is clear that for most Americans (and their victims) the deeper, lived reality is that the cross is a symbol of death and devout American Christians are largely "guilty bystanders," if not active participants, in the crimes of empire.

See also:

• "Judaism's Culture of Death"
• "Ralph Peters on Pax Americana & American Culture"
• "The 'General Eisenhower Warned Us' Hoax"
• Women Leaders in Muslim & Christian States

Labels: abortion, Christianity, critical thinking, Curtis White, Empire, Hollywood, Islam, Islamophobia, United States, violence

I finished reading Chris Hedges' American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America a couple of weeks ago (read an earlier Hedges essay by the same title here). It's a quick and interesting read but Hedges mainly fails to adequately address possible remedies to the social ills that promote religious fundamentalisms. His invocation of Karl Popper's warning against too much tolerance, i.e. Hedges' advocacy of more intolerance by the state for 'bad' people with 'bad' ideas—in this case Christian dominionists—is truly frightening. As Bryan Magee, who wrote Karl Popper and was a long time friend of the philosopher, noted: " 'The totalitarian liberal' was one of [Popper's] nicknames at the London School of Economics, and it was a perceptive one" (Confessions of a Philosopher, p. 183).

You don't secure freedom by restricting it. You have to give people a real stake in freedom, so that it is something they understand, value, and will struggle to keep. To do that you have to actually trust people with freedom. People are turning to fundamentalisms in America, in part, because in so many ways what passes for freedom in this country is a sham that has failed to deliver a fulfilling life. In the end, consumerism can never satisfy human needs for connection, value, and meaning. The increasing economic marginality of many Americans only hastens the spiritual crisis.

Hedges book tackles an important subject although his book can't really hold a candle to Sara Diamond's four books and fifteen years of research on the same subject matter. Then again, she hasn't written anything on the subject for nine years and doesn't bring the Christian perspective of Hedges. Richard A. Horsley while not delving much into the nuts and bolts of the Christian Right has continued to publish and has a more progressive and thoroughgoing political analysis than Hedges. I recommend his Religion and Empire: People, Power, and the Life of the Spirit as a short, inexpensive, and fascinating intro to his work.

In any event, what prompted me to start this post was Hedges' mention of the anti-abortion propaganda film, The Silent Scream. I decided to watch it for the first time. The film consists of a multimedia presentation by Bernard N. Nathanson, MD in which he narrates an ultrasound video of the abortion of a 12-week-old fetus and later shows graphic photos of the dismembered parts of aborted fetuses. Although I agree with Planned Parenthood's critique, The Facts Speak Louder, I think their title is dubious. The graphic images in the film may not speak more truthfully but they arguably speak louder and I can now understand why the film has been such a boon for anti-abortion activists.

With his two conversions, Nathanson is an interesting figure in his own right. His first conversion was from an abortion practitioner who had "presided over 75,000 abortions" and a founder of the National Abortion Rights Action League to high-profile anti-abortion activist. His second conversion—abandoning Judaism and converting to Roman Catholicism—happened in 1996 with the guidance of John McCloskey, an Opus Dei priest, and is, apparently, related to his conversion on abortion. Here's an excerpt from "Bernard Nathanson's Conversion" by Julia Duin:

There may be a deeper reason to Nathanson's disenchantment, [Orthodox rabbi, David Lapin] guesses, which has to do with the high level of Jews involved in the abortion business. Nathanson has written of the high percentage of Jewish abortionists. The new national leader of Planned Parenthood, who comes on board in June, is Gloria Feldt, a Jew.

"I believe that Bernard Nathanson's conversion to Catholicism is spurred not by theological deficiencies in a Judaism I don't believe he knew but by a deep compelling desire to distance himself from a faith whose secular wing has embraced abortion with a fervor," Lapin says.

"And there's no question about it. Boston Herald columnist Don Feder points out nearly half of the religious organizations endorsing abortion are Jewish in spite of Jews being 2.3 percent of the U.S. population, not 50 percent. The Jewish community is disproportionately represented in the pro-abortion movement. This taking up the cudgels for abortion is not by any means an expression of Judaism. It is a rejection of God and a rejection of the religious core of Judaism, and in those terms I understand why Bernard Nathanson had to seek another faith."

Lapin's opinion that pro-abortion activity is "a rejection of God and a rejection of the religious core of Judaism" finds some, albeit limited, support in the work of rabbi Eliezer Yehuda Waldenberg. Until his death last year, Waldenberg was a leading Orthodox authority on Halacha, i.e. Jewish religious law, and he specialized in medical questions. He was a judge on the Israeli government sponsored High Rabbinical Court and rabbi of the Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem. Jewish Medical Law (Jerusalem: Gefen, 1980) is a condensed version of his 21-volume Tzitz Eliezer; it was edited by Avraham Steinberg, M.D. and personally approved by Waldenberg.

In Part IV, Chapter 2 of Jewish Medical Law we find that abortion is permissible—provided, it is carried out within the first three months—when the pregnancy is life-threatening or just detrimental to the health of the Jewish mother, or if the Jewish mother is still nursing another child. Certain eugenic abortions, however, are permitted for Jewish women "up to the seventh month of pregnancy." The only permissible reason for a "gentile woman" to have an abortion is if "there is a life-threatening danger to the mother." In all instances, the "consent of the husband" should be "procure[d]" and a "Jewish physician is preferable to a gentile physician." Mordechai Halperin, M.D., of the above-mentioned Shaare Zedek Medical Center, suggests that the penalty, under Noahide law, for gentiles who perform abortions is death.

See also: Gems from "Jewish Medical Law"

Labels: abortion, Bernard Nathanson, Chris Hedges, Christianity, dominionism, eugenics, human reproduction, Judaism, Karl Popper, philosophy, religion

This story comes from the Sunday Times (UK) via Thirza Cuthand who blogs at Fit of Pique via brownfemipower. Before I quote the Times article, here's an excerpt from "Love's Last Farewell" by Richard A. Bamberg in Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction, edited by Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagel. (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1998):

"I'm speaking with Citizen Gerald Vanderlink. Record present date and time. Citizen Vanderlink and his life partner Citizen Dean Honeywell are considered to be the last two homosexuals in the North American federation and possibly the last two in the solar system. As we speak, Citizen Honeywell is comatose and not expected to regain consciousness."

I forced myself to remain calm. It wasn't easy.

"Citizen Vanderlink is faced with the imminent possibility of becoming the one and only homosexual in human existence. I'm here to learn a little of what it has meant for him. He has watched his subspecies go from a political force to an obscure minority. From what may have once been ten percent of the population to a single individual. One person, alone, among the seven billion inhabitants of the solar system.

"Few today remember the great controversy that raged throughout the early decades of the last century. The Morley process was developed to reverse the genetic flaw that caused homosexuality in humans. Now it has achieved 100 percent success. Tell me, Citizen Vanderlink, what was it like to live through that troubled time?"

I hadn't really expected that question, although I suppose I should have. It'd been eight, no, nearly ten years since I'd last heard the name of Morley and his damnable process. "What was it like?"

"Yes, Citizen. I can retrieve historical accounts, but I want to know what it felt like to one who was actually there and refused the process."

My voice was soft when I answered.

"Genocide."

Okay, now, here are several excerpts from "Science told: hands off gay sheep" by Isabel Oakeshott and Chris Gourlay (my comments appear in bold):

SCIENTISTS are conducting experiments to change the sexuality of “gay” sheep in a programme that critics fear could pave the way for breeding out homosexuality in humans.

The technique being developed by American researchers adjusts the hormonal balance in the brains of homosexual rams so that they are more inclined to mate with ewes.

It raises the prospect that pregnant women could one day be offered a treatment to reduce or eliminate the chance that their offspring will be homosexual. Experts say that, in theory, the "straightening" procedure on humans could be as simple as a hormone supplement for mothers-to-be, worn on the skin like an anti-smoking nicotine patch.

The research, at Oregon State University in the city of Corvallis and at the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, has caused an outcry. Martina Navratilova, the lesbian tennis player who won Wimbledon nine times, and scientists and gay rights campaigners in Britain have called for the project to be abandoned.

Navratilova defended the “right” of sheep to be gay. She said: “How can it be that in the year 2006 a major university would host such homophobic and cruel experiments?” She said gay men and lesbians would be “deeply offended” by the social implications of the tests.

It seems that Navratilova and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) blew the whistle on these experiments back in early November when Navratilova wrote letters to the Oregon State University and Oregon Health & Science University. In neither of the letters does she refer to any " 'right' of sheep to be gay."

But the researchers argue that the work is valid, shedding light on the “broad question” of what determines sexual orientation. They insist the work is not aimed at “curing” homosexuality.

One wonders if "the researchers" are being disingenuous here. Any light shed on 'causality' clearly has 'treatment' implications. Notice that "the researchers" have now also shifted from discussing sheep mating to human sexual orientation.

Approximately one ram in 10 prefers to mount other rams rather than mate with ewes, reducing its value to a farmer. Initially, the publicly funded project aimed to improve the productivity of herds.

The scientists have been able to pinpoint the mechanisms influencing the desires of “male-oriented” rams by studying their brains. The animals’ skulls are cut open and electronic sensors are attached to their brains.

By varying the hormone levels, mainly by injecting hormones into the brain, they have had “considerable success” in altering the rams’ sexuality, with some previously gay animals becoming attracted to ewes.

Professor Charles Roselli, the Health and Science University biologist leading the research, defended the project.

He said: “In general, sexuality has been under-studied because of political concerns. People don’t want science looking into what determines sexuality.

“It’s a touchy issue. In fact, several studies have shown that people who believe homosexuality is biologically based are less homophobic than people who think that this orientation is acquired.”

Yes, and for some of these people the belief that "homosexuality is biologically based" is a crutch that allows them to safely place LGBT people in a biodeterministic pigeonhole and evade granting them real freedom or agency in sexuality and/or gender identity.

Potentially, the techniques could one day be adapted for human use, with doctors perhaps being able to offer parents pre-natal tests to determine the likely sexuality of offspring or a hormonal treatment to change the orientation of a child.

Roselli has said he would be “uncomfortable” about parents choosing sexuality, but argues that it is up to policy makers to legislate on questions of ethics.

Yes, and the bought-and paid-for "policy makers" will pass the buck to 'the market' and the exigencies of 'scientific progress' and the market moguls will ostensibly leave it up to the 'consumer' and so it goes. This is clearly an ethical dodge by Roselli, who refuses to take any responsibility for his own choices.

Michael Bailey, a neurology professor at Northwestern University near Chicago, said: “Allowing parents to select their children’s sexual orientation would further a parent’s freedom to raise the sort of children they want to raise.”

Hmmm, "freedom to raise the sort of children they want," eh? For background on Bailey see "J. Michael Bailey and neo-eugenics" or "J. Michael Bailey Investigation"--both by transgender women.

Critics fear the findings could be abused.

Udo Schuklenk, Professor of Bioethics at Glasgow Caledonian University, who has written to the researchers pressing them to stop, said: “I don’t believe the motives of the study are homophobic, but their work brings the terrible possibility of exploitation by homophobic societies. Imagine this technology in the hands of Iran, for example.

“It is typical of the US to ignore the global context in which this is taking place.”

Why is it that so many Western academics never miss a chance to bash Iran? Perhaps Schuklenk had in mind the "the public hanging of two gay teenage lovers." Critical thinkers know that this charge was discredited or at least seriously undermined back in 2005. Citing Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission stated, "there is no conclusive information which suggests that the two young men were put to death based on consensual homosexual sex." As Richard Kim documents in The Nation this accusation is just another episode in a politically-driven campaign against Iran. See also "Does Iran's President Want Israel Wiped Off The Map - Does He Deny The Holocaust?"

Peter Tatchell, the gay rights campaigner, said: “These experiments echo Nazi research in the early 1940s which aimed at eradicating homosexuality. They stink of eugenics. There is a danger that extreme homophobic regimes may try to use these experimental results to change the orientation of gay people.”

Peter Tatchell mentions Nazis and eugenics but neglects to mention that eugenics laws and forced eugenic sterilizations were pioneered in the United States. Incidentally, eugenics also had deep roots in animal breeding.

Tatchell also campaigns for the apartheid state of Israel or, maybe, just gay rights above all else. In 2005, Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism (QUIT!) called for a boycott of World Pride Jerusalem. The boycott was in response to the July, 2005, call of 171 Palestinian non-governmental organizations "... for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel Until it Complies with International Law and Universal Principles of Human Rights."

But "gay rights campaigners" like Tatchell had other ideas. Tatchell argued: "While a boycott would not advance the Palestinian cause one iota, it would give comfort to the oppressors of lesbians and gays and undermine a genuine attempt at global solidarity against homophobia." However, Palestinians have spoken clearly about what they think will advance their cause and last year with virtually one voice they called for broad boycotts and divestment. The boycott of this particular event was unfortunate but World Pride organizers should never have agreed to hold the event in Jerusalem while Israel maintains its illegal annexation of part of the city, an illegal and brutal occupation in Gaza, the West Bank and the Golan, and second-class citizenship for non-Jews living in Israel--all while more than 6.5 million Palestinian refugees languish in exile because Israel will not allow them to return home.

He said that the techniques being developed in sheep could in future allow parents to “play God”.

Is deciding to prevent or terminate a pregnancy for financial or other personal reasons "play[ing] God," too? I wouldn't say so and I wouldn't object to sexual orientation selection in birth control/abortion on the grounds of playing God alone but different practical and ethical questions are involved when deciding to exercise "a parent’s freedom [sic] to raise the sort of children they want to raise." For instance, in China and India where abortion is legal and even encouraged gender selection abortions are illegal (although these legal proscriptions have not proven very effective).

To see what a couple of right-wing bloggers have to say on the subject go here and here.

Labels: abortion, eugenics, freedom, human reproduction, Iran, Israel, LGBT, science