By William Fisher
The Republican convention gets my vote as the most expensive and deceptive bait-and-switch Un-Reality TV show of the year.
Before the TV networks turned on the switch, we heard from the "right wing" of the party, which adopted a platform embodying its "core principals": anti-abortion, anti-stem cell research, no gun control, prayer in schools, and so forth.
Then, in TV primetime, we had three superstars who obviously got confused and showed up at the wrong venue: Messrs. Giuliani (former mayor of New York City), Schwartzenegger (governor of California), and Pataki (governor of New York). All pro-life, all pro-stem cell, some even in favor of gun control. Imagine that!
Then, we had an even softer face of the party in the person of the president's wife, Laura, telling us how compassionate her husband really is.
Then we had the week's most vitriolic voice: Senator Zell Miller, a disaffected Democrat from the deep south, whose outrageous rhetoric made the next speaker, Vice President Dick Cheney, sound positively like a Sunday school teacher.
And, finally, came the president, who gave us a look at where America has been and where it's going.
A few examples:
"Soon every senior will be able to get prescription drug coverage, and nothing will hold us back. (We cut taxes and acted, so) our economy is growing again and creating jobs."
Fact: US economic growth has been worse than anemic, and the president would have to create 900,000 jobs a month between now and the election to avoid the worst record since Herbert Hoover just before the Great Depression of 1929. Last quarter, some 135,000 net new jobs were created. And most of these paid less than the ones workers lost. Much of the Bush tax cut benefited those who need them least.
"The story of America is the story of expanding liberty: an ever-widening circle."
Fact: America today is not "the story of expanding liberty". It is a story of diminished civil liberties and too-frequently botched prosecutions.
"To create jobs my plan will encourage investment and expansion by restraining federal spending, reducing regulation and making the tax relief permanent."
Fact: President Bush, far from restraining spending, has run up a budget deficit of historic highs, which American children and grandchildren will be paying for generations to come.
"To create jobs, we will make our country less dependent on foreign sources of energy (we will) help workers take advantage of the expanding economy to find better and higher-paying jobs.”
Fact: If my memory is correct, lessening our dependence on foreign sources of energy was part of the president's acceptance speech four years ago. Since when, what has been done is absolutely nothing. And that's with the Republicans in charge of the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives.
"(We) must allow small firms to join together to purchase (health) insurance at the discounts available to big companies... we will make sure that health decisions are made by doctors and patients, not by bureaucrats in Washington, DC."
Fact: The president's prescription drug "discount plan" is a gross act of public deception. Discounts will be minuscule. And the president would allow small business to "join together to purchase (health) insurance at the discounts available to big companies”, even though Bush's so-called health care initiative specifically bars the federal government from using its enormous purchasing power to negotiate with the drug companies for lower prices. Under the president's health care plan, decisions are not being made by doctors and patients; they are being made by drug manufacturers and insurance companies. Big money contributors all.
(And on education): "We are transforming our schools by raising standards and focusing on results."
Fact: The president — joined by liberal Senator Ted Kennedy — launched his "No Child Left Behind" education program to improve the quality of education — and then failed to fully fund it. The knowledge gained by American children remains near the bottom compared with test scores in virtually all advanced economies. A large proportion of US kids can't show you Mexico or Canada on a map!
But the president left his choicest remarks for the war on terror. He wrapped himself in Sept. 11 and declared: "We have fought the terrorists across the earth. We have tripled funding for homeland security and trained half a million first responders. We are transforming our military and reforming and strengthening our intelligence services. We are staying on the offensive, striking terrorists abroad so we do not have to face them here at home. And we are working to advance liberty in the broader Middle East because freedom will bring a future of hope and the peace we all want. Because we acted to defend our country, the murderous regimes of Saddam Hussein and the Taleban are history, more than 50 million people have been liberated and democracy is coming to the broader Middle East.
"We are serving a vital and historic cause that will make our country safer. Free societies in the Middle East will be hopeful societies, which no longer feed resentments and breed violence for export. Free governments in the Middle East will fight terrorists instead of harboring them, and that helps us keep the peace."
America's crusader-in-chief uttered not a word about Iran, nor about North Korea, whose threats are far graver than any the US ever faced from Iraq. Nor did he have anything to say about Afghanistan's return to the title of number one poppy-grower-to-the-world, nor about the pathetic non-planning for the Iraqi post-war, nor about the chaos that persists in both these places, nor of the ever-rising body count, nor of the hatred for US policy generated in the Middle East by its lopsided Israel policy and its ham-handed introduction of its Greater Middle East Initiative, nor about the findings of the Sept. 11 Commission or the slam-dunk intelligence that gave us the rationale for invading Iraq.
In this political theatre of the absurd, facts are mere inconvenient obstacles in the path of White House speechwriters.
One final word: A favorite construct of the president and his advisors is "striking terrorists abroad (means) we do not have to face them here at home". If there is some occult logic in this, it eludes me. The president needs to know that terrorists are multitaskers.
Before the convention began, columnist David Ignatius wrote: "Bush, who has defined himself through his role as a "wartime president", has a special responsibility this convention week to explain how (the war on terrorism) is going — and what strategy he will pursue if he wins a second term. Bush's rival, John Kerry, owes the country the same clarity."
In the event, the American people got neither from either. They deserve better.
The writer has managed economic development programs in the Middle East for the US State Department and the US Agency for International Development, and served in the international affairs area in the Kennedy administration.
Sunday, September 05, 2004
Thursday, September 02, 2004
THOSE DISAPPEARING NUMBERS
By William Fisher
It appears that as US casualties in Iraq edge ever-closer to 1,000, reports of the numbers of KIAs move further and further away from the front pages of American newspapers and the top of the TV evening news.
These days, with a few exceptions, US military casualties in Iraq are being reported as parts of other stories – for example, the battle for Najaf – or buried deep inside the paper or not reported at all. And information about Iraqi casualties is even harder to find, since the Pentagon does not track this figure.
Is this some vast journalistic or bureaucratic conspiracy to make President Bush look better? I don’t think so. I think what’s happening may be even worse. The US media – especially television -- always finds it difficult to cover more than one big story at the same time. Added to this multitasking challenge is the sense that the American public is just plain tired of reading and hearing these awful numbers. And who can blame them?
There will no doubt be a huge burst of ink and air when the KIA number reaches the ‘magic’ 1,000. After that, I suspect the issue will go back into hibernation as the political campaign gets even hotter – or some other high profile rape case eats up all the media time and space.
So, just for the record, here are the numbers:
As of September 1, 978 US military have been killed since the war began, on March 19, 2003, Since the President declared "Mission Accomplished", on May 1, 2003, 839 American troops have lost their lives. KIAs since the capture of Saddam Hussein on December 13, 2003, total 518. And 121 have been killed since the ‘handover of sovereignty’ on June 29, 2004.
There were an additional 127 deaths among non-US coalition forces, and 132 American fatalities in Afghanistan. Another 6,916 US fighters have been injured.
According to Patrick McDonnell of the Washington Post, “Although attention in recent weeks has focused on Najaf, where US forces battled Shiite Muslim militiamen, most of the deadly confrontations for American troops in newly independent Iraq have occurred in the Baghdad area and the so-called Sunni Triangle to the north and west. The concentration of attacks in those areas is a reminder that the fiercest and most organized opposition to US forces and the US-backed interim government continues to be in Sunni-dominated cities, such as Fallouja. Nationwide, US forces are being attacked 60 times per day on average, up 20% from the three-month period before the hand-over.”
President Bush now admits to a “miscalculation” in what he describes as a “catastrophic success”, and John Kerry tells us he would have voted to go to war even if he knew then what he knows now.
And neither of these gladiators appears to have a clue about how to get us out of what can no longer be denied is a major quagmire.
Earlier in our Iraqi adventure, many pundits pooh-poohed the notion that it could be compared to Vietnam. Our Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, assured us that all would be well, and that ”democracy is messy”. Unfortunately, it has turned out to be a lot messier than Rummy imagined or that the Pentagon planned for – if it planned at all.
What we are learning from Iraq – and what we should have learned from Vietnam – is that policies have consequences. And that the doctrine of preemption has deadly consequences.
We need to remember that. And, even more importantly, we need to remember that ‘the numbers’ we’re no longer seeing aren’t just numbers – they’re people. Young people who won’t ever get older.
Think about it.
It appears that as US casualties in Iraq edge ever-closer to 1,000, reports of the numbers of KIAs move further and further away from the front pages of American newspapers and the top of the TV evening news.
These days, with a few exceptions, US military casualties in Iraq are being reported as parts of other stories – for example, the battle for Najaf – or buried deep inside the paper or not reported at all. And information about Iraqi casualties is even harder to find, since the Pentagon does not track this figure.
Is this some vast journalistic or bureaucratic conspiracy to make President Bush look better? I don’t think so. I think what’s happening may be even worse. The US media – especially television -- always finds it difficult to cover more than one big story at the same time. Added to this multitasking challenge is the sense that the American public is just plain tired of reading and hearing these awful numbers. And who can blame them?
There will no doubt be a huge burst of ink and air when the KIA number reaches the ‘magic’ 1,000. After that, I suspect the issue will go back into hibernation as the political campaign gets even hotter – or some other high profile rape case eats up all the media time and space.
So, just for the record, here are the numbers:
As of September 1, 978 US military have been killed since the war began, on March 19, 2003, Since the President declared "Mission Accomplished", on May 1, 2003, 839 American troops have lost their lives. KIAs since the capture of Saddam Hussein on December 13, 2003, total 518. And 121 have been killed since the ‘handover of sovereignty’ on June 29, 2004.
There were an additional 127 deaths among non-US coalition forces, and 132 American fatalities in Afghanistan. Another 6,916 US fighters have been injured.
According to Patrick McDonnell of the Washington Post, “Although attention in recent weeks has focused on Najaf, where US forces battled Shiite Muslim militiamen, most of the deadly confrontations for American troops in newly independent Iraq have occurred in the Baghdad area and the so-called Sunni Triangle to the north and west. The concentration of attacks in those areas is a reminder that the fiercest and most organized opposition to US forces and the US-backed interim government continues to be in Sunni-dominated cities, such as Fallouja. Nationwide, US forces are being attacked 60 times per day on average, up 20% from the three-month period before the hand-over.”
President Bush now admits to a “miscalculation” in what he describes as a “catastrophic success”, and John Kerry tells us he would have voted to go to war even if he knew then what he knows now.
And neither of these gladiators appears to have a clue about how to get us out of what can no longer be denied is a major quagmire.
Earlier in our Iraqi adventure, many pundits pooh-poohed the notion that it could be compared to Vietnam. Our Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, assured us that all would be well, and that ”democracy is messy”. Unfortunately, it has turned out to be a lot messier than Rummy imagined or that the Pentagon planned for – if it planned at all.
What we are learning from Iraq – and what we should have learned from Vietnam – is that policies have consequences. And that the doctrine of preemption has deadly consequences.
We need to remember that. And, even more importantly, we need to remember that ‘the numbers’ we’re no longer seeing aren’t just numbers – they’re people. Young people who won’t ever get older.
Think about it.
Najaf, Arab crises and the road to regional self-determination
The article below is the work of Rami Khoury, Executive Editor of The Daily Star newspaper in Beirut.
The urban warfare in the Iraqi city of Najaf that pitted the ragtag Mehdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr against the combined armed forces of the American and Iraqi governments has been defused for the moment. Events in Najaf mirrored the fundamental personal emotions and public political forces that drive events in the increasingly violent Middle East: a motley band of young men with personal weapons following a volatile young leader stood their ground, challenged their national government in Baghdad, and suicidally fought the strongest military power in world. The crisis was defused through the personal intervention of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the leading Shiite religious authority in Iraq (who originally comes from Iran).
The events help us to identify the real forces that drive the lives of the Sadr loyalists and the institutions of Iraqi society. Those can be summed up as the five crises that define the modern Arab world, which I listed last week as:
1. A crisis of sustainable human development, reflected in stagnation and disparity in water, jobs, nutrition, education, health and other human needs;
2. A crisis of sensible and stable statehood, with most Arab countries having suffered civil war, rebellions, border conflicts, terror and widespread emigration;
3. A crisis of citizenship rights, with public power and force exercised by small groups of unelected, unaccountable people;
4. A crisis of competing identities, including the modern state, pan-Arabism, Islam, tribalism, ethnicity, regional affiliations, gangsterism, commercialism, democracy, resistance,
terrorism and others;
5. A crisis of coexistence and unclear relations with Israel, Turkey, Iran, the USA and other external powers.
The cumulative consequences of these five crises, as reflected in the Najaf events, are very clear for those who wish to see them:
Low, erratic human development has generated millions of distressed individual Arabs whose daily life needs are so poorly met that they will gravitate to demagogues like Moqtada al-Sadr, in a desperate, often suicidal quest for money or meaning in their depleted lives.
They and others like them have battled every government in Baghdad in modern history, including the British, the Baathists, the Americans and the interim government of Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi - because the centralized state has not served them or reflected their identity and needs. US President George W. Bush and Iyad Allawi promised Iraqis democracy, and sent tanks and helicopter gunships to Najaf.
Sadr partisans and many other Arabs seek refuge in the gun, the tribe, and the Divine because they do not find either personal solace or political meaning in being citizens of an Iraqi state that honors their rights and spells out their responsibilities. The bond of citizen-state relations is badly broken.
Arab citizens everywhere resort to tribal, religious and regional identities because their modern state's laws and institutions have not ensured the critical basic needs of its citizens in three key areas: material needs, political accountability and participation, and manifestation of a credible, common national identity. When you need a job in the Arab world, you do not go to the Labor Ministry, but to your cousin. When you need to confront your own government, you do not go to Parliament with draft legislation, but to your sacred shrine with shoulder-fired missiles. When you need a mediator to defuse a crisis, you do not seek out politicians or civil society leaders, but your most holy man.
Tensions inside Iraq are partly due to the country's imprecise, fluctuating relations with key external powers such as the United States, Israel, Iran, Turkey and Syria, many of which interfere in internal Iraqi affairs, creating a chronic cycle of cross-border tensions.
This simultaneous manifestation of all five modern Arab crises in Iraq highlights how difficult it will be to achieve the sort of stability, democracy and progress that all Iraqis desire and deserve. Not a single Arab country to date has adequately resolved any of these five crises in a sustainable manner. None has seriously attempted to resolve the core weakness that underpins them all: the fact that the Arab citizenry in every country has never had an honest opportunity to define the broad parameters of statehood, or the more technical issues related to promoting political representation and accountability, cultural and ethnic pluralism, and realistic balances in areas such as religion and secularism, gender roles and rights, state power vs. individual rights, and central government vs. provincial authority.
Iraq suggests that the chronic crises of the modern Arab world will not be resolved by foreign armies or local militias. Yet, ironically, Iraq may turn out to be the first modern example of an Arab country whose citizens had the opportunity to define their basic national institutions and values. No existing power structure in any Arab country was established by the freely expressed will of the majority of its own citizens. All reflect the decisions of former colonial powers, or their chosen local elites, or native groups and officers that seized power after independence.
The answer to the crises of the Arab world is not to perpetuate their underlying causes - foreign armies, local autocrats, populist demagogues, rampant human despair, fragile national institutions. The answer is in granting the Arab people the opportunity to exercise their right of self-determination - once and for all to define their own state and national structures, devise responsive governance systems, work out relations with neighbors and distant powers, and decide the most appropriate balance in their lives and lands among the tribe, the gun, the law, the state and the divine.
The urban warfare in the Iraqi city of Najaf that pitted the ragtag Mehdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr against the combined armed forces of the American and Iraqi governments has been defused for the moment. Events in Najaf mirrored the fundamental personal emotions and public political forces that drive events in the increasingly violent Middle East: a motley band of young men with personal weapons following a volatile young leader stood their ground, challenged their national government in Baghdad, and suicidally fought the strongest military power in world. The crisis was defused through the personal intervention of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the leading Shiite religious authority in Iraq (who originally comes from Iran).
The events help us to identify the real forces that drive the lives of the Sadr loyalists and the institutions of Iraqi society. Those can be summed up as the five crises that define the modern Arab world, which I listed last week as:
1. A crisis of sustainable human development, reflected in stagnation and disparity in water, jobs, nutrition, education, health and other human needs;
2. A crisis of sensible and stable statehood, with most Arab countries having suffered civil war, rebellions, border conflicts, terror and widespread emigration;
3. A crisis of citizenship rights, with public power and force exercised by small groups of unelected, unaccountable people;
4. A crisis of competing identities, including the modern state, pan-Arabism, Islam, tribalism, ethnicity, regional affiliations, gangsterism, commercialism, democracy, resistance,
terrorism and others;
5. A crisis of coexistence and unclear relations with Israel, Turkey, Iran, the USA and other external powers.
The cumulative consequences of these five crises, as reflected in the Najaf events, are very clear for those who wish to see them:
Low, erratic human development has generated millions of distressed individual Arabs whose daily life needs are so poorly met that they will gravitate to demagogues like Moqtada al-Sadr, in a desperate, often suicidal quest for money or meaning in their depleted lives.
They and others like them have battled every government in Baghdad in modern history, including the British, the Baathists, the Americans and the interim government of Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi - because the centralized state has not served them or reflected their identity and needs. US President George W. Bush and Iyad Allawi promised Iraqis democracy, and sent tanks and helicopter gunships to Najaf.
Sadr partisans and many other Arabs seek refuge in the gun, the tribe, and the Divine because they do not find either personal solace or political meaning in being citizens of an Iraqi state that honors their rights and spells out their responsibilities. The bond of citizen-state relations is badly broken.
Arab citizens everywhere resort to tribal, religious and regional identities because their modern state's laws and institutions have not ensured the critical basic needs of its citizens in three key areas: material needs, political accountability and participation, and manifestation of a credible, common national identity. When you need a job in the Arab world, you do not go to the Labor Ministry, but to your cousin. When you need to confront your own government, you do not go to Parliament with draft legislation, but to your sacred shrine with shoulder-fired missiles. When you need a mediator to defuse a crisis, you do not seek out politicians or civil society leaders, but your most holy man.
Tensions inside Iraq are partly due to the country's imprecise, fluctuating relations with key external powers such as the United States, Israel, Iran, Turkey and Syria, many of which interfere in internal Iraqi affairs, creating a chronic cycle of cross-border tensions.
This simultaneous manifestation of all five modern Arab crises in Iraq highlights how difficult it will be to achieve the sort of stability, democracy and progress that all Iraqis desire and deserve. Not a single Arab country to date has adequately resolved any of these five crises in a sustainable manner. None has seriously attempted to resolve the core weakness that underpins them all: the fact that the Arab citizenry in every country has never had an honest opportunity to define the broad parameters of statehood, or the more technical issues related to promoting political representation and accountability, cultural and ethnic pluralism, and realistic balances in areas such as religion and secularism, gender roles and rights, state power vs. individual rights, and central government vs. provincial authority.
Iraq suggests that the chronic crises of the modern Arab world will not be resolved by foreign armies or local militias. Yet, ironically, Iraq may turn out to be the first modern example of an Arab country whose citizens had the opportunity to define their basic national institutions and values. No existing power structure in any Arab country was established by the freely expressed will of the majority of its own citizens. All reflect the decisions of former colonial powers, or their chosen local elites, or native groups and officers that seized power after independence.
The answer to the crises of the Arab world is not to perpetuate their underlying causes - foreign armies, local autocrats, populist demagogues, rampant human despair, fragile national institutions. The answer is in granting the Arab people the opportunity to exercise their right of self-determination - once and for all to define their own state and national structures, devise responsive governance systems, work out relations with neighbors and distant powers, and decide the most appropriate balance in their lives and lands among the tribe, the gun, the law, the state and the divine.
Friday, August 27, 2004
HITTING THE THIRD RAIL
By William Fisher
I am about to hit the third rail of American politics: Saying something less than gushingly laudatory about the 9/11 Commission.
Well, it’s actually less about the Commission than it is about the testimony of some of its members at hearings last week before a couple of committees of the House of Representatives.
The subject was ‘public diplomacy’. Translating this Washington-speak, public diplomacy consists of the things we say and do to get the world to understand and love us. More specifically, the hearings were about how the United States should reach out to the Muslim world.
The Commission’s report was absolutely right in saying that the US cannot win the battle against terrorism with the military alone, that we’re also fighting a war of ideas, and we can only win that war with better ideas. “The United States must do more to communicate its message”, the Commission’s report declares.
But what is the message? According to Commission Chairman Thomas Kean, Vice-Chairman Lee Hamilton, and Commission member Jamie Gorelick, the American message needs to be about our moral values, about how generous the American people are, about the need for better education, more libraries, women’s rights, closing the digital divide, and religious, racial and ethnic tolerance.
That’s all good stuff. But Commission members, in their scrupulous and unusual effort to remain nonpartisan, were visibly walking on political eggs to avoid any mention of the indispensable factor in the public diplomacy equation: Policy.
Yet every poll taken in the last few years tells us it is not America that is hated around the world, it is American foreign policy. And neither the Commission witnesses, nor any of the Republicans on these House committees, was prepared to discuss policy.
Only the ranking Democrats on the committees, Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio and Rep. Tom Lantos of California, weighed in with policy rants, and even these two Democrats disagreed on many issues. US policy toward Israel, for example.
Which made the discussion about tools. The tools we should be using to influence the world: Broadcasts, exchange programs, aid to strengthen economic development and civil society, and suchlike. This is a useful discussion because, unlikely as it may seem, the country that virtually invented modern communications has not been hugely successful in the way it uses its tools.
But tools are only messengers. They don’t make the message; they simply convey it.
But trying to discuss public diplomacy without discussing foreign policy is like moving bureaucratic boxes around and persuading voters you’ve actually achieved something. It makes hearings like these even more farcical than most of what goes on in Congress.
Ever since the 9/11 Commission issued its final report, the men and women of our Congress have been running for political cover like cats on a hot tin roof. It has been seen as something approaching blasphemy to question any of the Commission’s findings and recommendations – President Bush simply couldn’t wait to get to the Rose Garden to announce he was going to appoint an intelligence czar and create a national counter-terrorism center.
The Commission should not be faulted for avoiding partisan and inevitably rancorous foreign policy debates. That’s what we elect an Administration and a Congress to do. And that’s what we have a right to expect – and aren’t getting – from our quadrennial electoral process.
What is clear is that we have many failed foreign policies and a President who won’t say so. If those are givens, why are we wasting the taxpayers’ money discussing tools?
About the writer: William Fisher has managed economic development programs in the Middle East for the US State Department and the US Agency for International Development, and served in the international affairs area in the Kennedy Administration.
I am about to hit the third rail of American politics: Saying something less than gushingly laudatory about the 9/11 Commission.
Well, it’s actually less about the Commission than it is about the testimony of some of its members at hearings last week before a couple of committees of the House of Representatives.
The subject was ‘public diplomacy’. Translating this Washington-speak, public diplomacy consists of the things we say and do to get the world to understand and love us. More specifically, the hearings were about how the United States should reach out to the Muslim world.
The Commission’s report was absolutely right in saying that the US cannot win the battle against terrorism with the military alone, that we’re also fighting a war of ideas, and we can only win that war with better ideas. “The United States must do more to communicate its message”, the Commission’s report declares.
But what is the message? According to Commission Chairman Thomas Kean, Vice-Chairman Lee Hamilton, and Commission member Jamie Gorelick, the American message needs to be about our moral values, about how generous the American people are, about the need for better education, more libraries, women’s rights, closing the digital divide, and religious, racial and ethnic tolerance.
That’s all good stuff. But Commission members, in their scrupulous and unusual effort to remain nonpartisan, were visibly walking on political eggs to avoid any mention of the indispensable factor in the public diplomacy equation: Policy.
Yet every poll taken in the last few years tells us it is not America that is hated around the world, it is American foreign policy. And neither the Commission witnesses, nor any of the Republicans on these House committees, was prepared to discuss policy.
Only the ranking Democrats on the committees, Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio and Rep. Tom Lantos of California, weighed in with policy rants, and even these two Democrats disagreed on many issues. US policy toward Israel, for example.
Which made the discussion about tools. The tools we should be using to influence the world: Broadcasts, exchange programs, aid to strengthen economic development and civil society, and suchlike. This is a useful discussion because, unlikely as it may seem, the country that virtually invented modern communications has not been hugely successful in the way it uses its tools.
But tools are only messengers. They don’t make the message; they simply convey it.
But trying to discuss public diplomacy without discussing foreign policy is like moving bureaucratic boxes around and persuading voters you’ve actually achieved something. It makes hearings like these even more farcical than most of what goes on in Congress.
Ever since the 9/11 Commission issued its final report, the men and women of our Congress have been running for political cover like cats on a hot tin roof. It has been seen as something approaching blasphemy to question any of the Commission’s findings and recommendations – President Bush simply couldn’t wait to get to the Rose Garden to announce he was going to appoint an intelligence czar and create a national counter-terrorism center.
The Commission should not be faulted for avoiding partisan and inevitably rancorous foreign policy debates. That’s what we elect an Administration and a Congress to do. And that’s what we have a right to expect – and aren’t getting – from our quadrennial electoral process.
What is clear is that we have many failed foreign policies and a President who won’t say so. If those are givens, why are we wasting the taxpayers’ money discussing tools?
About the writer: William Fisher has managed economic development programs in the Middle East for the US State Department and the US Agency for International Development, and served in the international affairs area in the Kennedy Administration.
AMERICAN GULAG
By William Fisher
If you think prisoner abuse is about Abu Ghraib and a ‘few bad apples’, reading Mark Dow’s American Gulag may make you think again.
Dow is a journalist and former teacher at the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) detention center in Miami. He has spent years interviewing inmates, guards, and officials at that and the many other detention centers run by INS (now part of the new Department of Homeland Security).
"Long before Abu Ghraib, and even before September 11th”, Dow told The New Yorker magazine, “detainees in America's immigration prisons were being stripped, beaten, and sexually abused.” They were also being routinely deprived of the most basic civil rights.
Since September 11, immigration policy has become far more stringent, targeting Arab, Muslim, and South Asian foreign nationals. “Attorney General John Ashcroft has repeatedly used the term ‘terrorist’ to describe detainees, “when he was certainly in a position to know that they were not terrorists.” In fact, Dow writes, most had overstayed their visas, which could get them deported, but which is not a crime. Immigration law is not part of the US criminal justice system – which gives the INS virtually unlimited scope to hold people indefinitely, without charge, without access to attorneys, and without public disclosure.
Dow’s book describes a chamber of horrors that followed the 9/11 tragedy and the sweeping round-up of Arabs and Muslims.
Egyptian detainees held in Alabama go on a hunger strike. A Palestinian is transferred from jail to jail to keep him from contacting the media. He is told by INS officials that a condition of his release is that he cannot speak to the media about his case. If he does, they will lock him up again. An Egyptian man is confined for two months before being allowed to call a lawyer. He is given no soap or towels for a week and meanwhile interrogated. He says correctional officers stomped on his bare feet.
A Pakistani man, Mehmood, “had been traveling between Pakistan and the US since the mid-1980s. He was in the import export business. In the 1990s, he overstayed his five-year renewable visa…(He) had not been particularly surprised or concerned when, three weeks after (9/11), 25 FBI agents came knocking at the door of his Bayonne, New Jersey, home while he slept. He knew the authorities were ‘coming to Muslim houses. They just want to search us’, he said. Agents found ‘suspicious’ items – a flight simulator, a flying lesson logbook, box cutters and a hazardous materials driving permit. “But”, says Dow, “ with minimal investigation, the ‘case’ evaporated”. There were plausible – and confirmed – reasons for Mehmood to have had these items. His most serious breach of the law was altering the no-work line of his Social Security card.
When the FBI finished interviewing him, they said, “We have no problem with you. Now it’s up to the INS if they want to take you or not.” The INS arrested him. They told his wife she could expect a call from him in four to six hours, and that he would probably be freed on bail and might even get a ‘Green Card’. Bail was never set.
Dow writes: “For the first two months…Mehmood was moved each week to a new cell, handcuffed and shackled to be moved those few feet. After three weeks, he was allowed to make his first legal phone call. He was kept inside his cell for 24 hours day.” Then he was transferred first to Manhattan and then to Brooklyn. When he arrived in Brooklyn, he alleges, seven or eight correctional officers threw him out of the van, dragged him across the floor, and then threw him against a wall…with their full power.” He was injured.
Mehmood was charged with altering his social security card. He pled guilty and was sentenced to time served. He was deported back to Pakistan in mid-April, 2002. In that year, and in early 2003, “at least four charter flights took large groups of Pakistanis who had no proper documentation – or ties to terrorists – back to Pakistan. The INS called the charters “routine”. Even after Mehmood was back in Pakistan, Dow says, “Immigration officials said they could not comment on specific cases.”
Dow asks why Mehmood was held in the Special Housing Unit at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center, “a federal prison, for four months and two days, and denied access to legal help and to his family for weeks?”
Dow concludes: The Bush Administration has “exploited our national trauma to extend law enforcement authority, as the long-standing biases within the Justice Department against Muslims and Arabs became politically correct.” None of this, he adds, “has anything to do with immigration…It's simply the result of excessive authority and an obsession with secrecy.”
“Today, the immigration agency holds some 23,000 people in detention on a given day and detains about 200,000 annually. The prisoners are held in the INS’s service processing centers; in local jails; in facilities owned and operated by private companies…and in Bureau of Prisons facilities, including federal penitentiaries. Wherever they are held, INS prisoners are ‘administrative detainees’; they are not serving a sentence…Immigration detainees can be held for days, months, or years…Detainees who came (to the US) from Cuba during the 1980 ‘Mariel boatlift’ are still in detention, despite a US Supreme Court against indefinite detention.” The reason given by INS is that Cuba has refused to take them back.
Detainees tend to fall into four categories: Those who have entered the US without proper documentation, including asylum-seekers (10-13% of all detainees); people with, say, a visa overstay, who can be picked up by an immigration agent and taken to detention -- either an immigration detention center or a contracted jail; people with some kind of criminal conviction -- once an immigrant completes a prison sentence, he or she can be turned over to the immigration service; finally, there is a fourth category, labeled “special detention”, for those thought to be associated with ‘terror’.
“Local politicians and business entrepreneurs have taken full advantage of the revenue possibilities in immigration detention”, Dow writes. ”The Federal Government paid New York County $45.00 per detainees per day, although it only cost the prison $24.37 to maintain each prisoner.”
“When detentions increased following the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York City and the Pentagon, private prison profiteers saw another opportunity. The Chairman of the Houston-based Cornell Companies spoke candidly in a conference call with other investors: ‘It can only be good…with the focus on people that are illegal and also from Middle Eastern descent…In the US there are over 900,000 undocumented individuals from Middle Eastern descent…That’s half of our entire prison population…The Federal business is the best business for us…and the events of September 11 (are) increasing that level of business…”
“The prisons themselves are often gruesome,” Dow writes. The guards are “often unprepared for the environment.” One officer, after being convicted for repeatedly kicking and punching an inmate, told Dow, “It was a situation I had never been in … I reacted … I don't know what happened.”
Almost as disturbing is the veil of secrecy surrounding the detention centers. In his investigations, Dow was often prevented from interviewing prisoners, accessing medical records, and looking at immigration guidelines. Dow also found that INS answers to no one. It eschews formal regulations. There are no monitors or independent watchdogs. Most of what we know about these prisons comes from a handful of journalists, working tirelessly to "make public what the INS tries to hide."
In its new home at the DHS, Dow says, “The secretive immigration prison world is likely to be pulled even further from public scrutiny.”
That high levels of government are aware of the situation is clear. FBI whistle-blower agent Colleen Rowley expressed concern over the pressure from FBI offices to round up Arabs in order to fill the detention centers. A newsletter from the Justice Department says, “An alien's constitutional status in this country might be something that the government can use when an alien detainee challenges his or her treatment in detention.“ Dow finds this “astonishing, and disturbing, because it tells me that high-ranking Justice Department officials know about the treatment of these detainees, but instead of trying to do something about the conditions, they're looking for a way to justify those conditions.”
On paper, he says, there are INS standards regarding immigration conditions, including attorney visitation, media interviews, law libraries, and other crucial aspects of prison life. But, says the American Civil Liberties Union, “By refusing to promulgate these standards as regulations, the INS insured that they would be difficult if not impossible to enforce.”
Dow adds: “This effort to operate outside the bounds of enforceable law is no accident…“ Attorney General Ashcroft has “likened his new policy of preventative detention to Robert Kennedy’s crackdown on the Mafia, when arrests were made for ‘spitting on the sidewalk’ in order to prevent more serious crimes.”
Dow recommends a few ways to make the INS more transparent and accountable. These include Congressional hearings to consider the 2 1/2 decades of immigration detention abuses; an investigation by the Office of Inspector General; independent, surprise monitoring of all detention centers, prisons and jails organized by nongovernmental and community groups across the country; legal counsel and judicial review for every detainee; and repeal of the 1996 anti-immigrant laws -- responsible for tripling the detention population and for the deportation of tens of thousands of long-term legal residents for past minor crimes.
But ultimately, Dow believes, “detention authority should be removed from the immigration service except in emergencies and for strictly limited periods. The American immigration bureaucracy should not be operating a prison system at all.”
American Gulag: Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons is published by University of California Press, Berkeley 94704, California, USA, 2004. (www.ucpress.edu).
`
If you think prisoner abuse is about Abu Ghraib and a ‘few bad apples’, reading Mark Dow’s American Gulag may make you think again.
Dow is a journalist and former teacher at the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) detention center in Miami. He has spent years interviewing inmates, guards, and officials at that and the many other detention centers run by INS (now part of the new Department of Homeland Security).
"Long before Abu Ghraib, and even before September 11th”, Dow told The New Yorker magazine, “detainees in America's immigration prisons were being stripped, beaten, and sexually abused.” They were also being routinely deprived of the most basic civil rights.
Since September 11, immigration policy has become far more stringent, targeting Arab, Muslim, and South Asian foreign nationals. “Attorney General John Ashcroft has repeatedly used the term ‘terrorist’ to describe detainees, “when he was certainly in a position to know that they were not terrorists.” In fact, Dow writes, most had overstayed their visas, which could get them deported, but which is not a crime. Immigration law is not part of the US criminal justice system – which gives the INS virtually unlimited scope to hold people indefinitely, without charge, without access to attorneys, and without public disclosure.
Dow’s book describes a chamber of horrors that followed the 9/11 tragedy and the sweeping round-up of Arabs and Muslims.
Egyptian detainees held in Alabama go on a hunger strike. A Palestinian is transferred from jail to jail to keep him from contacting the media. He is told by INS officials that a condition of his release is that he cannot speak to the media about his case. If he does, they will lock him up again. An Egyptian man is confined for two months before being allowed to call a lawyer. He is given no soap or towels for a week and meanwhile interrogated. He says correctional officers stomped on his bare feet.
A Pakistani man, Mehmood, “had been traveling between Pakistan and the US since the mid-1980s. He was in the import export business. In the 1990s, he overstayed his five-year renewable visa…(He) had not been particularly surprised or concerned when, three weeks after (9/11), 25 FBI agents came knocking at the door of his Bayonne, New Jersey, home while he slept. He knew the authorities were ‘coming to Muslim houses. They just want to search us’, he said. Agents found ‘suspicious’ items – a flight simulator, a flying lesson logbook, box cutters and a hazardous materials driving permit. “But”, says Dow, “ with minimal investigation, the ‘case’ evaporated”. There were plausible – and confirmed – reasons for Mehmood to have had these items. His most serious breach of the law was altering the no-work line of his Social Security card.
When the FBI finished interviewing him, they said, “We have no problem with you. Now it’s up to the INS if they want to take you or not.” The INS arrested him. They told his wife she could expect a call from him in four to six hours, and that he would probably be freed on bail and might even get a ‘Green Card’. Bail was never set.
Dow writes: “For the first two months…Mehmood was moved each week to a new cell, handcuffed and shackled to be moved those few feet. After three weeks, he was allowed to make his first legal phone call. He was kept inside his cell for 24 hours day.” Then he was transferred first to Manhattan and then to Brooklyn. When he arrived in Brooklyn, he alleges, seven or eight correctional officers threw him out of the van, dragged him across the floor, and then threw him against a wall…with their full power.” He was injured.
Mehmood was charged with altering his social security card. He pled guilty and was sentenced to time served. He was deported back to Pakistan in mid-April, 2002. In that year, and in early 2003, “at least four charter flights took large groups of Pakistanis who had no proper documentation – or ties to terrorists – back to Pakistan. The INS called the charters “routine”. Even after Mehmood was back in Pakistan, Dow says, “Immigration officials said they could not comment on specific cases.”
Dow asks why Mehmood was held in the Special Housing Unit at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center, “a federal prison, for four months and two days, and denied access to legal help and to his family for weeks?”
Dow concludes: The Bush Administration has “exploited our national trauma to extend law enforcement authority, as the long-standing biases within the Justice Department against Muslims and Arabs became politically correct.” None of this, he adds, “has anything to do with immigration…It's simply the result of excessive authority and an obsession with secrecy.”
“Today, the immigration agency holds some 23,000 people in detention on a given day and detains about 200,000 annually. The prisoners are held in the INS’s service processing centers; in local jails; in facilities owned and operated by private companies…and in Bureau of Prisons facilities, including federal penitentiaries. Wherever they are held, INS prisoners are ‘administrative detainees’; they are not serving a sentence…Immigration detainees can be held for days, months, or years…Detainees who came (to the US) from Cuba during the 1980 ‘Mariel boatlift’ are still in detention, despite a US Supreme Court against indefinite detention.” The reason given by INS is that Cuba has refused to take them back.
Detainees tend to fall into four categories: Those who have entered the US without proper documentation, including asylum-seekers (10-13% of all detainees); people with, say, a visa overstay, who can be picked up by an immigration agent and taken to detention -- either an immigration detention center or a contracted jail; people with some kind of criminal conviction -- once an immigrant completes a prison sentence, he or she can be turned over to the immigration service; finally, there is a fourth category, labeled “special detention”, for those thought to be associated with ‘terror’.
“Local politicians and business entrepreneurs have taken full advantage of the revenue possibilities in immigration detention”, Dow writes. ”The Federal Government paid New York County $45.00 per detainees per day, although it only cost the prison $24.37 to maintain each prisoner.”
“When detentions increased following the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York City and the Pentagon, private prison profiteers saw another opportunity. The Chairman of the Houston-based Cornell Companies spoke candidly in a conference call with other investors: ‘It can only be good…with the focus on people that are illegal and also from Middle Eastern descent…In the US there are over 900,000 undocumented individuals from Middle Eastern descent…That’s half of our entire prison population…The Federal business is the best business for us…and the events of September 11 (are) increasing that level of business…”
“The prisons themselves are often gruesome,” Dow writes. The guards are “often unprepared for the environment.” One officer, after being convicted for repeatedly kicking and punching an inmate, told Dow, “It was a situation I had never been in … I reacted … I don't know what happened.”
Almost as disturbing is the veil of secrecy surrounding the detention centers. In his investigations, Dow was often prevented from interviewing prisoners, accessing medical records, and looking at immigration guidelines. Dow also found that INS answers to no one. It eschews formal regulations. There are no monitors or independent watchdogs. Most of what we know about these prisons comes from a handful of journalists, working tirelessly to "make public what the INS tries to hide."
In its new home at the DHS, Dow says, “The secretive immigration prison world is likely to be pulled even further from public scrutiny.”
That high levels of government are aware of the situation is clear. FBI whistle-blower agent Colleen Rowley expressed concern over the pressure from FBI offices to round up Arabs in order to fill the detention centers. A newsletter from the Justice Department says, “An alien's constitutional status in this country might be something that the government can use when an alien detainee challenges his or her treatment in detention.“ Dow finds this “astonishing, and disturbing, because it tells me that high-ranking Justice Department officials know about the treatment of these detainees, but instead of trying to do something about the conditions, they're looking for a way to justify those conditions.”
On paper, he says, there are INS standards regarding immigration conditions, including attorney visitation, media interviews, law libraries, and other crucial aspects of prison life. But, says the American Civil Liberties Union, “By refusing to promulgate these standards as regulations, the INS insured that they would be difficult if not impossible to enforce.”
Dow adds: “This effort to operate outside the bounds of enforceable law is no accident…“ Attorney General Ashcroft has “likened his new policy of preventative detention to Robert Kennedy’s crackdown on the Mafia, when arrests were made for ‘spitting on the sidewalk’ in order to prevent more serious crimes.”
Dow recommends a few ways to make the INS more transparent and accountable. These include Congressional hearings to consider the 2 1/2 decades of immigration detention abuses; an investigation by the Office of Inspector General; independent, surprise monitoring of all detention centers, prisons and jails organized by nongovernmental and community groups across the country; legal counsel and judicial review for every detainee; and repeal of the 1996 anti-immigrant laws -- responsible for tripling the detention population and for the deportation of tens of thousands of long-term legal residents for past minor crimes.
But ultimately, Dow believes, “detention authority should be removed from the immigration service except in emergencies and for strictly limited periods. The American immigration bureaucracy should not be operating a prison system at all.”
American Gulag: Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons is published by University of California Press, Berkeley 94704, California, USA, 2004. (www.ucpress.edu).
`
Wednesday, August 25, 2004
THE SILENCE OF ISLAM
By William Fisher
If Jews, Catholics or Protestants in the United States were being maligned, misunderstood, misrepresented, and attacked by news media and TV talking heads on a daily basis, what do you think they would do?
They would fight back. They would lay out and execute long-term programs to tell their stories. They would try to provide positive counterweights to negative criticism.
Today, Islam is being maligned, misunderstood, misrepresented, and attacked by news media and TV talking heads on a daily basis. And what do we hear from Muslims?
Silence.
But silence can be deafening. It confirms America’s already widely-held belief that Muslims are terrorists, that they care more about death than about life, and that they will do whatever it takes to kill as many Americans as possible.
And the longer these attitudes persist, the more they are believed.
What to do?
Muslim Arabs – yes, Americans think all Muslims are Arabs – rarely reach unanimity about anything. That is what has made The Arab League all but irrelevant. Over the years, the disagreements among their member states have brought them to virtual paralysis.
But here is an issue on which they might just possibly find consensus. They need to come together with non-Arab Muslims to say, “Islam is being vilified, and we’re not going to take it any more!”
Then what?
In America, there is only one effective answer to ‘then what?’ Find the most thoughtful and professional public relations firm money can buy, and ask them to design a communications program to begin to educate the American media and the American public about what Islam is and is not.
Finding such a firm will not be difficult – there are at least a dozen in the US with demonstrable experience in conceiving and implementing these kinds of programs. Nor will paying their fees – world-class PR firms are expensive, but the amount is close to petty cash for the Islamic world.
What will be difficult is staying the course. Changing attitudes fuelled by events like 9/11 will not be easy. And, if the program is to be credible, Islam will have to speak frankly and often about its shortcomings and its miscreants. It cannot gloss over those who have hijacked the faith.
Nor can it be done quickly. This is a process that will take years, perhaps a generation. Ask the Saudis, who have recently launched a public relations effort in the US. Ask the Roman Catholic Church, which is going to spend many years trying to dig itself out from under the awful wreckage caused by sexual abuse. So any PR firm that talks about ‘silver bullets’ should be dismissed out of hand. The magnitude of the task will demand infinite patience.
Why should Muslims care?
First, there are several million Muslim-Americans living in the United States. Since 9/11 may of them have experienced suspicion and discrimination. Others have been victims of hate crimes. Second, the United States is the most powerful nation in the world, with the largest economy in the world. In this era of globalization, its goodwill and understanding are critical – economically, politically, socially, culturally.
That is about what Muslims and the nations they come from can get from America. But there is something equally important Islam can give to America: Deeper knowledge to help the US execute a more balanced, more culturally sensitive, more even-handed foreign policy.
And that will benefit both Islam and America.
About the writer: William Fisher spent more than twenty years in the public relations business, and then managed international economic development programs in the Middle East for the US Department of State and the US Agency for International Development. He served in the international affairs area in the Kennedy Administration.
If Jews, Catholics or Protestants in the United States were being maligned, misunderstood, misrepresented, and attacked by news media and TV talking heads on a daily basis, what do you think they would do?
They would fight back. They would lay out and execute long-term programs to tell their stories. They would try to provide positive counterweights to negative criticism.
Today, Islam is being maligned, misunderstood, misrepresented, and attacked by news media and TV talking heads on a daily basis. And what do we hear from Muslims?
Silence.
But silence can be deafening. It confirms America’s already widely-held belief that Muslims are terrorists, that they care more about death than about life, and that they will do whatever it takes to kill as many Americans as possible.
And the longer these attitudes persist, the more they are believed.
What to do?
Muslim Arabs – yes, Americans think all Muslims are Arabs – rarely reach unanimity about anything. That is what has made The Arab League all but irrelevant. Over the years, the disagreements among their member states have brought them to virtual paralysis.
But here is an issue on which they might just possibly find consensus. They need to come together with non-Arab Muslims to say, “Islam is being vilified, and we’re not going to take it any more!”
Then what?
In America, there is only one effective answer to ‘then what?’ Find the most thoughtful and professional public relations firm money can buy, and ask them to design a communications program to begin to educate the American media and the American public about what Islam is and is not.
Finding such a firm will not be difficult – there are at least a dozen in the US with demonstrable experience in conceiving and implementing these kinds of programs. Nor will paying their fees – world-class PR firms are expensive, but the amount is close to petty cash for the Islamic world.
What will be difficult is staying the course. Changing attitudes fuelled by events like 9/11 will not be easy. And, if the program is to be credible, Islam will have to speak frankly and often about its shortcomings and its miscreants. It cannot gloss over those who have hijacked the faith.
Nor can it be done quickly. This is a process that will take years, perhaps a generation. Ask the Saudis, who have recently launched a public relations effort in the US. Ask the Roman Catholic Church, which is going to spend many years trying to dig itself out from under the awful wreckage caused by sexual abuse. So any PR firm that talks about ‘silver bullets’ should be dismissed out of hand. The magnitude of the task will demand infinite patience.
Why should Muslims care?
First, there are several million Muslim-Americans living in the United States. Since 9/11 may of them have experienced suspicion and discrimination. Others have been victims of hate crimes. Second, the United States is the most powerful nation in the world, with the largest economy in the world. In this era of globalization, its goodwill and understanding are critical – economically, politically, socially, culturally.
That is about what Muslims and the nations they come from can get from America. But there is something equally important Islam can give to America: Deeper knowledge to help the US execute a more balanced, more culturally sensitive, more even-handed foreign policy.
And that will benefit both Islam and America.
About the writer: William Fisher spent more than twenty years in the public relations business, and then managed international economic development programs in the Middle East for the US Department of State and the US Agency for International Development. He served in the international affairs area in the Kennedy Administration.
Friday, August 20, 2004
THE LAST LAUGH
By William Fisher
Jackie Mason has always been one of my favorite comics. But I have also recognized that his stereotypic ethnic humor is funny only to those whose own ethnicity makes them targets.
So I laughed into tears at his depiction of Jews as more interested in bagels than in Hiroshima, Protestants who would rather ‘have a drink’ than eat a meal, Italians who put bullets in your knees rather than forgiving a debt, and New Yorkers who take vacations to Puerto Rico to visit their (stolen) hubcaps.
No more. My love affair with Jackie has come to an abrupt and melancholy end.
Here’s why:
Mason was a guest-host on Jim Bohannon's nationally syndicated radio show during the summer and, as Tom Regan reported in the Christian Science Monitor, “went on a tear against Islam.”
Mason reportedly said: "In plain English, the whole Muslim religion is preaching and teaching hate, terrorism and murder, and nobody knows it, and it's about time they found out about it. I don't know how we can call it a religion in the traditional sense. It should be called a murderous organization that's out to kill people."
Mason's guest that evening, New York lawyer Raoul Felder – who co-authors pieces for Jewish World Review with the comic – called the prophet Muhammad a "pedophile." Regan reports that Mason couldn't be reached, but Felder said the remarks were based on the Koran and denied broad-brushing the religion.
This is not comedy, it is tragedy. For three reasons. First, Mason is a Jew. He should be the absolute last person on earth to assign collective guilt to any religion. That’s what Auschwitz tells us.
Second, thumb through any Bible of any religion in the world and you will be able to find exactly what you want. Politicians and demagogues since the beginning of Bibles have used the Good Book to justify whatever conclusion they wish to reach.
Third, I doubt whether Mason actually knows any Muslims – he once refused to perform in the same club as a Palestinian-American. He ought to go talk with the some of the millions of Muslim-Americans whose lives have been turned into exactly the same nightmare the Jews faced in Germany in the period before Chrystalnacht.
These people are American citizens, and overwhelmingly loyal Americans. Most of them found 9/11 just as unbelievable and outrageous as the rest of us. Today, they are having to fight to maintain the Constitutional rights Mason takes for granted.
Collective guilt is bad enough when it’s embraced by ordinary, if uninformed, citizens. It’s much worse when celebrities like Jackie Mason – and Pat Roberts -- get on board that no-nothing train.
As a Jew, Jackie Mason should know better than anyone that he could be next.
Jackie Mason has always been one of my favorite comics. But I have also recognized that his stereotypic ethnic humor is funny only to those whose own ethnicity makes them targets.
So I laughed into tears at his depiction of Jews as more interested in bagels than in Hiroshima, Protestants who would rather ‘have a drink’ than eat a meal, Italians who put bullets in your knees rather than forgiving a debt, and New Yorkers who take vacations to Puerto Rico to visit their (stolen) hubcaps.
No more. My love affair with Jackie has come to an abrupt and melancholy end.
Here’s why:
Mason was a guest-host on Jim Bohannon's nationally syndicated radio show during the summer and, as Tom Regan reported in the Christian Science Monitor, “went on a tear against Islam.”
Mason reportedly said: "In plain English, the whole Muslim religion is preaching and teaching hate, terrorism and murder, and nobody knows it, and it's about time they found out about it. I don't know how we can call it a religion in the traditional sense. It should be called a murderous organization that's out to kill people."
Mason's guest that evening, New York lawyer Raoul Felder – who co-authors pieces for Jewish World Review with the comic – called the prophet Muhammad a "pedophile." Regan reports that Mason couldn't be reached, but Felder said the remarks were based on the Koran and denied broad-brushing the religion.
This is not comedy, it is tragedy. For three reasons. First, Mason is a Jew. He should be the absolute last person on earth to assign collective guilt to any religion. That’s what Auschwitz tells us.
Second, thumb through any Bible of any religion in the world and you will be able to find exactly what you want. Politicians and demagogues since the beginning of Bibles have used the Good Book to justify whatever conclusion they wish to reach.
Third, I doubt whether Mason actually knows any Muslims – he once refused to perform in the same club as a Palestinian-American. He ought to go talk with the some of the millions of Muslim-Americans whose lives have been turned into exactly the same nightmare the Jews faced in Germany in the period before Chrystalnacht.
These people are American citizens, and overwhelmingly loyal Americans. Most of them found 9/11 just as unbelievable and outrageous as the rest of us. Today, they are having to fight to maintain the Constitutional rights Mason takes for granted.
Collective guilt is bad enough when it’s embraced by ordinary, if uninformed, citizens. It’s much worse when celebrities like Jackie Mason – and Pat Roberts -- get on board that no-nothing train.
As a Jew, Jackie Mason should know better than anyone that he could be next.
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