It has been 65 years since the United Nations voted to divide Palestine into two states, one for Israel and one for Palestinians. Yesterday the UN voted 138-9 to grant Palestine a non-member non-voting status which sounds inert but reaffirms their right to self-determination. It also allows Palestine to bring it’s case against Israel to the the International Criminal Court.
The situation in the Middle East is incredibly complicated, but as long as Palestinians were seen as a problem within Israel there was no higher court to hear their appeals. Are the settlements and destruction of Palestinian homes a violation of Palestinians’ right of return? Are the blockades of Gaza and targeted assassinations of Palestinians an internal affair within Israel, or violations of international law.
However one feels about the Middle East, the vote seems very important. For years the United States has used its clout to keep the Palestinian case from being heard at the highest level. Many prominent Israelis agree:
“I believe that the Palestinian request from the United Nations is congruent with the basic concept of the two-state solution. Therefore, I see no reason to oppose it. Once the United Nations will lay the foundation for this idea, we in Israel will have to engage in a serious process of negotiations, in order to agree on specific borders based on the 1967 lines, and resolve the other issues. It is time to give a hand, and encourage, the moderate forces amongst the Palestinians. Abu-Mazen –an alias for Abbas- and Salam Fayyad need our help. It’s time to give it.” – Former Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert
Ironically, the vote may make it easier to control rogue groups that are lobing rockets into Israel. When Palestine is eventually granted statehood, it will be subject to international law. There are shady politicians on both sides of this struggle who benefit from stirring up the pot. To take the issue out of the hands of personalities and subject it to international law is the best way out for all concerned.
Talk about clueless. With the number of military suicides going through the roof, the military isn’t reconsidering sending teenagers into traumatic situations. They aren’t reconsidering propagandizing soldiers with platitudes that will dissolve when their boots hit the ground. Nor have they considered letting soldiers go home if they realize they have made a mistake. Instead, the military is considering prosecuting those who attempt suicide but fail.
Everyone agrees that something needs to be done about an exploding rate of military suicides. According to McClatchy:
Last year, the 301 known military suicides accounted for 20 percent of U.S. military deaths. From 2001 to August 2012, the U.S. military counted 2,676 suicides.
It’s also becoming more common among veterans. Though timely numbers are elusive, the Department of Veterans Affairs reported that 3,871 veterans who were enrolled in VA care killed themselves in 2008 and 2009.
If soldiers succeed in killing themselves they are considered to have died honorably, but if they fail, they may soon be prosecuted under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The rationale is that suicide attempts bring “prejudice to good order and discipline” and have a “tendency to bring the service into disrepute.”
The story is as old as empire. Rich people send poor people to fight for dubious causes. If the soldiers succeed, their leaders usually get the credit. If they fail, or break, it’s their own damn fault.
There is no such thing as “friends in high places.” The cost of entrance to the halls of power is usually one’s principles and almost always one’s ties to humankind. After we have elected the “lesser of two evils” we cannot sit on our hands. At the same time Republicans are calling for greater tax cuts for the richest at the cost of programs for the poorest, Democrats seem willing use the most vulnerable as bargaining chips.
“We can’t be so naive to believe that just taxing the rich will solve our problems,” said Durbin, speaking at the influential liberal group called Center for American Progress. “Put everything on the table. Repeat. Everything on the table.” -Sen. Richard Durbin
By “everything” Sen. Durbin, of course, includes Medicare and cuts to what even Democrats have come to call “entitlements.” To call feeding and educating a poor child an “entitlement” is quite frankly offensive to me. No nation deserves to call itself civilized that allows it rich to hoard without restraint and its poor to languish without hope..
I ran across 3 bits of very good news yesterday. All three stories were reported in the BBC:
Deforestation in the Amazon is at record low rates. Which isn’t to say there isn’t still a problem, but deforestation has fallen to the lowest rates since Brazil started keeping records 24 years ago.
New York had a day with no violent crimes. For the first time in recent history, “Not a single murder, shooting, stabbing or other incident of violent crime was reported for a whole day.”
British Petroleum has been banned from any US contracts. It isn’t clear how long it will last, but the EPA has banned contracts with BP because of its “lack of business integrity over its handling of the blowout.”
The Associated Press has announced it’s new style book will eliminate the terms “homophobia,” Islamophobia” and “Ethnic cleansing.”
We sometimes forget that most print media belongs to the rich and powerful elite. If the press does not consciously choose to speak for the voiceless, it will be the most powerful weapon in silencing them. Terms like “anti-Semitism” were once resisted as inaccurate. It was claimed that not all semites are Jewish. When editors hold the suffix “phobic” to the same standards as the clinical diagnosis “phobia,” they have made it more difficult to talk about the fear some in our culture feel toward Muslims and people who are gay or lesbian.
One good way to maintain oppression is to render the justice claims of the “other” unspeakable or to deem them poor grammar.
AP Deputy Standards Editor Dave Minthorn told Politico that the term (homophobic) is “just off the mark” and “seems inaccurate… “We want to be precise and accurate and neutral in our phrasing.”
The website Slate has posted the official explanation of the change:
The AP, whose guidelines set news industry standards, defines phobia as an “irrational, uncontrollable fear, often a form of mental illness.” But the “mental illness” part is surely too literal—no one accuses arachnophobes of needing an asylum. The term homophobia was first used in the 1960s when psychologists began to notice how vehement their own colleagues’ reactions were to gay people—far more irrational, it seemed, than feelings around other outsider groups. “They had no argument, just repugnance,” says George Weinberg, a clinical psychologist who popularized the term in a 1972 book and opposes the AP’s move to drop the word. “They felt this way even about their own children. I realized this thing is deeply emotional and is based on fear.” As Weinberg and others used it, the term meant a dread or fear of close contact with gay people and a strong discomfort with homosexuality.
When people in power say they want to be “balanced” or “neutral” it also means they are either unaware of, or don’t want to talk about, discrepancies of power hidden in the culture. They are unaware of, or don’t want to talk about the fact, that that cultures adopt vocabularies that reinforce power hierarchies.
Perhaps the most horrifying change will be eliminating the term “ethnic cleansing” which can be a practice very hard to identify when it is happening slowly and systematically.
“When you break down ‘ethnic cleansing,’ it’s a cover for terrible violent activities. It’s a term we certainly don’t want to propagate,” -Minthorn
What a shame the AP is more concerned with not propagate the term “ethnic cleansing” than with not propagating its practice.
Not too long ago, a woman asked me a very important question. “Why doesn’t your church recite the Apostles’ Creed every week?” It is commonly believed that this creed contains the basic truths of Christianity and should be recited every week in a truly Christian community. There wasn’t time to finish the conversation but the question deserves an answer.
In my opinion, one of the greatest areas of immaturity in Christianity today is in our view of the creeds. By reciting creeds, what are we hoping to do? Are we repeating them to convince ourselves we believe things we have no way of testing? Are we repeating them to be a part of a team? Are we repeating them to have a sense of meaning?
It is true that reciting words will give us a powerful sense of meaning. Any hypnotist can tell you that. But what kind of meaning comes from repeating the same words over and over? Even the sense of unity brought by reciting creeds is suspect. To be sure, a strong bond is formed by reciting words in unison, but such bonds are formed whether it is a church reciting sacred formulas or drunken sailors huddled in a bar singing of the sea.
Many of Hitler’s followers dutifully repeated the Apostles’ Creed every week of their adult lives, but because they saw the creeds superstitiously, their actions remained unaffected. Like many today, they were using the creeds as self-contained meaning systems. Their use of the creeds did not make them better human beings, only better citizens of an empire. Today, the creeds have become idols for many in the Protestant church just as rituals have become idols for many of the Catholic faith. Some modern clergy rationalize superstition and injustice by finding verses in scripture, but that is after they have besotted their reason by reciting creeds like parrots.
Before they became dogma, the creeds were originally sacred songs. They were calls to love the sacred and to serve life. It was St. Paul who said that words without love are like clanging brass. It was St. John who said anyone who loves has God. The essence of Christianity is not found in any creed. The essence of Christianity is love, and love we cannot quite say.
What ever happened to that old Republican tradition of tokenism?
Republican House Speaker John Boehner has announced the chairs of all the 19 major House committees next year in Congress, and guess what? They’re all white men. I know. You’re stunned. Let’s do a recap. That’s 19 White Men, 0 white women, 0 men of color, 0 women of color.
While the chairs of committees are usually chosen from seniority, this demographic breakdown says much about the real leadership of the Republican Party. At at time when the Democratic House Caucus has a majority of women and people of color, Republicans couldn’t or wouldn’t find even one leader who wasn’t white and male.
This is very bad news for those who care about issues like choice and affirmative action. I seem to remember a little something about taxation without representation, but women and people of color will be secondary players when their personal lives are discussed this year. But there is good news for you if you are a Republican women or person of color. When the next Republican convention rolls around, you’re going to get really good seats.
Call it the Lone Star version of an Arab Spring. Cowboy fans have gone onto a White House website called “We, the People” intended to encourage citizens to petition the President to take action on important issues of the day. A petition has been posted on that site requesting President Obama to intervene in the affairs of the Dallas Cowboys and remove Jerry Jones as owner. The petition reads as follows:
We, the Citizens of the Great State of Texas, and Dallas Cowboys fans worldwide, have been oppressed by an over controlling, delusional, oppressive dictator for way too long. Request the Executive Branch’s immediate assistance in removal of owner and GM, Jerry Jones. His incompetence and ego have not only been an extreme disappointment for way too long, but moreover, it has caused extreme mental and emotional duress.
If anyone questions whether we Texans take football too seriously, I would say this petion might be Exibit A.
Pulitzer Prize winning writer Thomas Ricks was being interviewed on Fox Network to discuss his latest book The Generals. When co-anchor Jon Scott tried to get the author to attack the Obama administration’s handling of the attack in Benghazi, Libya, he got more than he bargained for.
“I think Benghazi was generally hyped by this network especially,” Ricks said. He added that he thought McCain seemed to be “backing off” from criticizing Rice since “the campaign [was] over.”
Scott asked how it could be called “hype” when four people were dead? Ricks fired back that the attack was a “small fire-fight,” he brought up the many security contractors killed in Iraq which largely went uncovered.
“I think the emphasis on Benghazi has been extremely political, partly because Fox is operating as the wing of the Republican Party.”
At that point Scott ended the interview after about 90 seconds.