Posts

1. Regarding Rachel Corrie, you may find a convincing evisceration of the
Mother Jones piece at http://www.counterpunch.org/nguyen09202003.html. Despite
your charming assumption that Mother Jones represents something like
holy writ to those of us who detect a whiff of racist, expansionist
ethnic cleansing in the Zionist project, I assure you that this earnest
little monthly is closer to the views of the left wing of the
Democratic party than it is to a more philosophically interesting and
radical left critique.

Actually, the CounterPunch piece establishes nothing beyond the conservative bona fides of the sources the MJ author used, and any "debunking" pertains only to Corrie's funeral service and whether or not Arafat underwrote it. (It is clear, however, that he sought to prop her up as a martyr of the Palestinian cause.)

The Guardian (can we at least agree that it's not a tool of the global Zionist conspiracy?) has also called into question ISM's purely pacifist motives, relating to the Mike's Place bombing. Of course, any plausible deniability here is as that the "satellite" didn't screen who passed through its doors quite so carefully as the main hub did. I'm not drawing definitive conclusions, Ismail, but for you to completely exonerate ISM based on its own self-defense is a touch naive. I no more take the IDF at its word.

2. Of all the questions that the Corrie murder (sic) raises-her highly
visible orange jacket, the wild screams and gestures of the other
protesters warning the driver off, the Israeli refusal to participate
in any investigation they didn't control, their backtracking from the
original fantasy of tunnels beneath the house Corrie was guarding, the
driver backing up over Corrie after running her over-of all these, the
feature that strikes you as the most interesting is the driver's
initially mistaking his skinny, poncho'd, hooded victim's gender? Come
on.

All of which is based on what? The eyewitness testimony of her friends and co-thinkers in an organization whose credibility you seem to take on faith. I realize the temptation must be very strong to say that the IDF is cynical, corrupt and butt-covering at every turn, and so therefore anyone else with a story to contradict its own must be telling the truth.

You'll recall that ISM famously posted photographs on its website that claimed to show the location of Corrie's death, but were later rubbished by the AP and Reuters. ISM then swapped those candids for new ones. Was Mother Jones also wrong to suggest that this jeopardizes the organization's true-blue posturing with respect to the media?

3. Are you using the subjunctive because you know that there is no
evidence that ISM "covertly abets terrorism"? If so, why mention this
as a possibility at all? These are smarmy tactics from the Steven Plaut
school and I hope it was not your intent to indulge in such transparent
propaganda. ISM doesn't abet terrorism, covertly or otherwise, except
in the fevered imagination of liars like Plaut.

No, I'm using the subjunctive because other news outlets have raised the question of ISM's facilitation of terrorist activities in Palestine, many of which (the news outlets) are acting in the spirit of evidence against interest to do so. I realize that as a supporter of Hamas, you're well disposed toward any organization that speaks in euphemism about suicide bombings or a Palestinian "resistance" that explicitly targets Israeli civilians and makes martyrs of the resisters. But most of us are not.

Haven't ISM's own founders gone on record as defending suicide bombing as a legitimate mode of anti-colonial struggle? Here are Huwaida Arraf and Adam Shapiro:

The Geneva Conventions
accept that armed resistance is legitimate for an occupied people, and
there is no doubt that this right cannot be denied. But that does not
mean that this right must be utilized… Hamas claims it has many men
ready to be suicide bombers – we advocate that these men offer
themselves as martyrs by standing on a settler road and blocking it
from traffic. This is no less of a jihad. This is no less noble than
carrying out a suicide operation…

The Palestinian resistance must take on a variety of
characteristics, both non-violent and violent. But most importantly it
must develop a strategy involving both aspects. No other successful
nonviolent movement was able to achieve what it did without a
concurrent violent movement – in India militants attacked British
outposts and interests while Gandhi conducted his campaign, while the
Black Panther Movement and its earlier incarnations existed
side-by-side with the Civil Rights Movement in the United States.

So, then. Unless "noble" means something else in Alexander Cockburn's dictionary than it does in mine, wouldn't anyone reading the above be silly not to wonder if perhaps ISM was as Gandhi-ified in its tactics as it claims to be? In all fairness – and because, as you kindly point out, I'm so honest – Shapiro was asked about his own words by Paula Zahn on CNN. He replied:

"The article that we wrote was actually in response to another article
written by a Palestinian, who said the Palestinians could not be
nonviolent. And so we were addressing within the context of the debate
over whether the Palestinians could use violence or could not use
nonviolence or could use nonviolence. So it was, first of all, within
that context."

I should hope you'd have great fun at mine expense, Ismail, if I ever tried to rationalize something I wrote with a shambolic statement like that. Not a thing in here mitigates the clear import of what he said or the terms he chose. He could have been responding to a chicken Kiev recipe for all I care.

4. "Even Mother Jones was never quite clear on what ISM's true activities were in the West Bank." Even Michael Weiss was never quite clear that Rafah refugee camp, where
ISM's true activities included interfering with home demolitions,
accompanying kids to school, etc, is in Gaza. There, all fixed.

ISM's Palestinian headquarters are in the West Bank, and, as you know, it's been one of the few patrons of Arafat's Ramallah compound. I wasn't referring to where the Corrie death took place.

5. Hamas didn't kidnap Johnston, it effected his release. In so doing, it
made quite clear to the thugs who did kidnap Johnston that it took its
security responsibility seriously, as witness the ensuing silence from
that family of criminals. To compare the situation of Hamas, besieged
and impoverished, with that of a mature Western democracy (in many
respects) like Israel is to reveal an utter indifference to reality.
Here's a moral equivalence you ought to disdain.

Hey, you kick-started this thread by comparing the Burmese junta to a "mature Western democracy (in many respects) like Israel," a rhetorical what-if that clumsily changed both the subject and the hemisphere of the argument. My point was that Israel's chief antagonist may cajole, threaten or intimidate an organization within the society it (putatively) governs to hand over a kidnapped BBC journalist, but does justice even stand the chance of being done? That the kidnappers have been "silent" since Johnston's release is supposed to be gratifying to whom, exactly?

Someone you failed to mention in your litany of victims, but one who nicely illustrates the point of how Israel operates at a more transparent level than Hamas, is Tom Hurndall, the British photojournalist who was also a member of ISM. What happened to the IDF sharp-shooter who killed Hurndall? He was sentenced to 8 years for manslaughter and obstruction of justice by an Israeli military court.

To bring this all back to the beginning, should we expect the Burmese regime, if it remains in power, to even call to account the video-captured murderer of Kenji Nagai?

As for your more general pronouncements about the underreporting of coverage unflattering to Israel, I think we're awash in the stuff these days, but please don't blame international media for my ignorance. I'd heard of the other cases you'd mentioned, just hadn't looked into them as thoroughly.

But my familiarity with Corrie might interest you: It came about in an interview I conducted with our mutual friend Billy Bragg, who wrote a song about Corrie's death based on her diary entries and the Alan Rickman-produced play about her that was — rather pusillanimously, I might add — blocked from exhibition in downtown Manhattan last year. As even Bragger admits on stage, the girl was deeply screwed up, but her story was one that deserved to be told, no matter where you stand on Israel/Palestine. However, I agree with Harry's Place that the song fails as both pop and politics, especially as it's a clear rip-off of Bob Dylan's "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll."

HP put it best: "The implied comparison of Hattie Carroll to Rachel Corrie is as
ridiculous as the implied comparison of William Zanzinger to the
Israeli army. I hope I don't need to explain why."

Of the cases you've mentioned, the only one I'm vaguely familiar with is Rachel Corrie's. From what I recall of the extensive media coverage of the affair — including an article in Mother Jones, by no means an apologist for Israel or the IDF's tactics — her death isn't so easily classified a "murder." (Anyway, you can't really emphasize the need for transparent investigations into these incidents and then preempt the lack thereof by terming one of them a murder.)

I haven't the time to go back and research the specifics of Corrie's death, but one fact that never quite made sense to me was: If the driver of the bulldozer was acting willfully, was he also clever enough to cover his tracks by initially radioing in that the person he hit was a man?

At any event, I oppose demolishing Palestinian homes, just as I would oppose a so-called peace organization like International Solidarity Movement covertly abetting terrorism. Even Mother Jones was never quite clear on what ISM's true activities were in the West Bank.

All that to one aside, you raise an important question: Would a democracy whose military purposefully targets and guns down members of the press be worthy of overthrow? It depends on the circumstances, where the orders came from, the nature of the elected regime, etc.

I'd have argued that the Burmese junta has been long overdue for ouster, without the need for the gruesome spectacle of a veteran Japanese photo-journalist being shot in cold blood. Why? Because the objective of the junta is to make Burma as closed a society as possible: Witness the blockade on Internet access and telecommunications; the squashing of all forms of dissent and public criticism, which includes — or would include — the discussion of the present subject.

One of the reasons I deplore moral equivalence is because a specific crime or human rights violation may be replicated with uncanny similarity under different regimes but never in a vacuum. If pressed to provide a list of conspicuous political differences between Israel and Burma — differences which favor Israel — would you be so taxed to do so? And the other way around, giving Burma the preference?

Another way to frame the James Miller question would be to ask: Did Hamas even undergo the pantomime of forensic inquiry into the kidnapping of BBC correspondent Alan Johnston?