Dropping a DIME: Max Blumenthal and the Erosion of Liberal Zionism

Zionism, like capitalism, is losing its aura of beneficence and inevitability, as its fangs become harder to hide. Israel is not the Upper West Side overseas. (No matter what many people on the Upper West Side may like to think.) It is a violently racist colonial enterprise, with all the ideological and practical viciousness that implies. 

This is the implicit conclusion of Max Blumenthal’s latest book, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, based on four years of reporting in Israel, which has touched a raw and festering nerve in the American liberal community.  Chris Hedges, who spent seven years as a correspondent in the Middle East, including Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem, calls Goliath “one of the most fearless and honest books ever written about Israel. Blumenthal burrows deep into the dark heart of Israel.”

By “racist,” I mean, first of all, fundamentally ethno-religious supremacist: The inescapable premise of Zionism is that the lives, property, security, fears, hopes, and aspirations – all that constitutes the humanity – of Jewish settlers in historic Palestine trumps that of the indigenous non-Jewish population.  Of course, this kind of supremacism is inevitably unconfined.  Until the next plane hits a building, Americans – even American liberals – might not be overly discomfited by the discounting of Arab Palestinians’ humanity, but Israeli Zionism is becoming increasingly “racist” in a sense that Americans can easily recognize, and liberal Americans not so easily dismiss:

Attention Shoppers!The Westgate Mall In America's Jihad Bargain

I know that events in Africa during the weekend of September 21^st are, in terms of American historical memory, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, but I’m going to pay them some belated attention. The attack on the Westgate Mall in Kenya was, after all, a horrific action by the  Somali jihadi group, al-Shabaab, lasting over a number of days, in which at least 61 civilians died. It was also, as USA Today opined: “the post-9/11 nightmare that Americans have been half expecting: al-Qaeda gunmen attack a shopping mall, take hostages, leave behind carnage and a sickening repeat question: ‘Why us?’" 

I’m sure many Americans felt exactly that dread on watching the events unfold – and well they should, since, given the forces in play, it’s quite possible that something similar will, again, happen here.

For Americans who might have more than a passing interest in understanding why such atrocities happen, and who might want to do more than shake their heads, after the fact, in bafflement and moral self-righteousness, one might start out with the always-cogent Jeremy Scahill’s explanation of “where al-Shabaab came from,” and how it came to target Kenya. It's a somewhat complicated story of how American special ops forces used favored Somali warlords as an “assassination squad” against perceived “al-Qaeda” militants. This was followed by American connivance with Ethiopia and Kenya to invade Somalia and break up the network of local institutions, known as the Islamic Courts Union, that had been established by a broad Somali movement to achieve some order and stability in the country. Al-Shabaab started as a marginal groupuscule within that movement, and only rose to prominence as a result of the foreign incursion.

As Scahill explains:

Most Somalia experts said that there were no more than a dozen al-Qaeda-connected individuals in Somalia right after 9/11. And so, the CIA hires these warlords ostensibly to go in and hunt these people down. Well, they end up murdering vast numbers of people who were imams or religious scholars, and in some cases, I was told, that they would literally like chop people’s heads off and then bring them to their American liaison and say, ‘This is so and so, and I’ve killed them.’ And so, you had this utterly thuggish collection of warlords murdering people, and doing so, they believed, with the backing of the United States of America, the most powerful nation in the world.

In this segment (about five minutes) from Democracy Now (full interview and transcript), Scahill lays out quite clearly how the US “made the very force they claimed to be trying to fight the most powerful force in Somalia”:

The Long Leash: Avant-Garde Culture as "Propaganda Asset"

Take a look at this article from The Independent, on the "long leash" of the CIA's Propaganda Assets Inventory.

"It was like a Wurlitzer jukebox: when the CIA pushed a button it could hear whatever tune it wanted playing across the world."

Besides confirming that Althusser pegged it with the concept of the "ideological state apparatus," this article is a reminder that:

1) The CIA -- the one that gave us coups, assassinations and torture, as well as Jackson Pollock -- was run by Ivy League-educated liberals, and

2) Much more than we like to think, we are the manipulated subjects of¹ a system in which, even when you think you're singing that cool, cutting-edge, outlaw song, you're still dancing to someone else's tune.

Modern art was CIA 'weapon '

Revealed: how the spy agency used unwitting artists such as Pollock and de Kooning in a cultural Cold War 

By Frances Stonor Saunders  The Independent, Sunday 22 October 1995

For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince - except that it acted secretly - the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years... 

Go to full story

Note
¹"Manipulated subject of" is a phrase from Herman Melville's great novella, "Benito Cereno." Phrase and story are perfectly apt here.

The New Privateers:Civil Forfeiture, Police Piracy, and the Third-Worldization of America

I know you're already mad about various injustices, but when you read Sarah Stillman’s recent New Yorker article, “Taken,” your blood will boil. It’s about the laws and practices – developed over the last 15-20 years as part of the "war on drugs" and the general encroachment of police-state tactics – regarding what is called “civil forfeiture.” And it’s about a lot more than that.

Forfeiture laws are touted as effective tools for destroying the empires of crime lords by seizing all the ill-gotten gains of their criminal activity. Criminal forfeiture laws – which are applied following conviction of a crime beyond a reasonable doubt, before a judge, with legal representation and such – can, used reasonably (the problems here are another issue), provide for just that.  Civil forfeiture, on the other hand, is based on the legal theory that property does not have the rights of a person, and that therefore actions against property can be taken on the basis of mere suspicion or “probable cause,” with no need to prove a crime. So the cases will have goofy names like, “United States v. One Pearl Necklace.” Another feature of the pre-crime police-state paradigm, civil forfeiture laws make suspicious (property) presumptively criminal (activity), without having to prove any actual, you know, crime. They authorize the police to steal your cash, car, jewelry, home, whatever, without even asserting that a crime has been committed.

[Do you hear the echoes in how suspicion of terrorism becomes terrorism itself? In how I don’t have to prove American citizens Awlaki, father and son, are “terrorists” (whatever that is) before drone-killing them, because my suspicion that they might be is good enough? (We won’t even get into how suspicion=guilt regarding other little stuff, like, oh, chemical weapons.) Do you see how years of putting up with pre-crime tactics for the “war on drugs” has been training in compliance for the more radical presumptive-guilt tactics of the “war on terror”? Constantly selling “war”-inflected frameworks of legal exceptionalism, the state has used various opportunistic bogeymen – “communists,” “drug dealers,” “pedophiles,” terrorists” (Who cares about them?) – to lure citizens into accepting a creeping radical authoritarianism.  Preemptive forfeiture today, preemptive detention tomorrow too.]

The insidious wrinkle in all this, which makes civil forfeiture not only creepily authoritarian but also painfully, infuriatingly, predatory, is that state and federal civil-forfeiture laws have allowed the police forces and prosecutors who seize “suspicious” property to keep all of it, and, in many cases, to use it any way they see fit, including personal perks and bonuses. As Stillman points out, we’re talking everything from “Halloween costumes, Doo Dah Parade decorations,…credit-card late fees, [and] poultry-festival supplies,” to “a thousand-dollar donation to a Baptist congregation…. important to [the District Attorney’s] reelection,“ to “a twenty-one-thousand-dollar drug-prevention beach party,” to “a city marshal’s ten-thousand-dollar personal bonus” and another officer’s “total of forty thousand dollars in bonuses.”  Stillman reports: “In Hunt County, Texas, I found officers scoring personal bonuses of up to twenty-six thousand dollars a year, straight from the forfeiture fund. In Titus County, forfeiture pays the assistant district attorney’s entire salary.” In other words, the real practice of civil forfeiture has become a lucrative system of “policing for profit,” a system that has literally legalized highway robbery and turned police into pirates.

Syria: No Better Angels

In my last post on Syria, I commented that “Short of widespread popular unrest, on issues like this, the will of the people counts for nothing against the exigencies of imperialism and Zionism, as understood by the American political elite,” that “there would be no challenging debate in the US Congress like that in the British Parliament,” and that “a combination of domestic political pressure that, along with international reluctance, [which would] create an effective pushback against Obama’s momentum towards war” was “not likely.” I was 100% certain of, and would have bet heavily on, a strike on Syria within a few days.

I am surprised and happy to see that I would have lost that bet. Indeed, there is substantially more than a glimmer of pushback on a number of fronts.  The British parliament’s rejection of a military attack on Syria turned out to be a wedge blow that opened crucial cracks in the hitherto seemingly-impervious American imperial edifice. It pushed Obama into going to Congress for a vote, which bought time in which the American people could think about the case and not just follow the leader, and in which the media would have to open the window of information and analysis at least a bit more than usual.