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THE ABSURD TIMES

THE ABSURD TIMES

Illustration: From http://www.whatnowtoons.com

Awhile ago, I mentioned that Randi Rhodes had been kicked off the air by, of all people, Air-America, for remarks she made about Hillary and Geraldine Ferraro. Seems the management has ties to Clinton somehow. Anyway, she made the remarks in a stand-up routine at a night-club and she had no "morals clause" or anything like that. Some people said the Air-America was "relieved" when she resigned.

Some of you wrote me and said I should contact the network and complain. Well, I had been trying to get an address and what I found out was that she was immediately snapped up by another network, NOVA. Most of Air-America's Affiliates' had contacted her as soon as they found out and she was already one the air before I could get around to complain.

She is on at 2, Central time, just google for a station close by. Nova is the network. Too many commercials, but she is funny. A welcome alternative to regular talk radio if you are interested. KPHX has a stream you can listen to even with dial-up. New stations are joining daily. Buffalo just joined.

________________________________________

Here's an interview with Noan Chomsky:

Tom Dispatch

posted 2008-02-26 15:13:30

Tomgram: Noam Chomsky, Terrorists Wanted the World Over

One of Noam Chomsky's latest books -- a conversation with David
Barsamian -- is entitled What We Say Goes
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805086714/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20>.
It catches a powerful theme of Chomsky's: that we have long been living
on a one-way planet and that the language we regularly wield to describe
the realities of our world is tailored to Washington's interests.

Juan Cole, at his Informed Comment website
<http://www.juancole.com/2008/02/three-events-that-changed-world.html>,
had a good example of the strangeness of this targeted language
recently. When Serbs stormed the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade, he offered
the following comment (with so many years of the term "Islamofascism" in
mind): "?given that the Serbs are Eastern Orthodox Christians, will the
Republican Party and Fox Cable News now start fulminating against
'Christofascism?'"

Of course, the minute you try to turn the Washington norm (in word or
act) around, as Chomsky did in a piece entitled What If Iran Had Invaded
Mexico?
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174797/noam_chomsky_on_the_iran_effect_>,
you've already entered the theater of the absurd. "Terror" is a
particularly good example of this. "Terror" is something that, by
(recent) definition, is committed by free-floating groups or movements
against innocent civilians and is utterly reprehensible (unless the
group turns out to be the CIA running
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/76824/mike_davis_return_to_sender_car_bombs_part_2_>
car bombs into Baghdad
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/09/politics/09ALLA.html?ei=5007&en=f6ed30bebf50f090&ex=1402113600&partner=USERLAND&pagewanted=print&position=>
or car and camel bombs
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/2033/which_war_is_this_anyway_> into
Afghanistan, in which case it's not a topic that's either much
discussed, or condemned in our world). On the other hand, that weapon of
terror, air power
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/106273/air_war_barbarity_and_the_middle_east>,
which is at the heart of the American way of war, simply doesn't qualify
under the category of "terror" at all -- no matter how terrifying it may
be to innocent civilians who find themselves underneath the missiles and
bombs.

It's with this in mind that Chomsky turns to terror of every kind in the
Middle East in the context of the car bombing of a major figure
<http://warincontext.org/2008/02/24/guest-contributor-roger-morris-americas-shadow-in-the-middle-east/>
in Lebanon's Hizbollah movement. By the way, The Essential Chomsky
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1595581898/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20>
(edited by Anthony Arnove), a new collection of his writings on politics
and on language from the 1950s to the present, has just been published
and is highly recommended. /Tom/

The Most Wanted List

*International Terrorism*
By Noam Chomsky

On February 13, Imad Moughniyeh, a senior commander of Hizbollah,
was assassinated in Damascus. "The world is a better place without
this man in it," State Department spokesperson Sean McCormack said:
"one way or the other he was brought to justice." Director of
National Intelligence Mike McConnell added that Moughniyeh has been
"responsible for more deaths of Americans and Israelis than any
other terrorist with the exception of Osama bin Laden."

Joy was unconstrained in Israel too, as "one of the U.S. and
Israel's most wanted men" was brought to justice, the London
/Financial Times/ reported. Under the heading, "A militant wanted
the world over," an accompanying story reported that he was
"superseded on the most-wanted list by Osama bin Laden" after 9/11
and so ranked only second among "the most wanted militants in the
world."

The terminology is accurate enough, according to the rules of
Anglo-American discourse, which defines "the world" as the political
class in Washington and London (and whoever happens to agree with
them on specific matters). It is common, for example, to read that
"the world" fully supported George Bush when he ordered the bombing
of Afghanistan. That may be true of "the world," but hardly of the
world, as revealed in an international Gallup Poll after the bombing
was announced. Global support was slight. In Latin America, which
has some experience with U.S. behavior, support ranged from 2% in
Mexico to 16% in Panama, and that support was conditional upon the
culprits being identified (they still weren't eight months later,
the FBI reported), and civilian targets being spared (they were
attacked at once). There was an overwhelming preference in the world
for diplomatic/judicial measures, rejected out of hand by "the world."

*Following the Terror Trail*

In the present case, if "the world" were extended to the world, we
might find some other candidates for the honor of most hated
arch-criminal. It is instructive to ask why this might be true.

The /Financial Times/ reports that most of the charges against
Moughniyeh are unsubstantiated, but "one of the very few times when
his involvement can be ascertained with certainty [is in] the
hijacking of a TWA plane in 1985 in which a U.S. Navy diver was
killed." This was one of two terrorist atrocities the led a poll of
newspaper editors to select terrorism in the Middle East as the top
story of 1985; the other was the hijacking of the passenger liner
/Achille Lauro/, in which a crippled American, Leon Klinghoffer, was
brutally murdered,. That reflects the judgment of "the world." It
may be that the world saw matters somewhat differently.

The /Achille Lauro/ hijacking was a retaliation for the bombing of
Tunis ordered a week earlier by Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres.
His air force killed 75 Tunisians and Palestinians with smart bombs
that tore them to shreds, among other atrocities, as vividly
reported from the scene by the prominent Israeli journalist Amnon
Kapeliouk. Washington cooperated by failing to warn its ally Tunisia
that the bombers were on the way, though the Sixth Fleet and U.S.
intelligence could not have been unaware of the impending attack.
Secretary of State George Shultz informed Israeli Foreign Minister
Yitzhak Shamir that Washington "had considerable sympathy for the
Israeli action," which he termed "a legitimate response" to
"terrorist attacks," to general approbation. A few days later, the
UN Security Council unanimously denounced the bombing as an "act of
armed aggression" (with the U.S. abstaining). "Aggression" is, of
course, a far more serious crime than international terrorism. But
giving the United States and Israel the benefit of the doubt, let us
keep to the lesser charge against their leadership.

A few days after, Peres went to Washington to consult with the
leading international terrorist of the day, Ronald Reagan, who
denounced "the evil scourge of terrorism," again with general
acclaim by "the world."

The "terrorist attacks" that Shultz and Peres offered as the pretext
for the bombing of Tunis were the killings of three Israelis in
Larnaca, Cyprus. The killers, as Israel conceded, had nothing to do
with Tunis, though they might have had Syrian connections. Tunis was
a preferable target, however. It was defenseless, unlike Damascus.
And there was an extra pleasure: more exiled Palestinians could be
killed there.

The Larnaca killings, in turn, were regarded as retaliation by the
perpetrators: They were a response to regular Israeli hijackings in
international waters in which many victims were killed -- and many
more kidnapped and sent to prisons in Israel, commonly to be held
without charge for long periods. The most notorious of these has
been the secret prison/torture chamber Facility 1391. A good deal
can be learned about it from the Israeli and foreign press. Such
regular Israeli crimes are, of course, known to editors of the
national press in the U.S., and occasionally receive some casual
mention.

Klinghoffer's murder was properly viewed with horror, and is very
famous. It was the topic of an acclaimed opera and a made-for-TV
movie, as well as much shocked commentary deploring the savagery of
Palestinians -- "two-headed beasts" (Prime Minister Menachem Begin),
"drugged roaches scurrying around in a bottle" (Chief of Staff Raful
Eitan), "like grasshoppers compared to us," whose heads should be
"smashed against the boulders and walls" (Prime Minister Yitzhak
Shamir). Or more commonly just "/Araboushim/," the slang counterpart
of "kike" or "nigger."

Thus, after a particularly depraved display of settler-military
terror and purposeful humiliation in the West Bank town of Halhul in
December 1982, which disgusted even Israeli hawks, the well-known
military/political analyst Yoram Peri wrote in dismay that one "task
of the army today [is] to demolish the rights of innocent people
just because they are Araboushim living in territories that God
promised to us," a task that became far more urgent, and was carried
out with far more brutality, when the Araboushim began to "raise
their heads" a few years later.

We can easily assess the sincerity of the sentiments expressed about
the Klinghoffer murder. It is only necessary to investigate the
reaction to comparable U.S.-backed Israeli crimes. Take, for
example, the murder in April 2002 of two crippled Palestinians,
Kemal Zughayer and Jamal Rashid, by Israeli forces rampaging through
the refugee camp of Jenin in the West Bank. Zughayer's crushed body
and the remains of his wheelchair were found by British reporters,
along with the remains of the white flag he was holding when he was
shot dead while seeking to flee the Israeli tanks which then drove
over him, ripping his face in two and severing his arms and legs.
Jamal Rashid was crushed in /his/ wheelchair when one of Israel's
huge U.S.-supplied Caterpillar bulldozers demolished his home in
Jenin with his family inside. The differential reaction, or rather
non-reaction, has become so routine and so easy to explain that no
further commentary is necessary.

*Car Bomb*

Plainly, the 1985 Tunis bombing was a vastly more severe terrorist
crime than the /Achille Lauro/ hijacking, or the crime for which
Moughniyeh's "involvement can be ascertained with certainty" in the
same year. But even the Tunis bombing had competitors for the prize
for worst terrorist atrocity in the Mideast in the peak year of 1985.

One challenger was a car-bombing in Beirut right outside a mosque,
timed to go off as worshippers were leaving Friday prayers. It
killed 80 people and wounded 256. Most of the dead were girls and
women, who had been leaving the mosque, though the ferocity of the
blast "burned babies in their beds," "killed a bride buying her
trousseau," and "blew away three children as they walked home from
the mosque." It also "devastated the main street of the densely
populated" West Beirut suburb, reported Nora Boustany three years
later in the /Washington Post/.

The intended target had been the Shi'ite cleric Sheikh Mohammad
Hussein Fadlallah, who escaped. The bombing was carried out by
Reagan's CIA and his Saudi allies, with Britain's help, and was
specifically authorized by CIA Director William Casey, according to
/Washington Post/ reporter Bob Woodward's account in his book /Veil:
The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987/. Little is known beyond the
bare facts, thanks to rigorous adherence to the doctrine that we do
not investigate our own crimes (unless they become too prominent to
suppress, and the inquiry can be limited to some low-level "bad
apples" who were naturally "out of control").

*"Terrorist Villagers"*

A third competitor for the 1985 Mideast terrorism prize was Prime
Minister Peres' "Iron Fist" operations in southern Lebanese
territories then occupied by Israel in violation of Security Council
orders. The targets were what the Israeli high command called
"terrorist villagers." Peres's crimes in this case sank to new
depths of "calculated brutality and arbitrary murder" in the words
of a Western diplomat familiar with the area, an assessment amply
supported by direct coverage. They are, however, of no interest to
"the world" and therefore remain uninvestigated, in accordance with
the usual conventions. We might well ask whether these crimes fall
under international terrorism or the far more severe crime of
aggression, but let us again give the benefit of the doubt to Israel
and its backers in Washington and keep to the lesser charge.

These are a few of the thoughts that might cross the minds of people
elsewhere in the world, even if not those of "the world," when
considering "one of the very few times" Imad Moughniyeh was clearly
implicated in a terrorist crime.

The U.S. also accuses him of responsibility for devastating double
suicide truck-bomb attacks on U.S. Marine and French paratrooper
barracks in Lebanon in 1983, killing 241 Marines and 58
paratroopers, as well as a prior attack on the U.S. Embassy in
Beirut, killing 63, a particularly serious blow because of a meeting
there of CIA officials at the time.

The /Financial Times/ has, however, attributed the attack on the
Marine barracks to Islamic Jihad, not Hizbollah. Fawaz Gerges, one
of the leading scholars on the /jihadi/ movements and on Lebanon,
has written that responsibility was taken by an "unknown group
called Islamic Jihad." A voice speaking in classical Arabic called
for all Americans to leave Lebanon or face death. It has been
claimed that Moughniyeh was the head of Islamic Jihad at the time,
but to my knowledge, evidence is sparse.

The opinion of the world has not been sampled on the subject, but it
is possible that there might be some hesitancy about calling an
attack on a military base in a foreign country a "terrorist attack,"
particularly when U.S. and French forces were carrying out heavy
naval bombardments and air strikes in Lebanon, and shortly after the
U.S. provided decisive support for the 1982 Israeli invasion of
Lebanon, which killed some 20,000 people and devastated the south,
while leaving much of Beirut in ruins. It was finally called off by
President Reagan when international protest became too intense to
ignore after the Sabra-Shatila massacres.

In the United States, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon is regularly
described as a reaction to Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)
terrorist attacks on northern Israel from their Lebanese bases,
making our crucial contribution to these major war crimes
understandable. In the real world, the Lebanese border area had been
quiet for a year, apart from repeated Israeli attacks, many of them
murderous, in an effort to elicit some PLO response that could be
used as a pretext for the already planned invasion. Its actual
purpose was not concealed at the time by Israeli commentators and
leaders: to safeguard the Israeli takeover of the occupied West
Bank. It is of some interest that the sole serious error in Jimmy
Carter's book /Palestine: Peace not Apartheid/ is the repetition of
this propaganda concoction about PLO attacks from Lebanon being the
motive for the Israeli invasion. The book was bitterly attacked, and
desperate efforts were made to find some phrase that could be
misinterpreted, but this glaring error -- the only one -- was
ignored. Reasonably, since it satisfies the criterion of adhering to
useful doctrinal fabrications.

*Killing without Intent*

Another allegation is that Moughniyeh "masterminded" the bombing of
Israel's embassy in Buenos Aires on March 17, 1992, killing 29
people, in response, as the /Financial Times/ put it, to Israel's
"assassination of former Hizbollah leader Abbas Al-Mussawi in an air
attack in southern Lebanon." About the assassination, there is no
need for evidence: Israel proudly took credit for it. The world
might have some interest in the rest of the story. Al-Mussawi was
murdered with a U.S.-supplied helicopter, well north of Israel's
illegal "security zone" in southern Lebanon. He was on his way to
Sidon from the village of Jibshit, where he had spoken at the
memorial for another Imam murdered by Israeli forces. The helicopter
attack also killed his wife and five-year old child. Israel then
employed U.S.-supplied helicopters to attack a car bringing
survivors of the first attack to a hospital.

After the murder of the family, Hezbollah "changed the rules of the
game," Prime Minister Rabin informed the Israeli Knesset.
Previously, no rockets had been launched at Israel. Until then, the
rules of the game had been that Israel could launch murderous
attacks anywhere in Lebanon at will, and Hizbollah would respond
only within Israeli-occupied Lebanese territory.

After the murder of its leader (and his family), Hizbollah began to
respond to Israeli crimes in Lebanon by rocketing northern Israel.
The latter is, of course, intolerable terror, so Rabin launched an
invasion that drove some 500,000 people out of their homes and
killed well over 100. The merciless Israeli attacks reached as far
as northern Lebanon.

In the south, 80% of the city of Tyre fled and Nabatiye was left a
"ghost town," Jibshit was about 70% destroyed according to an
Israeli army spokesperson, who explained that the intent was "to
destroy the village completely because of its importance to the
Shi'ite population of southern Lebanon." The goal was "to wipe the
villages from the face of the earth and sow destruction around
them," as a senior officer of the Israeli northern command described
the operation.

Jibshit may have been a particular target because it was the home of
Sheikh Abdul Karim Obeid, kidnapped and brought to Israel several
years earlier.. Obeid's home "received a direct hit from a missile,"
British journalist Robert Fisk reported, "although the Israelis were
presumably gunning for his wife and three children." Those who had
not escaped hid in terror, wrote Mark Nicholson in the /Financial
Times/, "because any visible movement inside or outside their houses
is likely to attract the attention of Israeli artillery spotters,
who? were pounding their shells repeatedly and devastatingly into
selected targets." Artillery shells were hitting some villages at a
rate of more than 10 rounds a minute at times.

All of this received the firm support of President Bill Clinton, who
understood the need to instruct the /Araboushim/ sternly on the
"rules of the game." And Rabin emerged as another grand hero and man
of peace, so different from the two-legged beasts, grasshoppers, and
drugged roaches.

This is only a small sample of facts that the world might find of
interest in connection with the alleged responsibility of Moughniyeh
for the retaliatory terrorist act in Buenos Aires.

Other charges are that Moughniyeh helped prepare Hizbollah defenses
against the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, evidently an
intolerable terrorist crime by the standards of "the world," which
understands that the United States and its clients must face no
impediments in their just terror and aggression.

The more vulgar apologists for U.S. and Israeli crimes solemnly
explain that, while Arabs purposely kill people, the U.S. and
Israel, being democratic societies, do not intend to do so. Their
killings are just accidental ones, hence not at the level of moral
depravity of their adversaries. That was, for example, the stand of
Israel's High Court when it recently authorized severe collective
punishment of the people of Gaza by depriving them of electricity
(hence water, sewage disposal, and other such basics of civilized
life).

The same line of defense is common with regard to some of
Washington's past peccadilloes, like the destruction in 1998 of the
al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. The attack apparently led to
the deaths of tens of thousands of people, but without intent to
kill them, hence not a crime on the order of intentional killing --
so we are instructed by moralists who consistently suppress the
response that had already been given to these vulgar efforts at
self-justification.

To repeat once again, we can distinguish three categories of crimes:
murder with intent, accidental killing, and murder with
foreknowledge but without specific intent. Israeli and U.S.
atrocities typically fall into the third category. Thus, when Israel
destroys Gaza's power supply or sets up barriers to travel in the
West Bank, it does not specifically intend to murder the particular
people who will die from polluted water or in ambulances that cannot
reach hospitals. And when Bill Clinton ordered the bombing of the
al-Shifa plant, it was obvious that it would lead to a humanitarian
catastrophe. Human Rights Watch immediately informed him of this,
providing details; nevertheless, he and his advisers did not intend
to kill specific people among those who would inevitably die when
half the pharmaceutical supplies were destroyed in a poor African
country that could not replenish them.

Rather, they and their apologists regarded Africans much as we do
the ants we crush while walking down a street. We are aware that it
is likely to happen (if we bother to think about it), but we do not
intend to kill them because they are not worthy of such
consideration. Needless to say, comparable attacks by /Araboushim/
in areas inhabited by human beings would be regarded rather
differently.

If, for a moment, we can adopt the perspective of the world, we
might ask which criminals are "wanted the world over."

/Noam Chomsky is the author of numerous best-selling political
works. His latest books are Failed States: The Abuse of Power and
the Assault on Democracy
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805082840/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20>
and What We Say Goes
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805086714/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20>,
a conversation book with David Barsamian, both in the American
Empire Project <http://www.americanempireproject.com/> series at
Metropolitan Books. The Essential Chomsky
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1595581898/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20>
(edited by Anthony Arnove), a collection of his writings on politics
and on language from the 1950s to the present, has just been
published by the New Press./

Copyright 2008 Noam Chomsky