Month: September 2013

At the Pike County Justice Court in Mississippi, Judge Aubrey Rimes expelled Mr. Jageet Singh from the courtroom, telling his attorney that he’d better remove “that rag” (his turban) from his head or go to jail.

That sounds bad enough, right? But how’d he get into the courtroom to begin with? The ACLU with the details:

Today, in a letter to the Mississippi Department of Transportation (MDOT), the ACLU and United Sikhs called on state officials to investigate the harassment of a Sikh commercial truck driver pulled over early this year for a flat tire.  After detaining Mr. Jageet Singh in January as he passed through Mississippi, the officers called him a “terrorist” and harassed and humiliated him because of his appearance and religious beliefs.  As a devout Sikh, Mr. Singh wears a turban and carries a kirpan.  A kirpan is a small, spiritual sword that is sheathed and sewn to the waistband. It is designed and worn as an article of faith, much as a cross is worn by devout Christians.

Contending, wrongly, that his kirpan was illegal, the officers demanded that Mr. Singh remove it. When Mr. Singh explained that he was a Sikh and that the kirpan was a sacred religious article, the officers laughed at him and mocked his religious beliefs. One officer declared that all Sikhs are “depraved” and “terrorists.” They continued to taunt him, and forced Mr. Singh to circle his truck with his hands on his turban while they searched the vehicle. Finally, not content with this humiliation, they arrested him, claiming that Mr. Singh had refused to obey an officer’s lawful command.

Emphasis mine.

I’m guessing the cops and the judge mistook Mr. Singh for a Muslim? Anyways, it doesn’t matter. He looks funny and, plus, 9/11 happened so we get to harass and humiliate anyone we feel like calling a “terrorist.”

United Sikhs is also representing Mr. Singh. Here is an excerpt from their “Right to Turban” page:

Since September 11, the world has been gripped by fear such that many minority communities, including the Sikh community, have suffered a backlash through mis-information and ignorance. The first reprisal killing after Sept 11 was of a Turban wearing Sikh in Arizona, who was mistaken as belonging to the group which perpetrated the 9/11 incident. Sikhs due to their unique appearance have since been a target of hate and bias crime and discrimination. Every week, UNITED SIKHS receives reports from Sikh adults and children who are victims of race/biased/hate crimes and from those being denied their rights to practice their religion. A Sikh’s right to wear his articles of faith has been challenged in schools, the workplace, Prisons and other public places. Sikhs suffer increased harassment at airports because they wear the Turban. UNITED SIKHS provides advice, counsel and legal representation to those whose legal rights are being denied by errant and mis-informed authorities and the public. A critical aspect of UNITED SIKHS’ advocacy work is to create an awareness of the issues amongst authorities and the public through talks, seminars and multifaith events.

The diplomacy with Iran is proceeding slowly in the days following the almost-handshake at the UN earlier this week. While skepticism is warranted, as I’ve written, there is a chorus of right-wing fear-mongers really upset about the prospect of detente with Iran. See, for example, this piece in the Washington Post by the neo-con Charles Krauthammer, whose basic point is that the Iranians are doggedly pursuing nuclear weapons and can never be negotiated with…ever.

For these naysayers, it would therefore seem that the only way forward is economic and/or actual warfare. That’s the only chance we have to eliminate this preeminent existential threat. Adm. James Winnefeld, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told a Washington think-tank last year that he doesn’t “see any greater challenge than Iran.”

It is a peculiar feature of being the world’s military superpower that every bogeyman the national security state and its propagandists can conjure up becomes a dangerous existential threat, no matter how weak that rival is.

Back in July, I wrote a piece for The Washington Times arguing that Iran doesn’t pose a threat to the U.S. America, I wrote, “is a global military superpower that spends more on defense than the rest of the world combined. Iran, by contrast, is a third-rate military power with an economy that is one forty-fifth the size of the U.S. economy.”

A post at the Center for Strategic International Studies provides more detail into just how comparatively weak Iran is. While Iran “has made major progress in creating naval forces for asymmetric warfare and developing naval missiles,” writes Anthony H. Cordesman,

…it has very limited air-sea  and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (IS&R) capabilities. It lacks modern conventional land, air, air defense and sea power, has fallen far behind the Arab Gulf states in modern aircraft and ships, and its land forces are filled with obsolete and mediocre weapons that lack maneuver capability and sustainability outside Iran. Iran needs nuclear weapons to offset these facts.

Iran also “lacks any real amphibious capability force for entry,” Cordesman adds. “It is able to spend far less on military forces than the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states and only a fraction of what they can spend on arms imports.” Iran’s short range rockets and missile forces “lack the accuracy and lethality to pose a major threat to any Gulf state but Kuwait – and Iran is far weaker in every warfighting dimension than a combination of U.S. and GCC forces.”

The CSIS report does argue that this inescapable comparative weakness does heavily incentivize Iran to obtain nuclear weapons, but even if it can manage to “assemble some form of nuclear device and test,” which U.S. intelligence sources have said would take more than a year, Iran “will be years” away from having “significant nuclear forces” it has “no immediate prospect of creating missile defenses” to protect itself from attack.

Can you believe this is the country all of these macho tough guys in Washington fear monger about? This weak, impoverished, isolated nation and its pathetically insignificant military capabilities is America’s greatest threat that can only be subdued through war?

“It is a matter of faith among many American politicians that Iran is the greatest danger now facing the country,” writes Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “But if that is true, then the United States can breathe easy: Iran is a weak military power.”

Children tend to have a tough time focusing on too many ideas at once. The same goes for adults who have the brain capacity of children.

Syria stories obviously soared in the media over the past month, and rightly so given that the Obama administration was going drag the U.S. into another unnecessary war based on false pretenses. Iran, too, has shot up in the body of international stories the U.S. media is covering, given new developments towards a possible diplomatic settlement to long simmering tensions. And again, rightly so.

But two big issues sometimes seems like the upper limit of how many separate ideas the major media can juggle at one time (unless of course we’re talking about celebrity gossip, the Michael Jackson death trial, and whether hot tubs can make you infertile).

Here’s what brought on this rant…

987 civilians have been killed in #Iraq so far THIS MONTH.

6,000 civilian deaths already this year.

There were 4,500 in all of 2012.

— (((YousefMunayyer))) (@YousefMunayyer) September 27, 2013

Yousef Munayyer is Executive Director of The Palestine Center and he lists these facts about Iraq, I suspect, in order to highlight how much chaos is still ongoing in the country that the U.S. needlessly and criminally tore apart for the past two decades.

One of the reasons it is really important to cover the ongoing violence in Iraq and its larger context of U.S. policy is because the myth of the success of “the surge” is still being peddled, particularly on the right. Senator John McCain, you’ll remember, excoriated Chuck Hagel during his confirmation process for at one point criticizing the surge in Iraq as potentially “dangerous.” He and others have had the gall to scream at people for dissenting on the surge religion even while Iraqis are dying in “numbers not seen since the bloody days of 2004,” as Kelley Vlahos wrote in these spaces last month.

Not only is Iraq on the verge of all out civil war, but the U.S.-backed Shiite government in Baghdad is increasingly authoritarian and is contributing to the country’s ongoing demise. The Sunni-Shia violence in Iraq is, as the International Crisis Group (ICG) puts it, “as acute and explosive as ever” primarily because “Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has implemented a divide-and-conquer strategy that has neutered any credible Sunni Arab leadership.”

Maliki has had his security forces detain and brutally torture thousands of political opponents in secret prisons and denied them access to legal counsel. Amnesty International reported this week that Iraq executed 13 men following unfair trials plagued by allegations of torture. “Iraq is one of the world’s most prolific executioners,” the report states.

So, the U.S. waged war against Iraq in 1991 and followed up with more than a decade of sanctions that decimated the country and was described by one UN official as genocidal. Then the U.S. invaded and occupied the country in a war of choice based on lies, ripping what was left of the country to shreds in the process. And now U.S. troops have left and Washington continues to send  about $2 billion, not including the additional billions of dollars worth of military training and equipment, to the corrupt and authoritarian regime in Baghdad that is driving the country into civil war.

How can decent Americans ignore this?

Ideally, the question of whether it’s wise for America to support allegedly “moderate” elements within the Syrian opposition should have been settled when thousands of foreign fighters were reported flooding into Syria for “jihad.” Or maybe when rebels were caught torturing, executing, and mutilating people, and eating their organs. Or maybe when studies showed that half the rebels are Islamists. Or maybe when Obama waived the federal ban on supplying arms to terrorist groups to make way for his Syria policy?

No such luck. But now, if ever, the debate should be over:

“Some of Syria’s most effective rebel forces, including at least three that previously were aligned with the U.S.-backed rebel command, have formed a new alliance with an al Qaida affiliate,” McClatchy reports.

Read that again. U.S.-backed Syrian rebels have joined with al-Qaeda.

“About a dozen fighting groups,” according to McClatchy, including U.S.-backed “moderate” factions like “Liwa al Tawheed, Liwa al Islam and Suqor al Sham,” joined jihadist al-Qaeda affiliates like Jabhat al-Nusra. In their announcement, they “specifically rejected the Syrian Opposition Coalition, the civilian group headquartered in Turkey that the Obama administration has promoted as an alternative to Assad.”

This brings back memories of when, in December 2012, more than 100 Syrian rebel factions signed a petition expressing solidarity with Jabhat al-Nusra and denouncing the U.S. decision to officially designate the al-Qaeda-linked group a terrorist organization.

I’m also reminded of when Secretary of State John Kerry, in the midst of a propaganda crusade justifying war on Syria earlier this month, told Congress that the Syrian “opposition has increasingly become more defined by its moderation” and “its adherence to some, you know, democratic process” and a “broad-based and secular” future.

Days later, Reuters reported that Kerry’s statements were “at odds with estimates by U.S. and European intelligence sources and nongovernmental experts.” In other words, a lie.

The debate over whether and how to support Syria’s “moderate opposition” should have been over long ago. For some reason, I don’t expect this latest news to stick a fork in the debate.

Human Rights Watch:

Israeli military forces should cease actions in a West Bank Bedouin community that were apparently intended to displace the residents without lawful justification. The military demolished all homes in the community on September 16, 2013, and blocked four attempts by humanitarian groups to provide shelters, with soldiers using force against residents, humanitarian workers, and foreign diplomats on September 20. Under international humanitarian law in effect in the occupied West Bank, the deliberate unlawful forced transfer of a population is a war crime.

In Obama’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly just two days ago, he outlined two issues as top priorities in the Middle East: Iran’s nuclear program and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. After getting distracted by a brief campaign for war in Syria, Secretary of State John Kerry is refocused on Israel-Palestine, saying just yesterday that he brokered an agreement to “intensify” negotiations.

The official basis for negotiations is two states for two people. And yet, Israel continues to reject the premise of talks by bulldozing more Palestinian homes and building new illegal settlements on Palestinian land.

As Yousef Munayyer wrote recently in The New Yorker, “Everything about the Israeli state’s actual behavior suggests it has no intention of ever leaving the West Bank.”

So why engage in the charade of negotiations? In an earlier piece at The Daily Beast, Munayyer explains that, “Israel needs negotiations to provide cover for its continued colonization of Palestinian territory and create the impression that its presence in the West Bank is temporary and its withdrawal around the corner.”

“The absence of negotiations,” Munayyer adds, “keeps the light focused on the apartheid reality, instead putting Israel in increasingly hot water as civil society and states continue to reject its subjugation of Palestinians.”

Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi, a Palestinian legislator and Secretary-General of the Palestinian National Initiative, agrees. This week he told reporters that the vaunted Oslo Agreement “allowed Israel [to] implement a system of apartheid, by significantly escalating its settlement activities, and the theft of Palestinian lands, Israel is using the peace deal as a cover-up for its violations.”

The settlement “led to disastrous consequences allowing Israel to divide the occupied territories into areas A, B and C, giving it the change to build and expand settlements, and the Apartheid Wall”, he added. “The wall was build 25 Kilometers deep into the West Bank, isolating and confiscating large areas of lands and orchards, and isolated Jerusalem from its surrounding Arab areas.”

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that these policies undermine negotiations. Indeed, as Munayyer points out, U.S. intelligence agencies figured it out all the way back in 1968, less than a year after Israel began occupying and settling in the West Bank.

A 1968 National Intelligence Estimate said: “If Israel continues to occupy conquered territory for an extended period, say two to three years, it will find it increasingly difficult to relinquish control. Domestic pressures to establish paramilitary settlements in occupied areas would grow, and it would be harder to turn back to the Arabs land which contained such settlements.”

Mark Landler is a White House correspondent for The New York Times. Under the title "Through Diplomacy, Obama Finds a Pen Pal in Iran", Landler wrote of President Barack Obama’s deep "belief in the power of the written word," and of his "frustrating private correspondence with the leaders of Iran." (NYT, Sep. 19)

What is also frustrating is the unabashed snobbery of Landler’s and the NYT’s narrative regarding Iran: that of successive US administrations trying their best and obstinate Iranian leaders – stereotyped and derided – who always fail to reciprocate. This is all supposedly changing though since the new Iranian President Hasan Rouhani, who they present as different and approachable, decided to break ranks with his predecessors.

This is of course hardly an appropriate framing of the story. While a friendly exchange of letters between Rouhani and Obama is a welcomed development in a region that is torn between failed revolutions, civil wars and the potential of an all-out regional conflict, it is not true that it is Rouhani’s personality that is setting him apart from his predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Rouhani’s ‘charm offensive’ as described by the times is a ‘process’ that ‘has included the release of 11 prominent political prisoners and a series of conciliatory statements by top Iranian officials.’ It is natural then, we are meant to believe, that Obama would make his move and apply his writing skills in earnest. Israel was not mentioned in the story even once, as if the fact that Israel’s decade-long advocacy of sanctioning and bombing Iran has not been the single greatest motive behind the deteriorating relations between Washington and Tehran, long before Ahmadinejad was painted by US media, the NTY included, as the devil incarnate.

Dominant US media is unlikely to adjust its attitude towards Iran and the rest of the Middle East anytime soon: the perceived enemies will remain enemies and the historic allies – as in Israel only – will always be that. While that choosy discourse has been the bread and butter of US media – from elitist publications like NYT to demagogues like Fox News – that one-sidedness will no longer suffice as the Middle East region is vastly changing in terms of alliances and power plays.

Continue reading “New York Times Fiction: On Obama’s Letter to Rouhani”